Polar Bear

Endangered Species Act protection may do little to stave off extinction for the polar bear.

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<p>The threat of global warming has felt real, acute and terrifying for years...to number-crunching scientific policy wonks and bug-loving environmentalists. But there was something about the image of a once-robust white bear, unnaturally skinny and swimming in a suddenly ice-free ocean, that woke up the masses. This wasn't just about ice melting, but about life on Earth.</p><p>There, in the form of something almost cuddly and somewhat human-shaped, was a real symbol for the changes we are inflicting on our entire globe by simply going about the business we thought of as innocent: driving, heating and cooling our homes, powering our cell phones, plugging in our flat screen TVs....By the end of 2008, even President Bush, a notoriously -- let us say -- <i>skeptical</i> player in the real world global warming drama, had declared the polar bear endangered (even if his Administration expressly said that the prime cause of its endangerment, global warming, <a href=

could not be addressed by the Endangered Species Act).

For reminding us that global warming is a near-and-present danger, the now iconic polar bear deserves a Heart of Green. Let's hope we have a chance to pin some prize to it while it still lives in the wild.

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Photo By: Jan Will / Istock

The Bush Administration was criticized by environmentalists for agreeing to list the polar bear as threatened due to habitat loss from climate change--the first species listed for that reason--but it was listed with the caveat that plans to protect the species from extinction should not include actions taken far from its habitat to reduce the threat of climate change. In other words, the coal-burning power plants that emit so much carbon, for instance, would not be regulated to address the threat to polar bears. The Obama Administration finalized the Endangered Species Act rule, which the Center for Biological Diversity criticized as a "hollow half-measure that ignores the mortal danger that polar bears are in from greenhouse gas emissions."

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