Non-fiction
The Loneliest Polar Bear
By Kale Williams
Sphere
The story of climate change is notoriously
hard to tell. The greatest existential threat
of our time is actually pretty dull stuff:
how do you make a tale of incremental
temperature rise mean something to
everyone? How do you warn our distracted
public about a menacing giant that is both
too big and too stealthy for the human eye
or brain to apprehend?
In The Loneliest Polar Bear: A True Story of Survival and Peril on the Edge of a Warming World, American reporter Kale Williams offers an answer. Through
his captivating account of the life of
Nora, a zoo-bred-and-born polar bear
abandoned by her mother, Williams cuts
the monumental crisis of global warming
down to irresistible size. Nora was born
at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, in
Ohio, in the United States, in 2015 but
soon transferred to the Oregon Zoo in
Portland. Williams’ story, based on a
2017 series of features he wrote for The Oregonian newspaper, follows the bear’s improbable survival as a hand-reared
orphan and her life as a “zoo celebrity”.
Few – certainly not residents in the
author’s home city of Portland – can
resist a fluffy, white, orphaned bear cub.
By hitching his story to this adorability
factor, Williams manages to lead readers
from the confines of a zoo enclosure
across a sweeping landscape of history,
politics, science and culture to bring the
catastrophe of global warming into bearsized
The book tells Nora’s story at a human
scale. The bear’s keepers and their
anxieties about providing a proper
diet – a difficult thing to emulate in
captivity, as it turns out – are described
in compassionate detail. Tales of Nora’s
health problems and efforts to find her
company of her own kind are made lively
and compelling – even if not especially
remarkable in the zoo life of animals.
Williams’ aim, however, is to situate
Nora as a small emblem of something
much larger – the climate change disaster
and our troubled relationship with nature.
Zigzagging across time and space, the
author links Nora to her captive-raised
father, whose mother was killed by an
Inupiat hunter near the Alaskan village of
Wales decades before. The connection, in
turn, links to the current and accelerating
transformation of Alaska and the rest of
the Arctic, now warming more than twice
as fast as elsewhere.
The storyline drags the oversized issue
of climate change into view as part of
Nora’s world, revealing an almost-dizzying
array of intersections. Polar bear research
is there, along with speculation about
the future for Alaska’s native people.
The debate about the ethics of zoos
also makes an appearance along with
Arctic colonisation, the Spanish flu, the
emotional life of animals and even British
explorer Captain James Cook. The pieces
are disparate, but come together as a final
call to action: “The term ‘new normal’ gets
thrown around a lot with regard to climate
change,” writes Williams. “But Nora didn’t
have a choice about what her new normal
would be. We do.”