Isolated polar bear company in a hot world

In early November 2015, a polar bear cub named Nora was abandoned by her mother at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, leaving her fate at the hands of a team of veterinarians and zookeepers. The Loneliest Polar Bear: A True Story of Survival and Peril on the Age of a Warming World Tells the story of a frantic attempt to keep Nora alive and well, from struggling to replicate polar bear milk in an hour-long surgery to fix a broken bone in her leg.

But the book, author Kell Williams expanded ‘ 2017 series about Nora For Oregonian / Oregonoy, goes beyond the life of a bear. It details political battles over the existence of climate change, debates about the ethics of zoos, and the already devastating effects of global warming on native Alaskan villages.

The Reporter Door Talked to Williams about pulling all these pieces together, wrote about native communities, and the trouble of holding an animal as a mascot for a complex problem.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

This book is full of lots of riveting and emotional moments. So my first question for you is, did you cry at the time you were writing this?

Absolutely, on more than one occasion. Do you want just the writing part or the reporting part? Do you want travel disappointment or just emotional destruction?

Tell me about the emotional devastation.

I think that is probably one of the hardest parts, it was actually after the manuscript was finished, and we were in the editing phase and starting the fact-checking. But last year, and it was very hard for reasons other than just the book, but I was reading so much about climate change and talking to so many people who were affected by it, and then the epidemic hit. And then the people of the woods in Oregon brought this blanket of smoke to Portland that seemed to stick forever. And it was really, I think, that’s the low point for me because it just brought home all these different topics, you know, there was a lot of science being denied around the epidemic, And it was just so reminiscent of it all. The stuff that I was reading about the book and I was researching and writing about. And then it was really just with smoke on top of it, very often it felt like it was too much to bear.

The book covers the history of polar bears and their habitat, the difficulty of raising them in captivity, the history of climate studies, the uncertainty of native populations in Alaska – and all within the first 50 or so pages. So was it difficult to weave all these different threads together?

It was, but I felt it was important to do that because I really wanted to see both humans and polar bears in their current state of how we got here, even over a geological period. We are all adapted to the world as it exists now, and we are able to do so because it has changed at a geologic speed. But now it is not so. Obviously, the change we are seeing now is growing very fast. So the adaptations we are able to do will not be long enough. As the pace of change increases, we obviously need to adapt more quickly, which will be possible for some of us, for those who are not possible for others, For hotels that are not able to survive wildfires or snow storms in shelters, or for polar bears who do not have the benefit of being able to leave their habitat.

Photo by Dave Killen / The Oregonian

There is for the book “Cute Polar Bears Come for Cubs, Stay for Climate and Indigenous Justice”. So are you hoping that Nora will get people off again and then there will be big takeaways?

Yes, it struck me that I was doing the same thing as zoos do. You know where there are obviously animals of this type, and you can use that as a vehicle for another message, but I think their story is central to the book.

But I think, as I said before, I wanted to make additional reference to the fact that people who live polar bears learn to live in the same type of harsh climate, which would seem unfit for those of us. Are those who live in the south. And you can’t really understand those problems without looking at the history of climate science and the rise of climate denial over the last 40 or 50 years.

So this is your first book, your first time writing and being edited in such a large format. Were there any stories or interesting facts that did not include it in the book?

Oh, man, there certainly were because we had cut probably 25,000 words from the first draft to the final manuscript. I think that is probably one of the areas that my editor helped the most was about the indigenous community there. [Editor’s note: one of the main settings of the book is the village of Wales, Alaska.] I wrote a lot on his history in some earlier drafts, including this complete long story about the first missionaries going to Wales and schools about how he set off and how one of them killed some teenagers . The village, mostly because he was a supreme asshole to all those who lived there and treated them all with great disgust, was badly racist, had no regard for any culture or traditions.

It was not made in the story. But I think it is probably the best. One of the things I’m trying to focus on is the hashtag that was trending around at the time, I think it was like “onstories” where people in these communities were allowed to tell their stories should be given. And it is not really my place to write the entire history of the village because there are many people who are more familiar with me on that subject. And for me to come as an outsider and try to tell that story, it’s probably not my place.

Photo by Dave Killen / The Oregonian

You talk about the polar bear which is a really complex mascot for climate change and also that it can try to find out if an animal is happy. But there are a lot of anecdotes about Nora’s actuaries who actually connect emotionally with her. Do you think there are problems that convey human traits and feelings to animals?

I do, yes. You know, obviously, anthropomorphizing has its drawbacks. I mean, we can project things on animals that are impossible to know if they are actually experiencing them. But I think there are a lot of ways to know if an animal is doing well or not.

There are dangers for animals to describe human emotions. But I think it’s dangerous for them too, as you know, big bags of meat that don’t have any kind of sense. I don’t think it’s possible for us to understand how they experience that feeling. But I think it would be dangerous to think that they have no feelings because then you are free to not care about how well they are doing. And you can treat them but you want to. And I don’t think that’s right, either.

I’ll be honest, when I looked at the cover of the book, I felt something like, “Oh man, here we go” because when I was a kid, I definitely grew up in the era where it was every day. It felt like in school, people were saying, “We have to save the polar bear,” at which point the polar bear has become like an empty signer and has barely any meaning yet. Do you feel through the process of writing this book, your feelings about polar bears as a mascot, or about conservation efforts or how we talk about climate change, are they Changed during writing?

I don’t know that they have changed, but I’ve certainly become more aware of the problems of being a poster child or figurehead or mascot of any kind that is as complex and multifunctional as climate change. I mean, anytime you simplify something as big as a climate crisis “we need to save the polar bear,” something is about to be lost.

There are 19 populations around the Arctic. And some of them are definitely decreasing, others are stagnant, some are increasing, others of which they have no idea. When you put the polar bear there, “we need to save this animal”, when in fact, some of these populations are growing, people who want to argue in bad faith can come back and Can say, “What do you mean we need to save polar bears? We’ve got populations that are moving upstream. That’s why all climate science is fake.”

When you have a mascot on top of your flag, and everyone is supposed to rally around, it gives people the kind of opportunities that come in cherry-pick and dismiss your entire argument. We do. That being said, you know, if the polar bear is the one who inspires someone to take action, then I don’t really see harm in that. It is just an attempt to weigh those two things against each other.