Avatars of Climate Change: On Kale Williams' "The Loneliest Polar Bear"

Kale Williams | The Loneliest Polar Bear: A True Story of Survival and Peril on the Edge of a Warming World | Crown Publishing | 2021 | 288 Pages

There’s a striking description midway through Kale Williams’ The Loneliest Polar Bear of the polar bear’s incredible sense of smell. Strong enough to identify a seal miles away in the arctic north, the book’s polar bear protagonist, Nora, would certainly have been able to smell the Eagle Creek Fire when it raged just 50 miles away from her enclosure in Portland’s Oregon Zoo. 

That 50,000-acre forest fire in September 2017 was caused by a teenager throwing fireworks, but as with most modern forest fires, climate change helped prime it to burn bigger, hotter and faster. That summer Portland suffered one of its longest stretches without rain on record, for example, and that August was the city’s all-time hottest.

It is a scene in the book where the ravages of climate change come dramatically close to Nora, who, already, had become a victim of climate change herself. And it’s a scene where the threat posed moves from the vague and metaphorical to the present and actual: climate change is just fifty miles away, devouring acres of trees in walls of flames, while a polar bear romps in buckets of ice and a swimming pool constructed to suggest her wild habitat.

Polar bears like Nora have long been something akin to the unofficial avatars of climate change, as they are among the biggest, most charismatic and most visible of the world’s animals that are impacted by a swiftly warming planet. In truth, of course, all animals are affected by climate change, but because polar bears live in such a cold climate and are so dependent on sea ice for their survival—they catch seals by waiting at holes in the ice where they come up for air and then plucking them out of the water—the danger they face is particularly immediate and much easier for the casual observer to process.

While there are plenty of legitimate arguments to be made about the ethics of keeping wild animals in zoos, one of the stronger counterarguments is that zoo animals serve as ambassadors for their species, educating visitors about their wild relatives and the dangers they face. 

Williams found the perfect such ambassador for polar bears, and a furry face for the dangers of climate change, in Nora. Her story became The Loneliest Polar Bear. Born in 2015 at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Columbus, Ohio, she was suddenly abandoned by her mother after just six days. Hairless and about the size of a squirrel, Nora’s chances of survival were miniscule, but the Columbus zookeepers swooped in to rescue her, attempting to hand-raise one of the world’s largest predators to healthy adulthood, a task with extremely long odds of success. 

Williams uses Nora’s early biography as the spine of his book, telling in suspenseful detail how her Columbus keepers—collectively nicknamed “The Nora Moms”—struggled to keep her alive. Nora’s keepers confronted a number of significant challenges, like trying to find a substitute for her mother’s milk that would provide all the necessary nutrients for a growing polar bear, and how the substitute formula—not quite a mother’s milk—caused Nora bone development problems. 

There was also the problem of socialization. Because Nora was raised by humans and in isolation from other bears, she tended to think of herself as a human being rather than a bear. She thrived on human attention. To lead a healthy life, her keepers had to find a zoo with another, compatible bear for her to befriend. That search took her from Columbus to Portland and, later, from Portland to Salt Lake City. For a time, Nora took anti-anxiety medication to help her deal with troubling behavior, a not uncommon occurrence for zoo animals. 

While Williams’ book is the story of one particular polar bear, it is also the story of all polar bears, and the people who share a habitat with them, both in the specific sense of the arctic circle, and the general sense of the planet. He regularly finds springboards in his narrative to discuss, say, the evolution of polar bears, their mating habits in the wild, how they are studied, the effects of past colonialism and current climate change on the indigenous people who share the ice with the bears, and the history of other polar bears in captivity.

In a stroke of reporting luck, Williams was also able to spend a significant amount of time with the Iñupiat hunter Gene Agnaboogok, who, while hunting on the ice years ago, accidentally fell into a polar bear den. Agnaboogok managed to kill the angry mother bear before she could kill him, but in the process, he orphaned two cubs. The cubs were taken to zoos and entered into breeding programs; one of them, Nanuq, eventually fathered Nora. 

Agnaboogok’s presence in the book isn’t simply part of Nora’s origin story, however. As Williams follows him over the years, we learn how his life and that of other indigenous people is changing as the top of the world warms and their way of life is threatened just as surely as the bears’ lives are. The ice they use as a hunting base is vanishing, the animals they hunt are becoming rarer. The ocean, ever rising, engulfs their homes.

Permeating the narrative is that gradual but ever-increasing threat of climate change, which Williams tracks from James Hansen’s 1988 congressional testimony that brought mass awareness of global warming to President Donald Trump’s denial of the phenomenon’s very existence. 

It’s a threat that can seem quite remote to many people, especially those that have visited Nora in the zoos where she’s lived. Each of those zoos had polar bear habitats of varying sizes and degrees of verisimilitude, and each had the difficult task of trying to at least approximate the Arctic Circle to Americans far below it. They could bring polar bears, effective symbols of climate change that they are, to the seemingly unaffected masses, and they could present facts about what visitors can do to decrease their carbon footprint and maps to illustrate the speed at which sea ice is disappearing, but they couldn’t completely communicate the ravages of climate change in an immediate and arresting fashion.

Mother Nature could do that on her own. Though Ohioans, Oregonians and Utahans and all those on the continental United States need not hunt for meat from sea ice like Gene Agnaboogok’s people do, they are now subject to hotter and more frequent heat waves, greater droughts, increased flooding, more and more powerful hurricanes and, of course, the sorts of forest fires that color the sky and send the scent of burning trees toward Nora’s nose in her Oregon zoo home.

In Nora’s life, Williams found an ideal example of the ambassador species to discuss polar bears and climate change. Nora’s struggles for survival and the incredible amount of cooperation by many experts in various fields necessary to help her pull through serve as, one one level, a compelling, occasionally gripping drama of one zoo animal’s life, but, on another, as a microcosm of Nora’s species, our species, our shared threats and what we might have to do to overcome similarly long odds.