On Charisma, Megafauna & Climate Change

Oh, on a morning like this – this winter wanderland, Christmas card worthy. Hard not to have my mind drift to consider the Arctic, must be some sort of birth place of winter, the alpha and omega of winter, with her forever snows and ice.

I’ve never been to the Arctic, few of us have I guess. But I can picture it, just like they say, the pristine, white expanse, and there up above it all, above the snow and ice and polar bears, Aurora Borealis trying on her best Isadora Duncan, splashing her glass of absinthe upwards across the sky. Such a luminous wonder all around.

So how is it that we all just stand and watch as it ebbs and flows away into nothingness, just a drip, drip, drip at a time? How is it that I trundle along, putt-putting in my car, listening meekly to the cheering for our nation-building, sea ice-destroying, pipeline projects, as all the while the Arctic diminishes in our collective imagination of the sublime.

It’s surprising that it doesn’t matter that even a high-profile conservation poster child such as the polar bear is in peril. Sure, those everyday black bears, thought of as mere garbage pickers, mediocre hunting trophies, and common roadkill, yes, it can be hard to get folks to fret too much about their future (after all, just here in northern Ontario alone, turning up at just one sanctuary, over seventy orphaned cubs this year, yes, that many losing mothers to the gun or the car).

But there is nothing ordinary about the polar bear, this huge creature of land and sea. Still, as it turns out, even the numbers of the most cherished, most iconic, most evocative of creatures - oh those lions and tigers and polar bears - are as bleak as anyone else’s out there. Charismatic mega fauna be damned.

There are only some 19 (possibly 20) remaining populations of the great white bears left in the world, most here in Canada. And these populations are comprised of some 26,000 remaining individual bears. The bears are trying, some starting to shift their hunting inland, but their ways are old ways, layered into the sea ice, likely thought by the bears to be eternal, the stuff of epochs and eras and eons. Perhaps, until the Anthropocene.

Right now, far away in Brazil, climate change talks – COP30 – are taking place. Canada is there, hobnobbing and chit-chatting about our transition to a low-carbon future while back home the bears watch and wait for the ice to return and thicken enough so they might eat. Without enough food, the weight of the mothers will not be sufficient to reproduce. Local populations will shrink, dwindle – a slow attrition caused by homo sapiens’ addiction to petroleum.

So with each drip, each splash, each droplet of sea ice sent into the ocean, the world’s largest terrestrial carnivore, a creature that we dread and adore, is steeling itself for an uncertain future. We should as well. Because what are we without the polar bear, without that green sea ice, without the taste of the fish and the seal, if we are indeed all connected?

For more information please see:

Canada’s statement at Cop30, 2025 : https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/news/2025/11/canada-delivers-its-national-statement-at-cop30.html

The paradoxical extinction of the most charismatic animals https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5896884/

Energetic constraints drive the decline of a sentinel polar bear populationhttps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp3752

To support the work of Bear With Us sanctuary: https://bearwithus.org/support-our-efforts/

If you like my writing and would like to support it, please pick up or order a copy of my new novel, The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien at your local, independent bookstore or order direct from my publisher, Latitude 46: https://store.latitude46publishing.com/collections/featured-books/products/the-haunting-of-modesto-obrien

You might also be interested in my climate change trilogy: The Wintermen, Wintermen II: Into the Deep Dark & Wintermen III: At the End of the World, also available for order and from: https://store.latitude46publishing.com/collections/fiction/products/the-winter-men