In the new millennium’s politics, polar bears play the part whales played in the 1980s. From a theatrics-as-protest perspective, their shape lends itself better to impersonation than that of a rainforest or whale. Activists take advantage of this. Dressed as polar bears, they show up in the most unlikely places—the Kremlin, or Ottawa’s Parliament Hill—as nonhuman “climate refugees. In an act billed as “part protest, part performance,” Greenpeace paraded a mechanical polar bear the size of a double-decker bus through central London, as part of its Save the Arctic campaign. Fifteen puppeteers operated Aurora the bear, which had an articulated head and neck, a mouth like an ice cave, and the real bear’s “slightly lazy” ambling gait.

When climate change became a pressing political issue, zoos that had closed polar bear exhibits or were planning to do so because of their high costs reversed course, making sure polar bears were on hand. In part, this reflected zoo visitors’ growing interest. But zoos also stepped up their breeding programs when the species was listed as threatened—many of their bears were well past the reproductive age. They soon increased their holdings also with abandoned cubs and “problem” bears removed from the Arctic.

Like captive breeding programs and reintroduction efforts in general, science-assisted interventions in the field raise the question of what constitutes wildness, or the bearness of polar bears. One of several emergency actions proposed to relieve starving bears has helicopters airlift food to the “most accessible” ones—at a cost of thirty-two thousand dollars per day. (Similar programs already exist for intensely managed animal species and populations such as the California condor, black bears in Washington, and brown bears in Eastern Europe.) Other last-ditch efforts biologists suggest include relocating bears farther north, where sea ice will last longer; moving more bears to zoos; and even euthanizing those unlikely to survive on their own. Some Inuit who decry even the radio-collaring of polar bears as disrespectful to the animals and who are tired of “outsiders” meddling say to just let them be.

With the polar bear caught in the media’s limelight, some Canadians began to consider it a more fitting national emblem than the beaver. In an attempt to oust the official signature animal—“the dentally defective rat”—one senator reminded her fellow citizens that a country’s symbols are not constant and can change over time. The polar bear would be perfect for the part, with its “strength, courage, resourcefulness, and dignity.” An opponent countered that “you can’t beat a beaver for stoic hard work and industry,” a perfect metaphor for the pioneering Canadian spirit. Such resistance shows the difficulties of rebranding, with brand loyalty in this case entrenched for more than thirty-six years.

When the senator pitched it as a new national symbol, the polar bear had already reinvigorated Canada’s oldest trade, which the animal rights movement’s stance against wearing fur had previously damaged. Since the bear’s numbers were thought to have declined and restrictions on hunting it consequently increased, its value as status symbol rose, to a level comparable to its first appearance in Europe during the Middle Ages. Sports hunters now pay up to thirty thousand dollars to shoot a polar bear in Canada. In the last five years, the price of pelts alone doubled, with the best selling for twenty thousand dollars or more. Even in small amounts, legal polar bear hair, used in fly-fishing, is hard to obtain. Like real flies, lures made with the hollow hairs settle gently on water. There is no equivalent, and patches of pre-treaty skin with hair sell for six dollars per square inch in the United States.

All this encourages poaching, especially in Russia, where forty to two hundred bears are killed each year. Their skulls and skins enter the market with false Canadian documentation, the forging of which itself is a lucrative business. The resurgent demand for fur rugs, claws, carved masks with polar bear fur, and similar items comes largely from Russia and China, where a growing middle class spends money on status symbols that are passé in the West. South Koreans, on the other hand, buy dried polar bear gallbladders for “medicinal” uses, at three thousand dollars a piece.

Canadian politicians say that initiatives to outlaw such trade or hunting are based more on emotion than on science and that the hunting quotas are sustainable. (Inuit and trophy hunters kill about six hundred polar bears per year.) In the feelings it awakens, this controversy resembles the “seal wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, when big-eyed, white “baby” harp seals clubbed on sea ice caused furor and even French sex symbols became activists. Impassioned appeals, however disguised, come from both sides. “A ban would affect our ability to buy the necessities of life, to clothe our children,” an Inuit representative at the 2013 CITES conference said. “We have to protect our means of putting food on the table and selling polar bear hides enables us to support ourselves.” Perhaps by intention, this statement counts on our empathy, on our instinct to nurture and protect the human young and frail.

The same Native spokesman redirected the discussion toward the root cause of the polar bear’s plight. He accused the United States of compensating for its lack of action on climate change and pollution of the Arctic from drilling and mining, of using the polar bear as a blunt tool, because it is “the perfect poster child.”

