‘We can tackle the problem but it has gone way beyond changing lightbulbs’
For 35 years, camerman Doug Allan has been filming magnificent polar bears in the Arctic – and in that time he has also seen how global warming is destroying their habitat
The Inuit had told me I’d never forget my first bear. We’d been out for three days, driving by snowmachine across the frozen sea ice of Prince Regent Inlet at the very north of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. It was early March and the sun was below the horizon for 15 hours a day, still utterly free of meaningful warmth even when it showed itself above the skyline. A freezing, hard world, bitingly cold when 20 knots of wind laid on top of the minus 30 temperature. And one that seemed to me to be completely devoid of life. In those three days I’d seen no seals, no birds and certainly no bears. Charlie Inooruaq lifted his arm. A man of few words, he grunted “Last tea. Then camp”. We uncapped the thermos, poured the last dregs of lukewarm water into our mugs. I’d known it wouldn’t be easy finding bears, but had expected more than nothing considering how long we’d been searching.
Then he appeared from behind a ridge of ice, maybe 75 metres away. Just like they say bears do, without warning, suddenly, powerfully. But not power as in physical strength, power as in raw physical presence. He – I could tell it was a male from the long hairs that came down from his forelegs – stood motionless, tilting his muzzle to the sky, sniffing for seals. He glanced at us, in total indifference, the low sun was almost completely behind him, his whole body was beautifully goldenly rim lit. I could see every hair on his back, his breath steaming out from his nostrils. The Inuit have two words for afraid – one implies the fear they have of a dangerous situation that is outwith their control, the other is what they feel when facing an animal they know can be dangerous but for which they also have respect. Pay them that respect and they will offer it back. That bear had that sort of charisma, what he exuded to me was a sense of total being where it was supposed to be. I’d never met an animal that so totally belonged in its environment. The contrast couldn’t have been greater, between me – chilled, hungry tired, looking forward to getting back to our cabin
– and the bear – confident, untroubled, well fed, relaxed, totally at home. We watched for a minute or so, before he ambled away into the pack ice.
Over the last 35 years as a wildlife film maker, I’ve spent over 500 days in the company of polar bears. It’s been exciting, demanding, hugely satisfying and also occasionally massively frustrating. But above all it’s been a privilege. But you can’t have witnessed them over as many years without becoming increasingly concerned over what’s happening to their environment.
In 1996, Dr Ian Stirling, the world’s most experienced polar bear biologist, wrote the best ever book on the whole ecology of polar bears. He called it simply Polar Bears. In 2011, he brought it bang up to date, incorporating the latest research. But he re-titled it Polar Bears – The Natural History of a Threatened Species. A soberingly frightening sign of the new times.
One of the outcomes of the warming of the Arctic over recent years has been longer ice-free summers. The sea ice is breaking up significantly earlier than it was 15 years ago, and it’s not reforming until much later in the autumn. Pregnant polar bears nowadays are going into their dens in poorer health than previously. They find it hard to hunt without a seaice platform, and the tough times of summer are lasting longer. Then the screw is turned again because they have a much shorter time on the new autumn sea ice to hunt for seals before they have to find somewhere to den up and give birth. Some females go into their dens already hungry. They are giving birth to fewer cubs, and those cubs in turn are not as strong. Their early days on the sea ice, when they have to keep up with their mother as she hunts for seals, was always a crucial period of stress. These days the odds are even more stacked against them.
Polar bears are considered by biologists to be marine mammals, like whales, walrus or seals. They all depend on the sea for their survival, they spend their whole lives at sea. The difference between a whale and a polar bear is
Expecting bears to prosper when ice conditions are worsening across the Arctic basin, is like hoping orangutans will be alright as the chainsaws take down their forests
that the whale lives in the sea while the polar bear lives on it. The sea ice is where the bears hunt, mate, sleep and where many give birth in dens under snow banks. Expecting bears to prosper when ice conditions are worsening across the Arctic basin, is like hoping orangutans will be alright as the chainsaws take down their forests. A sobering report by the American Department of Wildlife seven years ago predicted that polar bear numbers could drop from 25,000 to 10,000 by the middle of the century, and rather than being circumpolar in their distribution, there might simply not be enough sea ice for enough of the year for a polar bear to make a living.
The challenge with climate change is that it’s full of positive feedback loops. Positive feedback means that bad things run away with themselves. The Arctic warms a little, some ice melts, the land and sea become darker, they absorb more heat than they did when they were white, the shallow seas warm and so does the tundra. Trapped under the sea in its crystalline form, and locked in the long dead permafrosted vegetation under the Arctic soil are vast quantities of the gas methane. Warm the shallow seas and melt the tundra and this gas escapes into the atmosphere, where it’s 20 times better than CO2 at warming the planet. As the Arctic warms, expect more warming globally.
But climate change in the Arctic isn’t just threatening polar bears. It’s a major driving force that’s accentuating extreme weather events we’re seeing around the world. Warming of the massive land and ocean ecosystems of the Arctic disrupts the jet stream, the high altitude wind which shapes and propels the weather systems of the northern hemisphere. The intensity of the monsoon rains in India this year, the power of the typhoons that swept across the Philippines last month – we can expect these to strengthen again in the future. Populations displaced, global food production disrupted, entire nations destroyed – rising sea levels will take some Pacific Island countries off the map forever.
“Twenty years from now you’ll be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did.” Mark Twain’s words struck a chord when I was a teenager, and came to my mind as I stood at many a crossroad. But now it’s more like, “Twenty years from now we’ll be screwed by the things we didn’t do because we did the wrong things for far too long”. We can tackle the problem but it has gone way beyond changing lightbulbs. We need decisive, imaginative, coordinated actions by governments commensurate with the scale of the challenges. Global finance is there when the need is perceived as big enough. It cost $2 billion to develop the atomic bomb, $25 billion to put a man on the moon, and they found nigh on $1000 billion almost overnight to save the banking system ten years ago. With sums like that directed at climate change, we really could tackle the problem. But we must aim much higher than our current targets, and act much more quickly.