Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (4 page)

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“W
E COMPETE IN THE LONG-HAUL,
high-yield market,” John Gunter told me one afternoon. Gunter is in his early thirties and slight, with a styled wave of hair that pours over his forehead. He lives in Winnipeg, but has been spending every fall in Churchill running Frontiers North Adventures, the company his parents founded in the nineties. It’s now the largest and most visible outfit in the town’s roughly $7-million-a-year tourism industry. We were eating a couple of bowls of minestrone soup, in a restaurant the Gunter family recently bought half of.

The Gunters first came to Churchill in the eighties, when John’s father was sent to manage the Royal Canadian Bank branch in town. At that time, the tourism industry consisted of a few hardscrabble one-man operations—locals who, like Len Smith, hauled people out to the tundra on vehicles they built themselves, operated little hotels, or rented rooms in their homes. Hard-core wildlife photographers were willing to go through the trouble of cobbling together travel arrangements from all these entrepreneurs, individually, by mail. The Gunters’ innovation was to package these proprietors together and market all-inclusive vacations. They made the process of booking a trip to Churchill more like booking a stay at a Caribbean resort, and eventually bought the Tundra Buggy business from Len Smith when Smith retired to Florida. They began advertising through mainstream outlets like automobile clubs and the AARP. They were opening Churchill’s frontier to a wider spectrum of tourists—namely, Gunter told me, what the industry calls “classic tourists.”

I’d been in Churchill for a couple of days at that point. The gaggles of classic tourists were impossible to miss. They were older—the average age of travelers to Churchill is sixty-one, according to one study—and moved between scheduled activities in chaperoned cohorts. The classic tourists seemed to delight in everything, wherever they went. It was always uplifting to hear the swishing of their snow-proof pants as they rose smiling, en masse, from their breakfast table at Gypsy’s Bakery and filed onto a school bus waiting outside, to light out for their next low-impact adventure.

Over the years, the motivations of Churchill’s tourists seem to have changed just as dramatically as their demographics. The first wave of visitors to Churchill were coming to photograph the bears, but tended to have a broad appreciation for the landscape and its ecology. By comparison, locals told me, the current crop feels more myopically bear-centric—they come to Churchill to tick something off a list. A 2010 study in the journal
Current Issues in Tourism
on the phenomenon of “Last Chance Tourism” found that a majority of people traveling to Churchill were coming because they wanted to see polar bears before they went extinct. As one industry veteran put it, “People are coming to see the last dinosaur now.”

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C
HURCHILL’S POLAR BEARS
are almost certain to be the first polar bears wiped out by climate change. This is a corollary of the same unconventional migration that strands them here every fall to be marveled at by tourists. Polar bears in Churchill are already pushing the limits of what’s possible for their species. Surviving in a place where the primary habitat—ice—simply vanishes for a few months each year has meant evolving one of the longest fasting periods of any animal on Earth. The bears’ lifestyle is almost literally feast or famine: bulking up all winter, then living off that accumulated energy while waiting out the summer on land. It means flirting with a breaking point at the lowest point of that cycle every year, just before the ice re-forms. (A healthy female bear might lose two-thirds of her body weight, only to put it back on after freeze-up.)
And it leaves very little wiggle room to adapt if conditions change.

A body of scientific research, including work by a University of Alberta biologist, Andrew Derocher, has shown that the ice on Hudson Bay is now breaking up three to four weeks earlier than it did in the 1980s, pushing the bears onto land earlier in the summer, and for a longer stretch of time. In short, they are being given less time to eat, then forced to fast for longer. Consequently, in the last twenty years, Churchill’s bear population has declined by more than 20 percent.

Polar Bears International had flown Derocher to Churchill while I was there. Among other things, they wanted him on hand for the Martha Stewart taping. He is a towering, affable guy, and among the world’s most respected authorities on polar bears. When I knocked on the door of the sparsely furnished rental house PBI had put him up in, he and one of his graduate students had just finished watching the new Nissan Leaf commercial online—the one with the polar bear hugging the commuter. “It really is kind of depressing that the animal I’ve spent a long time studying is being used as the motivator to buy a car,” Derocher said. He was ambivalent about the way polar bears had infiltrated popular culture in general—“I can’t go anywhere without seeing polar bears,” he told me—and was skeptical of electric cars as a solution to climate change in the first place, since they’d wind up plugged into an electric grid that often relied on coal.

