The bears of Churchill

Polar bears were frequent newsmakers this winter. All the news was bad. Russian bears, facing a lack of food, were becoming more aggressive. In Alaska, forced to swim longer distances between receding ice sheets, they were drowning. Recognizing the bears' troubles, Greenland set its first-ever hunting quotas last month, and even the Bush administration is considering classifying them as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, citing loss of habitat.

Churchill's bear population is the southernmost in the world and, like its human population, subsists under less than ideal conditions. Hudson Bay is not frozen all year. After roaming the ice all winter, gorging on seals, the bears decamp where the last ice melts at the southeast of town. They spend the summer on land, living off reserves in what's called "waking hibernation." But an influx of fresh water into the bay makes the area north of Churchill first to freeze again. And so, each fall, the bears lurch off the tundra toward it, anticipating their first opportunity to get back on the ice where they'll spend another winter ambushing seal pups. The town, of course, is in their way.

But Hudson Bay now melts earlier in the spring and freezes later in the fall, leaving the bears marooned on land for longer stretches of time. Ian Stirling, a leading polar bear researcher with the Canadian Wildlife Service, says the summer season has extended by about three weeks over the last 30 years. Churchill's bear population has fallen nearly 20 percent in the last 20 years, and U.S. and Canadian biologists have correlated the decline to earlier spring melts. Recently a female bear was found torn apart and devoured by a larger male -- which, like the increase in bears' venturing into town, may be a sign of "nutritional stress."

Meanwhile, projections show Hudson Bay becoming nearly free of ice, year-round, by mid- to late-century. William A. Gough, a climatologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough, has spent a decade analyzing 35 years of sea ice records in Hudson Bay. He's projected its future using six different climate models created by government agencies around the world. "The Canadian model shows total ice reduction by 2050," he said. By 2080, when the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere will have tripled, the other models show the same result. "By the end of the century," he said, "there will be no platform for polar bears." And no platform for bear tourism.

While no amount of earnest, Churchillian elbow grease is likely to fix the problem, the townspeople I met seemed staunchly pragmatic. Unable to start his snowmobile season, Daudet bought four reconditioned computers to sell in town. He was also doing snowmobile tuneups, patching tires his neighbors left on his doorstep and, given that the weather had been so mild, washing cars outside.

"When it comes to the pressures on the bears, things like global warming, what can we really do?" Iwanowsky said. "You can move forward or you can stand still and fade away. And this community doesn't believe in standing still." He proudly added that Churchill was one of the first remote areas in Canada to get broadband Internet service. It was a testament to the industriousness of the community, but, ultimately, also to its sour luck against the elements. A brutal windstorm knocked out the entire infrastructure not long after it was installed.

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On a bright and balmy morning, about 40 of us packed into a tundra buggy. Each vehicle is retrofitted with wood paneling, a heating stove, rows of seats and windows, and a steel, open-air viewing balcony in back, safely above the reach of the bears, which often rear up lazily to streak the hulls with muddy paw prints.

As we rolled across the tundra and tidal flats outside town, polar bears loafed on tangles of kelp, conserving what was left of their energy. They are breathtaking beasts, to be sure, but in this context -- chewing on straw, napping, even rising up to tussle with one another like drunken heavyweights -- they seemed more cartoonish than menacing.

Behind me, in matching blue parkas and gray fur hats, a couple from San Jose, Calif., sprung up at the day's first sighting. A yellowish bear had loped into view, his skeleton and muscles jumbling in his loosened fur like wrenches in a duffle bag. The woman tittered and squealed -- "This is a treat!" "Look at his stomach!" -- while her husband raised his 2-foot telephoto lens and clicked furiously. They were concerned about the warming weather but had no intention of stopping their annual visits. "I'm just so glad that everybody got to see that!" the woman said, a little flushed, after the driver put the buggy back into gear and we'd rolled on.

Frontiers North, which operates the Tundra Buggy Adventure, owns 18 vehicles, all of which they built themselves. Because the ecosystem is so delicate, the provincial government confines its operation to preexisting trails -- the training grounds of the since vanished U.S.-Canadian military installation built up during the Cold War.

