Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye by Zac Unger

Author:Zac Unger [Unger, Zac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306821639
Publisher: Da Capo Press

CHAPTER 16

The Greatest Conservation Generation

[Protecting the polar bear] is going to make Americans do what they’ve never done before, which is say, “What am I willing to pay for that species, in the Arctic, in the far north, that I’ll never see, and if I did it would probably try to eat me?”

—KENNETH GREEN, RESIDENT SCHOLAR AND CLIMATE CHANGE SKEPTIC, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

AS THE LOCAL REPRESENTATIVES of the Greatest Conservation Generation inhaled their processed lunches, I invited myself to sit down with four of them. They chattered about the helicopter flight they’d taken and all of the acrobatics that the pilot had performed for them. Apparently, someone had had to make use of an airsickness bag.

“Do you guys have a minute to talk?” I asked.

“Just a minute,” one of the girls said, sighing. “And then we have to blog.”

A girl named Annabel, a high school junior with an attitude so severe and serious that she seemed haunted, explained what she planned to write. “The den was collapsing,” she said. “The permafrost is melting and if it keeps going like this, the moms won’t have any place to deliver their cubs. We came here to the tundra and we actually saw that. We have pictures. Global warming is happening.” She bit a half-moon out of her sandwich and nodded her head gravely as she chewed. “We have to do something soon. It’s all up to us or the bears are going to die.”

“That’s pretty heavy,” I said.

I looked outside the dining car window. A bear wandered lazily from one side of the buggy to the other and back again, sniffing at the bare dirt and chewing on some grass. He lifted his head to look directly at us only once, when a particularly loud chorus of squeals rose from one of the tables. After the commotion died, he scratched out a little spot in the ground and went to sleep.

“He’s been here for a couple of days,” Annabel said. “He feels safe with us.” Ah yes, the pure simple friendship between man and beast. Step off the Tundra Buggy and it’s group hugs all around, cue the theme from It’s a Small World and then . . . some big-ass bear punches you in the throat and eats your kidneys.

One of the other girls shrugged. “He got really excited when we were grilling hot dogs and hamburgers the other night. Maybe we can do that again tonight. That would be so cool.” I watched as the bear got up, turned from head to tail, and then lay down in the same spot, facing the opposite direction. It was like watching a house cat: we were each mildly interested in the other, but there was no affection beyond the fact that it’s nice to be in the same general vicinity as another mammal with a beating heart.

But the girls felt differently. “He needs us,” said one of them.

“We can’t let him down. We just can’t,” Annabel said with a pleading tone to her voice.

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