Derocher has studied Churchill’s bears since he was a student in the mid-eighties. He explained that the bears lose about two pounds every day that they’re on land. And so a bear’s body mass when it comes off the ice in the spring is one measure of how likely it is to survive until the next freeze-up, of “how much gas is in the tank.” Derocher’s mentor, Ian Stirling, has described healthy bears as resembling “big tubs of jelly with little, stubby legs sticking out.” By fall, a bear in poorer condition will have a leaner profile, like a hunting dog. A starving bear will start to resemble a duffel bag with a bunch of wrenches clunking around inside.

Still, the big drain on the population so far doesn’t appear to be adult bears dying of starvation, but a flickering out of the new generations meant to take their place. Derocher has shown that females with less fat on them when they come off the ice in the spring give birth to smaller cubs. And smaller cubs are less likely to survive. Slimmer mothers also produce fewer cubs. (Twins and triplets in the population are becoming less common.) Females that become so weakened while waiting for freeze-up may also shut down their ability to nurse to conserve energy, and their cubs will starve. Or else they forgo reproduction in the first place. Derocher has shown that females whose body mass fell below about 415 pounds were unable to reproduce successfully, and they are all being quickly driven in that direction. (Derocher tracks females with satellite collars; he recently had to order new, smaller collars, because the old ones are now too big for the shrinking bears.) If all the females reach that reproductive point of no return, with no young surviving, it would just be a matter of waiting for the adults bears to die out. Suddenly, the polar bears of Churchill would be a society with no children.

The general trend, from here on out, will be for increasingly longer summer seasons. The bears will return to the ice later and later in the fall, in worse and worse condition, and with fewer and fewer cubs. The coastline where the Tundra Buggies roam may gradually morph into something akin to a polar bear refugee camp, a holding area for despondent, gaunt animals with no ice in front of them and no place to go. There will be good years among the bad years—colder, with earlier freeze-ups. But there may also be catastrophic years, when the ice melts extremely early in the spring and re-forms extremely late in the fall or winter, and a disproportionate chunk of the population gets knocked off all at once, unable to wait it out. Nothing says that Churchill’s polar bears will disappear in a gradual, linear way, Derocher told me. It could be quick if just the wrong succession of sudden shocks plays out. Recently, at a meeting of Canadian wildlife officials, Derocher suggested that plans ought to be drawn up for short-term crisis scenarios: “What if some sort of freak thing happened, and freeze-up didn’t start until late December? What are you going to do if you end up with forty bears that are starving? Do you want to euthanize them? Do you want to pick them up in a helicopter and release them somewhere else? Do you want to feed them? Bring them to a zoo?” His point was acknowledged but not dwelled on, he said.

By 2050, Derocher told me, Hudson Bay is expected to stop freezing at all; it will be open water year-round. No matter how the particulars in Churchill have played out by then, the sea ice—the polar bear’s true home—will have vanished entirely. If any bears are left outside town, they will vanish with it.

There are eighteen other populations of polar bears on the planet, and over the next century, a different story will unfold in each. Seven of them are already known to be declining, though less steeply than Churchill’s. Some of the populations at the highest latitudes may increase temporarily, as more seals and walruses—animals the bears eat—shift their own ranges north, chasing a colder climate. Some bear populations might only
appear
to increase, since polar bears will be hungry enough to roam closer to Arctic villages in search of food, and people will see the animals more frequently. And a small number of bears, scientists project, will survive into the next century on pockets of ice around northern Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Islands—and maybe indefinitely if, in the near future, the world actually starts to make the sort of wholesale, politically unpopular shifts needed to slow climate change.

That is, when environmentalists like Robert Buchanan say they are fighting to save the polar bear, what they mean is bleaker than it sounds: they are fighting to save
some
polar bears, these ones in the very far north that still, theoretically at least, could be preserved like a keepsake. Robert, for his part, seems to prefer to talk more about humanity’s opportunity to preserve the polar bear
species,
rather than break down the scenarios for each individual population. He never ducks the scientific reality. But it would undermine his message of building hope and motivating action to concede, while preaching to television crews on Buggy One, that it’s too late to save the particular polar bears wandering behind him in the shot. In even a best-case scenario, the species will be withdrawn into those shrunken sanctuaries at the top of the world and recede into an even more distant and wild abstraction, a creature once again unreachable by tourists and celebrities and their cameras. At that point, the bear will live on mostly in whatever legends we are beginning to tell about it now.

