Friday, January 6, 2012

Is the WWF Saving the Polar Bear or Themselves?

Have you seen the recent commercials the World Wildlife Fund WWF has on TV soliciting money to "Save the Polar Bears"? After seeing the commercial for the twentieth time last night, I started thinking and decided to send the WWF a question.

See below my email to them:

I recently saw a commercial you're running to solicit donations to save the polar bear and by extention their habitat.I like polar bears as much as the next person, so my question is quite simple. Precisely how much money do you need to stop the polar caps from melting and thereby save the white bear?

I'm understandably curious about your financial plans as I'm unaware of any technology that is currently available to a non-profit like the WWF that could effectively stop and reverse the current natural or possibly man-made climatic change. With millions of dollars of donations you could probably gather some bears and put them in zoos or other controlled enclosures, but it wasn't my impression that your plans were following along these realistic and achievable lines.

Unfortunately, the polar bear is a specialist adapted to a very unstable environment and dependent on a single source of food. It needs the ice to hang around most of the year so that it can hunt fat seals. No ice means no seals for lunch, and that means starving and dead bears. Unless you can stop the melting ice, you can't save the wild polar bear. No amount of donated money can change this simple equation. As a result, our best scientific estimates place the bear's probable extinction within 100 years.

In fact, I have every reason to believe that the WWF will most likely outlive the polar bear. Perhaps your donation efforts are really all about insuring the survival of your organization, and not the arctic bear?


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