This is a memorable and important book about a magnificent animal that now seems doomed to die before our very eyes, while we who are responsible for its passing stand by in melancholy amazement, almost mute.
However, all is not quite lost. Even at this late stage, there is a slender chance that regulations could still be enacted that would help stay the bears' demise – perhaps even prevent it. Currently, those in Barack Obama's White House and other corridors of northern power seem hesitant to do so.
Richard Ellis, reigning poet laureate of the marine world, appears on the strength of this impeccably argued and fact-filled treatise on the history and present standing of Ursus maritimus to be the perfect candidate to help persuade them to do the right thing.
On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear, by Richard Ellis, Knopf, 400 pages, $35
I have had three memorable encounters with polar bears, each in its own way emblematic both of their regard and of their fate, which are so painstakingly outlined in On Thin Ice. The first was when I was small, and my mother took me to the London Zoo to join the endless lines of schoolchildren taken to see a newborn cub named Brumas.
In the drab and battered impoverishment of postwar London, so adorably comforting a creature cheered us all up mightily. Yet Brumas was to be the unknowing precursor of a vast industry that would soon be constructed around the immediately recognizable cuteness of small white bears, and which would be exploited by legions of toy makers, by the Coca-Cola Corporation, by Hollywood and by countless other zoos – most notably in recent years, Denver, with Klondike and Snow, and then, more recently, by Berlin, with an exceptionally handsome male cub born in 2006, and named Knut.
Knut proved to be both the apotheosis and nemesis of cute, providing in his swift rise and fall his own set of highly contemporary emblems of ursine tragedy. He was visited by millions, in person or on Facebook. He appeared on postage stamps and an entire world of magazine covers, culminating in his being photographed by Annie Leibovitz, and photo-shopped with Leonardo DiCaprio onto the cover of Vanity Fair.
My second encounter was in 1965, when I shot a polar bear and ate it
But then he grew up and angered people by growing ragged and turning a dirty yellow colour, then going horribly mad and a little savage – at which point lawyers were unleashed to try claw away much of the money he had made back in the days when he was cute. The case continues, while Knut remains alone and unvisited, looking as bitter as only an unkempt and jaundiced bear can.
My second encounter was in 1965, when I shot a polar bear and ate it. It was in East Greenland, I was on an expedition that was trapped and had run out of food; we had radioed permission from Inuit hunters in a settlement nearby. It was an elderly bear, and its muscles turned out to be infested with enormous flatworms, rendering it not especially good to eat. I have never shot an animal since. But some Inuit still do: To a hungry family in the Arctic North, the idea of prettiness runs a distant second to poundage. The public attitude to the 22,000 polar bears that Richard Ellis estimates remain depends very much on where and how that public lives.
