I’m surprised the headline doesn’t read “Rare wildfires threaten well-done polar bears”. I think they missed an opportunity for hysteria there.
Wildfires sparked by lightning near Canada’s Hudson Bay are threatening the habitat of polar bears, encroaching on the old tree roots and frozen soil where females make their dens, a conservation expert on the big, white bears said on Thursday.
Polar bears are more typically threatened by the melting of sea ice, which they use as platforms for hunting seals, their main prey. But those who live near Hudson Bay spend their summers resting up on shore when the bay thaws, living in dens dug in the frozen soil among the roots of stunted spruce trees.
Fires in this area are rare, said Steven Amstrup, a former polar bear specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey and now chief scientist at the nonprofit conservation organization, Polar Bears International.
“It’s a cool, wet environment that doesn’t burn very often,” Amstrup said by telephone from Washington state. “It’s not an environment where the forest is adapted to fires very much.”
Unusually hot, dry weather in Manitoba, Canada, and lightning strikes caused several fires through Wapusk National Park across known polar bear dens in July, said Manitoba Conservation Officer Daryll Hedman.
Poor little polar bears. All you nature lovers, Darwin would have said this is what we call “survival of the fittest” and the bears are obviously not fit. Even if humans made the planet warmer, which they did not, the bears cannot adapt to their changing environment. Again, we are part of the environment. (Or we are aliens, pick one.) So Darwin’s survival of the fittest applies here and the polar bears just go exist. Maybe the next species will be stronger. Please don’t argue with Darwin–he’s the hero of the Gaia worshippers and the court determined his evolution theory (and by association and/or default, everything else he said) was right. You can’t get more scientific than that.