EIGHT BEARS

A look at the world’s eight surviving bear species.

As Reuters global climate and environment correspondent Dickie notes, some of the world’s embattled bears are charismatic bywords for wild animals as a whole: the polar bear, say, or the grizzly. Others, such as the spectacled and sloth bears, are scarcely known. Yet all are slipping away save for the black bear, the sole species “considered secure throughout its global range,” and 6 of the 8 are under immediate threat of extinction—all due to human interventions in their environments. Their fortunes were not always so tenuous. As the author writes, modern bear lineages appeared over the last 5 million years or so, “extremely recently in terms of geological time,” and spread to every continent except Australia. Still, their day in the sun has been curtailed: There are perhaps 500 primate species, vastly outnumbering ursines. While many hunting cultures revered bears even as they feared them, urban civilizations have tended to discount them—and to kill in the course of encounters almost always initiated because humans are intruding into bear country. This sometimes happens in unexpected places. In North Gujarat, India, for example, sloth bear attacks on humans numbered 1 per year between 1960 and 1999, on average, while today the number has jumped to nine. The culprit? Lack of water in the hot summer months, when most attacks occur, caused by climate change. Climate change, of course, is devastating polar bears, who are becoming fewer and smaller, the result of a tightening food chain and loss of sea ice habitat, which “could disappear completely as early as 2035.” Dickie concludes by noting that the future is likely bleak. By 2100, she observes, the world’s human population is projected to reach 11 billion, and “every new human exacerbates the crises faced by the natural world.”

Gloomy in outlook but a cleareyed view of the world’s bears and the many threats they face.