"The town never had a bear problem in those days," Bob Penwarden told me. "The military used lead poisoning -- they just shot the bears." Penwarden moved here in the early '60s to launch communications and weather satellites for a private contractor. (The old rocket range is now the Northern Studies Centre, a base camp for visiting scientists.) With government agencies and contractors flooding in, the town's population swelled to 6,000. The military held dances, operated a movie theater and curling rink, and organized a hockey league for Churchill's kids. "They flew in lobster for New Year's Eve," Penwarden remembers.

When the Americans pulled out in 1965, it caused a ripple effect. Penwarden's outfit shed men fast, laying off nearly a quarter of its employees in one morning. By the early '80s, Churchill was down to about 1,000 people. There were rows of empty buildings and an infrastructure the town couldn't afford to keep up. Rocket shells littered the tundra and were sunk in the Bay.

Those who stayed scavenged to rebuild their community. No one wanted to drive the military's abandoned ambulance, so the woman who drove the town's cab took on the task. Penwarden and his wife tore down the old jail and built a house from the wood. Slowly -- with the buzz and firepower of the base gone, the whaling factory at the mouth of the river defunct and the once-bustling town reduced to a small, shivering settlement -- nature moved back in.

"You had all this crumbling and the walls falling down," said Mike Spence. He was a teenager in Churchill then and now runs two hotels, a restaurant, a flooring business and the town's only car rental agency. He's also the mayor. "Then, all of a sudden you're seeing a lot more wildlife coming in. You've got more bears coming in. You've got the beluga whale population coming up. You've got different kinds of wildlife like foxes, Artcic hare, caribou, all coming together. And then bang!" Spence said, pausing to lend gravity to this creation myth. "All of a sudden you've got tourism that's starting to prosper."

Merv Gunter, co-owner of Frontiers North, acknowledged the potential of climate change to undermine the Tundra Buggy empire he and his wife, Lynda, have built up over the years. "For a company that relies on the presence and welfare of polar bears, it would be sheer folly not to be concerned," he said.

He couldn't be sure to what extent humans are causing global warming, he told me, but "I think we should do everything we can about it just in case. And can we do anything more than that to stop climate change? No," he said. "So we will coexist with that. We'll have to, as will the bears. They're a very tenacious and a very amazing species with their ability to evolve and to adapt."

Many townspeople seem to expect the same stubborn resilience from the bears that they themselves have always used to get by. They assume the bears will find a way to survive, and some even speculate they'll learn to eat berries and evolve back into grizzlies. One afternoon on the tundra, I put this hypothesis to Jane Waterman, a Canadian biologist from the University of Central Florida, who was in Churchill studying bear behavior.

"Natural selection can happen very quickly in bacteria because they can breed in 20 minutes," she said. "Polar bears live 20 or 25 years. That means that for changes to occur genetically, it's going to take a little bit of time. And that's something they don't have. So, no," she went on. "If the change is as rapid as all the climate models predict, by the middle of this century, there's no sea ice in Hudson Bay and there are no bears. If there's no sea ice, you can't have bears."

One morning, as an Italian couple shuffled out to their tour bus, Penwarden and I stood chatting in front of a map of Canada in the lobby of the Tundra Inn, which he and his wife, Pat, own. Old Nike missile adapters sit on the porch, used as planters, and a slim, decommissioned rocket leans in the lobby behind a ficus. The floor was appropriated from the old bowling alley and still has its pin markers.

When I'd asked why he and Pat stayed after the military pullout, he'd simply said, "It wouldn't be home if we went somewhere else." His faith in the bears seemed informed by an identical logic.

"Oh, I'm worried," he said, stammering a little. "I'm worried because it's the livelihood of a lot of people in this town. But I believe that home is here for those bears. I don't say these scientists are right. I don't even believe they're right on this global warming. For the bears, this is home. I may be dead wrong -- and they do wander. And hell knows where they go. But they'll be back next spring."

Next page: Global warming's new business opportunities, "Nature's Light Show," and a lonely Danish explorer