The Looming Polar Bear War

The storm clouds of a legal war are gathering, according to a recent article in Mother Jones. On one side are wildlife preservation advocates and those concerned about the impacts of global warming who are backing the petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). On the other are various interests supported by ExxonMobil and land developer groups, now fronted by such organizations as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a long-time civil rights group increasingly aligned with conservative activists, according to Mother Jones.

The battle lines suggest the usual modern post-industrial conflict pitting environmental protection and preservation against the clearly unsustainable model for harvesting limited natural resources like oil and gas, which is driven by the short-term profit motive of public companies. What is different this time is the civil rights spin on the socio-economic argument that the increasing costs of exploiting and developing limited resources like oil and gas in ways that must also protect polar bears will result in higher prices passed on to consumers, which disproportionately hurts the poor and racial minorities, the argument goes. In the U.S., where $4 per gallon gasoline prices have created a new reality to which Americans are having to adjust, this new spin -- however transparent -- may just resonate with law-makers and consumers. High fuel costs directly impact the average person, but not the absence of polar bears.

Precisely for these reasons, of course, the public policy deck is stacked against the polar bears in the legislative and executive branches. The Bush Administration, encouraged by business interests, has been dragging its feet on rendering a decision on the ESA petition while licensing rights to explore for oil in polar bear habitat, as the Mother Jones article reports:

In January, the Fish and Wildlife Service missed its deadline for issuing a decision, while the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service almost simultaneously announced plans to auction off oil- and gas-exploration leases in the Chukchi Sea, the very heart of polar bear country. This move was seen as no accident by environmentalists, and was sharply criticized by Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Senate's environment and public works committee.

Chuck Cushman, founder of the American Land Rights Association, is quoted as saying, "We have to keep in mind that people are an important species too. Instead of a radical regulatory regime, we have to have a moderate, gradual swing." Of course, like any progressive problem -- whether we're talking about human health or Earth health, the longer you wait to address it, the more "radical" the solution may need to be to correct it.  So, in what amounts to a government-corporate squeeze play, government helps oil and gas interests by stalling as the incumbent energy, mining and developer interests caution that we need to go slow because of the human economic impact. All the while, global warming worsens, more arctic ice melts, more polar bears are lost, and the cost of remediating global warming and saving the declining polar bear population continues to escalate until it just seems too steep to fund.

And so, with the incumbent oil, gas, mining and development interests easily buying influence with Congress and the regulators to maintain the status quo, the courts are left as the main battleground. And the polar bear thus becomes the chief symbol for a potential turning point because the petition to list it as an endangered species under the ESA was one of the first to link the fate of a species with greenhouse gas emissions. As the Mother Jones article puts it: "It was no accident. If the petition succeeds, it could prompt a wholesale shift in federal climate-change policy, potentially forcing a wide array of industries nationwide, and the energy sector in particular, into compliance with the ESA."

The fact is that the current dominant economic model for the energy industry, and the legal systems that support it, still are based on Earth's destruction. Popular media stories cast the conflict in terms of tree-huggers versus greedy and heartless business titans or, as in the Mother Jones article, partisan liberal (pro-environment) versus conservative (pro-business) political agendas. But both characterizations are misleading, divisive and divert our attention from the real conflict: we humans, as one of many Earth species, have put ourselves squarely in opposition not to each other but to the Earth itself, its other species, and its natural self-regulating geologic and atmospheric cycles. And so the polar bear, as a symbol of the Earth and its natural cycles, will have its day in court.

In this American presidential election year, the two leading candidates are touting themselves as agents of "change." We'll see what kind of real change the victor brings to this issue, and if it includes more closely aligning American government environmental and business policy with the Earth and its cycles. If not, and depending on how the polar bear legal war unfolds, we can be assured that a different kind of change from the Earth itself is coming; it is already in motion.