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The Polar Bear Today, Maybe Us Tomorrow

June 14, 2006 ⋅  E-Mail Article ⋅  Print Article ⋅ Post a comment

The world is getting smaller and smaller each day and the more we industrialize it the more we shrink it. How much more industry can the world maintain before it just gives up the ghost? We see sharks attacking swimmers in unfamiliar areas because their food source has been fished out. We see Asian countries selling sick and diseased chickens to impoverished workers because there is a high demand to support the overworked slave labor manufacturing workers. We see alligators attacking people in their garages because their habitat has been developed. Now we have the innocent Polar Bear. That’s right, the polar bear. We have so much industrialization occurring at such a rapid pace that it appears the world cannot keep up much longer. Add to this the fact that manufacturing in India, China, and Thailand, are basically unregulated and dumping pollutants all ove the place, we see how the world is headed down a very slippery slop and the plight of the polar bear may be in reality a look into the future of humanity.

As we huff and puff to industrialize the world we are destroying our living quarters, and in an even more extreme manner, we are destroying the living quarters of all plant and animal that support human life. We must remember that human life pretty much mimics animal life, as the animals go so goes the humans. Now consider what industrialization and global warming are doing to the polar bear. Reportedly, polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea may be turning to cannibalism because longer seasons without ice keep them from getting to their natural food, a new study by American and Canadian scientists has found.

The study reviewed three examples of polar bears preying on each other from January to April 2004 north of Alaska and western Canada, including the first-ever reported killing of a female in a den shortly after it gave birth. What makes this story really fantastic is the fact that polar bears feed primarily on ringed seals and use sea ice for feeding, mating and giving birth, they rarely kill each other for nourishment. However, the effects of global warming, and over fishing, have combined to deprive the polar bear of its sustenance.

Polar bears kill each other for population regulation, dominance, and reproductive advantage, the study said. Killing for food seems to be less common, said the study’s principal author, Steven Amstrup of the U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center. He went on to say that, “ During 24 years of research on polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea region of northern Alaska and 34 years in northwestern Canada, we have not seen other incidents of polar bears stalking, killing, and eating other polar bears.”

Environmentalists have been telling anyone who will listen that the shrinking polar ice habitat was occurring because of global warming and if the trend continues it may lead to the extinction of polar bears before the end of the century.

Kassie Siegla stated, “Cannibalism demonstrates the effect on bears…It’s very important new information…It shows in a really graphic way how severe the problem of global warming is for polar bears.”

Today it’s the bears; tomorrow it may be our problem. Many feel overcrowding will not be an issue for years to come but if we do not address it now where will the children of this world be when they have run out of room. Countries half a world apart barely get along as it is, what will happen when we are shoulder to shoulder with no where to turn? We need to slow down the pace of industrialization and globalization; we need to give Mother Nature and the planet earth a moment to adapt. If not, we may be as cannibalistic as the polar bears in the very near future.

The Polar Bear Today, Maybe Us Tomorrow

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