Newsflash

SAVING THE POLAR BEAR

The Center has been working on behalf of polar bears since 2001, when we successfully challenged the Bush administration’s suppression of a report implicating its plans for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development for likely violation of an international treaty requiring protection of polar bear habitat. The administration has continued to press for oil and gas drilling in increasingly precious polar bear habitat, however, and the Center has continued to fight those plans. Most recently, we blocked Bush administration designs on drilling in the Beaufort Sea, which threatened to harm polar bears and other marine animals in coastal waters off the Arctic Refuge.

We’ve also been at the forefront of the fight to protect polar bears and their habitat from an even more dire threat: global warming. As greenhouse gas emissions drive human-caused global warming at unprecedented rates, Arctic sea ice — critical to nearly every aspect of polar bear survival — melts earlier and more extensively each decade. The rate of summer sea-ice decline is so dramatic that leading researchers believe the Arctic could be completely devoid of ice in the summer as early as 2030. And even without that vanishing act, scientists predict that global warming will result in a shortening of the polar bear’s hunting season and a decrease in the sea-ice platform from which it stalks its primary prey, ringed seals, as well as a corresponding decrease in winter fat stores and access to maternal denning sites. Indeed, recent cases of polar bear starvation and stranding at sea have already been documented and are likely to become more common as Arctic temperatures continue to rise rapidly.

The Center has led the charge to save polar bears from extinction by global warming. We authored the 2005 scientific petition calling for the bear’s protection under the Endangered Species Act, and subsequently filed suit with our partners at the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace to force the administration to take action on the petition. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service still hadn’t issued a final decision on the polar bear in March 2008 — more than three years after our petition was submitted — we filed suit again, and on April 28, a judge ruled in our favor and ordered the Service to issue a final listing decision by May 15. Just a day before the newly imposed deadline, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne at last announced that the polar bear would be listed as threatened — a momentous decision and a great environmental victory that will have far-reaching consequences. Unfortunately, Kempthorne simultaneously vowed that the listing wouldn’t be permitted to affect U.S. climate policy, and that he would implement a new rule allowing the United States to “continue to develop our natural resources in the arctic region” — that is, to continue exploiting polar bear habitat. We immediately filed new court papers to ensure that the polar bear is truly protected. Even as Interior waived Marine Mammal Protection Act safeguards for polar bears and walruses in the Chukchi Sea — effectively giving oil industries a blank check to harass wildlife in the area — we were already gearing up for a lawsuit to protect polar bears from government-sanctioned oil development in both the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. And Interior isn’t the only entity we’re taking  a stand against for the polar bear: We’ve also sought to intervene in a hunting-group lawsuit challenging the bear’s protected status. (Apparently, the group thinks the bear’s new listing protects it too much.)

The Center’s full-court-press media campaign for the polar bear has helped shine an international spotlight on the bear’s plight and galvanize public opinion in support of its protection. In addition, as the administration continues its suppression tactics around climate science, we’ve fought in the courts to ensure that the best science on global warming sees the light of day, as well as pushing for more responsible national energy policies and drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. We’ll keep working to preserve the integrity of the Endangered Species Act so that it can fulfill its purpose in protecting all imperiled species, including the polar bear.

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NATURAL HISTORY

Contact: Kassie Siegel