Photo of emaciated polar bear kicks off climate change talks

The world’s tragedies often have images that end up defining them: A five-year old screaming in Iraq after her parents were killed by U.S. soldiers. A starving child being stalked by a vulture during a ruthless famine in Sudan.

A video released this week of an extremely emaciated polar bear has served as a similar purpose: a rallying cry and stand-in for a largely unmitigated environmental disaster.

The video was shot by Paul Nicklen, a nature photographer and contributor to the National Geographic magazine for the last 17 years. He is also a biologist by training and the co-founder of Sea Legacy, a nonprofit that uses storytelling and images to advocate for the environment.

Nicklen’s video, which he shot on a trip for Sea Legacy, depicts an emaciated polar bear, its coat patchy, seemingly near death on an island in a Canadian territory inside the Arctic Circle. It searches for food in a rusted garbage can and chews what Nicklen said was an old snowmobile seat.

And it struck a nerve: It was viewed more than 3.5 million times in posts on Nicklen’s and National Geographic’s Instagram feeds, according to metrics on the photo sharing site, before picking up news coverage from around the world.

In his caption with the video, Nicklen wrote that his team was “pushing through their tears” while documenting the bear.

“It’s a soul-crushing scene that still haunts me, but I know we need to share both the beautiful and the heartbreaking if we are going to break down the walls of apathy,” he wrote. “This is what starvation looks like. The muscles atrophy. No energy. It’s a slow, painful death.”

The photo was shot on Somerset Island in the upper reaches of Canada. Nicklen and his team saw the bear and shot the video from about 400 feet away, he said. Nicklen, 49, who grew up in the region on nearby Baffin Island, said that he had never seen a bear in such poor condition before.

“We stood there crying — filming with tears rolling down our cheeks,” he told National Geographic.

He said that the intent behind the footage, which is set over a mournful soundtrack, was not purely journalistic. The trip he was on was part of a push to drive home the issue of climate change with Sea Legacy.