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Talking Story 
by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V17, #2 (January 9, 2007), page 7.

Our holidays are over. Just passed too are our gift-giving days.

You have to hope everyone did well; that everywhere, squirrelly kids and wishful parents got what we prayed for. What’s more, we have to believe our generous shoppers and earnest present-wrappers feel just as good. Giving, our elders always say, is better than getting.

The Bush Administration gave us some good news during December’s last busy week. It was easy to miss. So many other important headlines were hitting us — the King of Soul, America’s healing President, Iraq’s demonic despot, all perished at year’s end.

It’s possible no one noticed our government’s big admission that polar bears are in big trouble. At the close of 2006, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conceded that continuity of the entire arctic species might be threatened.

Of course, it’s also possible not many of us new Americans care much about our furry friends way up north. Sure, they’re cute and cuddly, but our concerns tend to be more arms-length: is my job still in hand after the Christmas rush? Are our boys coming home with good grades, or with the cops just behind? How many relatives back home were hurt, are yet missing, or will always be missed, after last month’s furious storms?

We are often overwhelmed with more immediate worries.

But our old folks will tell you: a tiger lunching at a neighbor’s house will soon be visiting mine. We have a lot of animal analogies.

Still, it’s possible that many of us immigrants would’ve ignored the bad big bear news even if we’d heard it. They’re probably the same woodenheads who’d ignore that tiger next door. In fact, they’re likely the same kind of folks as those who figure America can scoff at the 169 countries and governmental organizations (including our anxious neighbors Canada and Mexico) committed to the Kyoto Protocol — the modern equivalent of our grandparents’ old adage about every living thing on our little blue planet’s relation to every other living thing. Your tiger is my tiger. Same hunger.

The Administration’s admission starts in motion a period of public discussion about what’s bugging our big fuzzy arctic cousins and what on earth must we do about it. Soon. It was a Christmas present not only to lovers of those cute white baby bears, wrestling around the way they do, all over their floating chunks of ice pack, but more to the point: it is a gift to our children and our children’s children, not only in America, but more critically: to our families back home. Back there, back where our aching earth’s most vulnerable families suffer from America’s neglect.

Let’s talk about polar bears.

They are big. They are furry. They live about as far north as you can go. It’s cold up there, most of the time it’s frozen ocean. Since the beginning of time, earth’s oceans have iced up then melted down in thousand-thousand year cycles. When the planet chills, we have an ice age. Only people with Prestone antifreeze running through their veins survive. Then, when the planet warms again, floodwaters soak the place. Not long ago, our Willamette Valley was a shallow sea filled with all kinds of weird life. For all of human history, big ice persists only on high mountains and on earth’s polar ice caps.

Now the North Pole, also called Santa Land, is melting. Many serious scientists warn that Arctic summer ice sheets will be gone in 30 years unless we do something about global warming. Now.

Santa and Mrs. Claus could easily move to Beaverton, but polar bears cannot. Indeed, these guys are drowning in numbers never seen before. Without summer ice pack, they’re paddling around cold water until exhausted. Then they drown. That’s not the worst of it — troubled mom bears are eating their own kids. It’s what mothers under severe environmental distress do. When there’s no food, no future, for their offspring: they end their little lives. Gulp. Gone.

Almost a year ago, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition with the U.S. Department of the Interior, supported by a mountain of scientific and commercial evidence, alleging that American polar bears are in danger of extinction.

When Mr. Bush’s big boys did not formally respond inside the six months required under law, the Center was joined by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace International in filing a big fat federal lawsuit. So, in late December, the Fish and Wildlife Service conceded that our bear buds are threatened and that it’s time to talk about their problems. About our problem. An admission that polar bears are "endangered," a red-hot notch or two up from "threatened," would require all government agencies to refrain from acting in ways that would harm the gasping species.

Okay, okay, unlike our Portland city leadership, our D.C. guys and girls are a little slow in understanding that our ravenous consumer appetites, fed by our Costco-sized shopping carts, brought home in cars undisturbed by any federal fuel efficiency standards, are responsible for scary climate change. For the disappearing North Pole, for drowning polar bears. Right before our eyes.

But slow is better than stupid.

Stupid would be continuing to insist that the U.S. (about six percent of our precious little planet’s people), responsible for about 40 percent of the industrialized world’s greenhouse gasses, is innocent of contributing to the polar bear’s troubles.

Stupider would be sorrowing more for fuzzy baby white bears than for skinny brown boys and girls. But it’s a good start. Cuddly bears can get people interested in the problem and involved in the solution, when too much human sorrow would likely numb folks into inaction.

So let’s be grateful for our government’s tepid response. It is a gift. This is a big country. The biggest, the most powerful, the most able to mobilize a big remedy for global climate change.

Every night, let’s recall quietly that hungry tigers will eat us as sure as eat our neighbors — that 2006’s Asian killer storms, destroying nearly 6 million family homes back home, were born from the same source as that tormenting our Arctic bears. Same climate shifts. Same earth. Same fate.

The holidays are over. A new year’s begun. And giving is still better, much bigger, than getting.