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O
NE NIGHT,
I was invited for beers at Churchill’s Royal Canadian Legion Hall. When I arrived, I found a long table of men in Carhartt overalls and quilted flannel shirts decompressing after work. The national news was on in the corner, and the men hollered and shushed one another when a report about Martha Stewart’s visit came on the television. Everyone paid attention, but hardly anyone said anything when it was over. They mostly just groaned or huffed air through their noses.

I’d been spending a lot of time hanging around the entrepreneurial second tier of Churchill’s tourism industry, getting to know many of the same weather-beaten men who’d helped pioneer the industry twenty and thirty years ago. I liked them. And, I’ll admit it, I enjoyed it in a very high-schoolish way whenever I walked into Gypsy’s Bakery and got waved over to sit with them at the table in front of the pastry case—the table always understood to be held just for them, even during the mightiest mealtime rush of classic tourists. But none of them believed climate change was endangering the town’s polar bears, no matter how clear-cut the science seemed to me, and this had a way of stunting conversation. No one was worried, and they brushed the prospect aside so casually, with such genial sarcasm, that I sometimes felt embarrassed about bringing it up. As one man put it to me: “Yeah. The bears are all fucking dropping through the ice, because it’s melting and drowning them. Right.”

Nevertheless, many of them could rattle off changes in the climate that they’d noticed with their own eyes. The summer was clearly longer. The vegetation was bigger. Moose were more common. So were robins. (“It used to be a really big deal to see a robin up here,” one guy said.) In fact, the main economic hope for the town these days is that a longer season of open water on Hudson Bay will bring more ships into Churchill’s seaport and that, eventually, the town will become Canada’s outpost for trade with Russia, with ships loading up with grain from the prairies and navigating a new, ice-free Northwest Passage.

Still, nearly all the locals I met were convinced this warming was just part of a natural cycle. And the presumption was, if the change in the climate were natural, as opposed to man-made, the polar bears were somehow inherently equipped to withstand it. Maybe the bears’ numbers would shrink, but they’d muddle through until the climate corrected itself and there was plenty of ice again.

Everyone came back to an image of the polar bear as an invincible eating machine. Many of these men spend a good part of their year on the land, hunting and trapping; they know the bears don’t technically “fast” through the summer months, as biologists tend to put it. “The polar bear eats,” Mark Ingebrigtson, a former mayor of Churchill, told me. “He gets the odd seal, the odd whale.” People told me about bears they’d seen tearing through berry bushes. They’d seen them pillage goose nests and inhale the eggs. One man described watching a polar bear lie in wait while a caribou herd blew past, then pounce on the last animal in line and devour it. Another claimed to have watched a bear leap from the bank of the Churchill River onto the back of a beluga and drag the whale to shore like a Labrador fetching a floppy, inflatable pool toy. A male bear can easily weigh twelve hundred pounds. It can run twenty or twenty-five miles an hour and be at full speed after only a few strides. They are opportunists, I was told, and can eat virtually anything they want. Even if the ice recedes, they are not going to “stand around starving” onshore.

Recently, some of these same adaptation theories have been argued out in scientific journals.
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But the consensus remains that the polar bear, as a species, simply can’t last by haphazardly grabbing calories on land. It takes a huge amount of energy to keep a polar bear operating. (According to one study, if a polar bear chased a goose for more than twelve seconds it would have burned more calories than it gained by eating the goose.) It’s not a coincidence that the animals have evolved to eat ringed seals—hapless globs of fat, which they hunt by lying perfectly still next to a seal’s breathing hole and waiting for it to surface. Everything else is just snacks. Individual, innovative bears or pockets of bears may manage to outlast others for a while, but the ice is slipping away too fast for the species to re-engineer its metabolism and evolve. When ice receded after the last ice age, a population of polar bears around southern Scandinavia died out in almost exactly the same way.