Polar Bear Blog - Incredible Shrinking Polar Bears - August 30, 2006

I am not sure why but I really get irked when I read news articles about the latest scientific disaster to hit polar bears. There are always announcements that the ice cap is melting, they have less time to hunt seals, they are drowning, they are being over-hunted, they are turning to cannibalism, they are turning into hermaphrodites. And now their genitals are getting smaller. Great.

I really respect polar bears, they scare the living daylights out of me and really decrease the amount of REM sleep I get around this time of year but I still respect them. Every new study and new article just feels like a friend has been kicked while he is down.

I mean, give the bears a break - not from pollution or climate change (we should have done that twenty years ago...ten years ago...March 2nd...) - but from pity. Will somebody please write a story about polar bears doing something majestic instead of simply more demeaning science?

We talk about how we created climate change and climate change is killing polar bears and how we have to save them - but that does not translate politically, we will save them as long as it does not really inconvenience our day-to-day life. It does seems a little twisted.

But, in the big picture, what are we saving? Polar bears emerged as their own species about 200,000 years ago. That is a long time in terms of weather patterns, ice ages and individual lifespans but a very short time in terms of evolution. Maybe the polar bear's time has simply come and it will die off or slowly return to a more grizzly lifestyle. Or maybe the grolar or pizzly is not an alarming death knell but the beginning of an amazing jump in evolution.

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