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Endanger Polar Bears? Doesn't Make Sense

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By JOHN HERBERT

From Where I Sit

Published: May 27, 2008

I was somewhat taken aback when the feds listed the intrepid polar bear as an "endangered species" earlier this month.
Something doesn't make sense. The world's estimated polar bear population has more than quadrupled, to around 25,000, in the past 40 years.
After roaming abandoned Arctic shacks and North Polar ice floes from the North Slope of Alaska to the Norwegian archipelago of Spitsbergen since the 1960s, and some close encounters with stray polar bears, I long ago concluded that we humans need continued protection from the aggressive, speedy and very carnivorous one-ton hairballs.
Polar bears can take care of themselves just fine — and scare the wits out of us in the process. They don't need any federal intervention or protection; thank you very much.
There really isn't much of a bite to the federal action, anyway. The "endangered species" designation won't interfere with current oil prospecting projects as long as "critical habitat" such as vast areas of the Arctic Sea, its seabed and coastline, aren't included.
The federal declaration is more of an olive branch to keep tree-huggers and other crunchy-granola environmentalists from suing Washington over the imagined evils of allegedly human-caused global warming. Even the feds' own NASA said last year that global warming, or melting ice floes, is more likely to be caused by wind shifts than by "dirty" power plants or auto exhausts.
One thing is for sure; by the looks of blood-stained ice floes and beaches, the polar bear isn't being deprived of a hot meal. The bears are still catching (and swallow pretty much whole) live Arctic seals. Not even that celebrity seal-hunting opponent, actress Bridgit Bardot, can stop them.
If they're still hungry after downing a couple of seals, polar bears will wander through an Arctic village, devouring leather saddles and seats on bikes and snow scooters left outdoors at night. Almost every summer, a careless camper is eaten alive by a polar bear on Spitsbergen. Lesson: Ring your campsite with explosive trip wires.
Once, we were prevented from going ashore on Spitsbergen because a polar bear was on the loose. Just the night before, the bear had broken into, and partied on, the village's warehouse of food supplies. When a colleague showed up with a rifle and vowed to protect us, we were allowed on dry land.
A stray polar bear (I was assured it was a "she") blocked our light plane from taking off from the abandoned coal-mining village of Svea by standing on her hind legs and trying to munch on the leading edge of our wing. Fortunately, she lost interest after a few minutes and waddled back to the garbage cans the half-dozen resident meteorologists had been filling.
The village minister was a bearded Norwegian called "Pastor Kjell." An avid fisherman, Kjell had lost an arm and an eye in a polar bear attack. But that incident hadn't crimped his style — or his enthusiasm for Arctic fishing, from the safety of a tiny fiberglass motorboat, I should add.
Kjell had mastered one life-lesson, though. Since the attack, a rifle-touting passenger rides "shotgun" on the back of the snow scooter the pastor uses to visit outlying villages.
Indeed, I learned fast that you don't go outdoors unarmed in the High Arctic. Polar bears can outrun any human, I was angrily warned, after an innocent summer stroll along the village beach. On another occasion, I was read the riot act after going out to pick up fossils from a receding glacier. "Don't do that, Herbert," cautioned a colleague. "We saw a polar bear wandering along the top of the glacier last night."
By the way, the fossils confirm the Arctic was once sub-tropical; they bear imprints of ferns and shellfish, demonstrating that global warming comes and goes in cycles, in the most unlikely places, too.
Many of my brushes with polar bears were in the Spitsbergen town of Longyearbyen, a village of 3,000 coal miners and weather forecasters named after mining engineer John Longyear. A Bostonian, he was otherwise known, not for fending off polar bears, but as the husband of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy.
I'm sure she would have put her religious beliefs aside and carried a gun, too, when facing the hairy realities of the High Arctic.

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert lives in Spring Hill.

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