Like the bear Viking merchants traded to Europe’s nobility, the emblem of nature conservation is precious as a commodity and as a pawn in political maneuvers. Even if we never reach the point where polar bears are fed bear kibble from helicopters, bears today, managed and marketed, no longer seem quite “pure” or genuinely wild. While the blending of consumer logos and wildlife might strike some people as odd, it is also no longer limited to the corporate sector. The previous president of Polar Bears International, a former marketing director, was dedicated to turning the bear into a recognizable environmental brand, promoting the bears’ situation through guided tours outside Churchill. Still, overexposure and a desensitized public could weaken the message and the “Lord of the Arctic” fade to a new cliché. Some critics think polar bears have already begun to disappear in the white noise of our culture. “The polar bear has lost a lot of its cachet,” the writer Jon Mooallem said in an interview. “It’s become too political. It doesn’t really resonate with environmentalists anymore and it ticks off everyone else.” Summing up the dilemma of image, Mooallem claimed that, “In the twenty-first century, how species survive, or go to die, may have to do more with Barnum than with Darwin.”

It may have to do even more with Konrad Lorenz, Marshall McLuhan, and Jean Piaget. It has to do more with Lorenz, because he ferreted out 
the dynamics between market forces and ecological catastrophes (outlined in his 1973 book Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins); with McLuhan, because he realized how the medium shapes the message; and with Piaget, because he stressed learning from the past and teaching our children well. These three figures supersede Barnum, as better promotion of the polar bear will only get us so far. What really is needed is a drastic restructuring of our society, or at least, our economic system.

With our tendency to mess things up and then try to fix them—culminating at present in desperate schemes of geo-engineering—we find it hard to accept that perhaps the polar bear’s time is running out. And that ours could be too.

*Michael Engelhard is the author of a new essay collection, American Wild, and of Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon, from which this essay has been excerpted. He lives in Fairbanks, Alaska and works as a wilderness guide in the Arctic.

On its first day in office, the incoming administration ordered all mention of climate change removed from the official White House website. This, and the new president’s vow to eliminate Obama-era environmental policies, suggest a broad mistrust of science (climate science particularly) among the executive branch and its supporters. Suspecting that this could endanger decades of accumulated scientific data and research, UPenn’s Environmental Humanities program and Penn Libraries have initiated the DataRefuge project (#DataRefuge, @DataRefuge), facilitating a series of DataRescue events around the country designed to ensure that federal climate and environmental data remain publicly available under the current administration – a clear illustration of resistance stemming from the mobilization of vulnerability.

The following is an email conversation with one of the initiative’s organizers, Patricia Kim (@lowerendtheory) – Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Program Coordinator and Graduate Fellow at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH).

Can you briefly explain the DataRefuge project?

DataRefuge is a public, collaborative project launched in late November 2016 that creates trustworthy, research-quality copies of federal climate and environmental data that are disappearing from their agency websites or whose access is made more difficult. As an advocacy project, it tells stories about why climate and environmental data is vital to various individuals, institutions, as well as human and nonhuman communities. In addition, we are coordinating with our many collaborators to organize DataRescue events where advocates and volunteers help retrieve copies of the most valuable and vulnerable data nominated by researchers.

The need for such a endeavor seems fairly evident. Were there any similar groups or projects that inspired the PPEH initiative, or with whom you are are collaborating?

The End of Term Harvest Project (EOT), part of the Internet Archive, is a collaborative initiative that began in 2008 at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency to archive federal websites to the Internet Archive. With each presidential transition, many agency websites change, regardless of party, depending on each administration’s priorities. Sometimes administrations add more information to websites like the Environmental Protection Agency, while others take down certain datasets. EOT has a web crawler that will go into specific URLs and seed them to the Internet Archive, ensuring the public accessibility to the data. In addition to EOT, the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI) is another collaborator comprised of an international network of researchers who develop technical tools to both track changes to federal agency websites and download data that are “hard to crawl” and seed to the Internet Archive.

Is data politically neutral, and only when it is employed as evidence for some argument does it become politically charged? Or is data born politicized, given the circumstances of its observation and collection?

I love the French word for data because I think it gets to the heart of your question: données, from the verb donner or “to give,” meaning “that which are given.” A datum is given by an actor or a stakeholder who has established a political, social, or economic need for particular kinds of knowledge. Data are thus concrete in the sense that they are anchored in constructed measurements of qualities and organized observations and trends.

This understanding of data raises questions, such as, what is it that we are giving and taking? For what purpose are we giving and taking certain kinds of observations? In this sense, data is never neutral—it is always politically, historically, and socially situated.

