This Haunting Video of a Dying Polar Bear Will Break Your Heart

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23:17 2017-12-10

A video of a starving polar bear collapsing on Canada’s Baffin Island is going viral for good reason — it’s the latest heartbreaking example of the devastation of Climate Change.

My entire @Sea_Legacy team was pushing through their tears and emotions while documenting this dying polar bear. It’s a soul-crushing scene that still haunts me, but I know we need to share both the beautiful and the heartbreaking if we are going to break down the walls of apathy. This is what starvation looks like. The muscles atrophy. No energy. It’s a slow, painful death. When scientists say polar bears will be extinct in the next 100 years, I think of the global population of 25,000 bears dying in this manner. There is no band aid solution. There was no saving this individual bear. People think that we can put platforms in the ocean or we can feed the odd starving bear. The simple truth is this—if the Earth continues to warm, we will lose bears and entire polar ecosystems. This large male bear was not old, and he certainly died within hours or days of this moment. But there are solutions. We must reduce our carbon footprint, eat the right food, stop cutting down our forests, and begin putting the Earth—our home—first. Please join us at @sea_legacy as we search for and implement solutions for the oceans and the animals that rely on them—including us humans. Thank you your support in keeping my @sea_legacy team in the field. With @CristinaMittermeier #turningthetide with @Sea_Legacy #bethechange #nature #naturelovers This video is exclusively managed by Caters News. To license or use in a commercial player please contact [email protected] or call +44 121 616 1100 / +1 646 380 1615”

A post shared by Paul Nicklen (@paulnicklen) on Dec 5, 2017 at 8:52am PST

Photographer Paul Nicklen told National Geographic that “when scientists say bears are going extinct, I want people to realize what it looks like. Bears are going to starve to death. This is what a starving bear looks like.”

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, polar bears are a threatened species in the United States, which means that they’re likely to be at the brink of extinction in the near future.

And this is what going extinct looks like — due to warming temperatures, the seals that polar bears eat to survive are disappearing along with the sea ice. Since polar bears can’t hunt in the open water, they have no food options.

Of course, humanity can help slow down the melting of the sea ice by regulation our behaviors relative to our carbon footprint, but things aren’t looking so great on that front. After all, President Trump thinks climate change is a hoax and he withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a pact between almost every country in the world entered in 2015 with the goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to keep global temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius at the end of this century.

Nicklen says that he filmed the polar bear dying with tears streaming down his face.

It’s a “soul-crushing scene that still haunts me,” Nicklen wrote in an Instagram post. “But I know we need to share both the beautiful and the heartbreaking if we are going to break down the walls of apathy.”

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