Russian Town Under Siege by Dozens of Supposedly Endangered Polar Bears
The polar bear, swimming from ice floe to ice floe in search of food, has become the symbol of climate change. They’re all going to die and it’s all your fault! Now, sit down for a spell and listen to Greta tell you how you’re not supposed to take a plane.
It may surprise you that the polar bear isn’t threatened with extinction. It’s vulnerable, but not threatened. That doesn’t mean the people of Ryrkaypiy in Russia might not bear a secret wish that it was. That’s because the Arctic Circle hamlet is being threatened by 56 of them.
According to the U.K. Daily Mail, life in the remote town has pretty much stopped because of the bears.
“All public events have been cancelled and children were given extra protection as they travel to and from kindergarten and school,” the Daily Mail reported Friday.
“Special bear patrols are trying to stop the ‘hungry’ bears entering residential areas.
“So far the invasion is on the outskirts of the village — which has a population of 766 — in Russia’s easternmost Chuktoka region, where the beasts are feasting on seal carcasses at Cape Kozhevnkov, according to reports.”
That’s what 56 polar bears who’ve just caught a walrus looks like. As reasons for canceling school go, this certainly isn’t the worst.
So of course, this is because of climate change.
“Nearly all the polar bears are skinny,” Tatyana Minenko of the World Wildlife Federation’s Polar Bear Patrol in Ryrkaipiy told the Daily Mail.
“There are adult bears, adolescents and mother bears with cubs of different ages.”
“The number of human and predator encounters in the Arctic is increasing,” the WWF said.
“The main reason is the decline of sea ice area due to the changing climate. In the absence of ice cover, animals are forced to go ashore in search of food.”
The WWF is hardly alone in saying that the polar bear is threatened.
”Because of melting sea ice, it is likely that more polar bears will soon starve, warns a new study that discovered the large carnivores need to eat 60 percent more than anyone had realized. Turns out they are high-energy beasts, burning through 12,325 calories a day,” National Geographic reported in February of last year.
Here’s the thing, though: they’re not starving.
As Arctic Today reported in October of last year, “the polar bear does not face imminent extinction, and the widespread belief that it does now stands in the way of more nuanced communication about the dramatic effects of climate change in the Arctic.”
“When the symbol gets bigger than the region itself and people don’t realize that the polar bear is just one piece of a whole diverse web of life in the Arctic, then it can become almost a barrier,” Leanne Clare of the WWF’s Arctic Program said at the time.
“What we are trying to do now is to help people understand that the polar bear is an important part within the region and that it is a part of a very intricate and fragile — some would say resilient — web of life in the Arctic that is at risk. We have to talk about that — for whatever reason people have a huge attachment to polar bears — and then figure out how to utilize this attachment and get people to go beyond this and attach themselves to the Arctic region as such.”
So polar bears aren’t starving, but not endangered.
And the problem is that we just don’t get the nuances in the “web of life in the Arctic that is at risk” — because the same people who are telling us we don’t get the nuances are also the ones who have reduced those nuances because “don’t you love those adorable polar bears?” is an effective message since “for whatever reason people have a huge attachment to polar bears.”
Probably not the people of Ryrkaypiy, though.
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