Just because data are born contingent does not mean that they are inherently false and untrustworthy. The interpretation, (de/re)contextualization, and even worse, the disavowal of the validity of data are other modes of politicization that are particularly dangerous, since this knowledge serves to inform policies, and in many ways are matters of life and death for vulnerable communities.

The information you’re protecting was created with public money, so ostensibly the data belongs to the public, not the executive branch. Given this, would it be illegal or unconstitutional for the federal government to destroy it or make it inaccessible? Is there congressional or judicial oversight to prevent such an action?

Yes, we the people own federal data, and any actual, material destruction of that data is illegal. While they are not “deleting” anything, they are clearly suppressing public information. However, incoming administrations create new budgets to reprioritize funding needs—including which websites to maintain and what kinds of research to fund. The Internet needs upkeep and care, which requires labor; the digital has a material dimension that is as likely to degrade and rot as a house plant. If you defund certain aspects or take down sites, then it is harder to access this information. You can submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the specific agency. Yet that is often a long and thorny process, impeding any other research that may have taken place in the meantime.

I think what goes hand in hand with loss of access to vulnerable data are active impediments to the further collection of valuable data. Defunding agencies and organizations that sponsor research, like the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Institute of Health, for instance, all put research and future data collection at risk.

Is digital information in any sense more fragile than analog? Is there a digital analogy to the spectacle of burning books?

There is a materiality, fragility, and ecology to digital information. Without care and maintenance, digital information is subject to degrade and disappear. For instance, as my colleague Steve Dolph has analyzed, the language of digital archiving and preservation mirrors that of ecology and agriculture. For instance, the technical term for a URL that no longer exists is “link rot.” The digital rots, expires, and degrades.

Certainly there are comparisons to draw between the spectacle of burning books and limiting access to public data, in that they are both examples of material loss. I think the main difference is that taking down websites and neglecting URLs is not spectacular, but rather silent and almost imperceptible to the broader public that does not include specialists and researchers whose work relies on access to this data, which, in some ways makes this kind of digital loss more insidious. The advocacy work of DataRefuge has drawn attention to the ways in which limiting access and defunding knowledge production are as pernicious as burning books.

Are there particular types of data the DataRefuge project is focused on protecting? Climate data broadly? NOAA and NASA datasets? 

We are first focusing on datasets that have been nominated and identified by experts, specialists, and researchers as vulnerable and valuable through a survey that we have circulated across various networks. At DataRescue Philly, we focused primarily on NOAA datasets and were able to seed 3,692 URLs to the Internet Archive and furthermore download ~1.5 terabytes of data from “uncrawlable” websites. At that event, all datasets from the National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI), the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) as well as a significant portion of the Office of Oceanographic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) were successfully seeded.

Other DataRescue events have worked on preserving data from the Department of Energy, Interior, NASA, NOAA, EPA, USDA, OSHA etc. What constitutes climate and environmental data is considerably broad, because of course, everything (transportation, public health, infrastructure, etc.) is impacted by global, anthropogenic climate change.

Any ballpark conception of how much federal climate data is out there? How much data have you been able to copy so far at DataRescue events?

The Internet is vast, and as for how much climate and environmental data is out there—A LOT! As for how much has been saved—this number is constantly growing because of the distributed efforts, but we ball-parked at the beginning of February that approximately 55,000 URLs have been seeded and about 2 terabytes harvested—but these numbers could be wrong and do not account for duplicated pages.

How does a DataRescue event work? Where is the rescued data being stored? Will the data you copy be publicly accessible? Are there plans to build query-able databases of rescued data?

DataRescue events require a lot of time, kindness, and collaboration among different kinds of experts. DataRefuge has created a workflow that is efficient and can be easily adapted by and scalable to different locations and groups.

Each DataRescue event focuses on a particular agency or branches within several agencies. DataRefuge has a (growing) list of datasets that have been nominated by researchers that guides the goals of each event.

Individuals with a broad number of skill sets participate in these events—from people who have basic tech skills that can use the web crawler to “seed” URLs to the Internet Archive, to coders and hackers who can write special scripts to retrieve data that is harder to access with just the crawler.

Then there are individuals like me who have no tech skills and are interested in documentation and storytelling. Documentation entails publicizing the event through social media and/or writing mini-ethnographies during each DataRescue event. Storytelling is a DataRefuge initiative that seeks to develop different stories or use-cases for climate and environmental data, mapping and writing why this information is vital to various communities beyond the climate science circles.

Librarians are the true heroes of this story. In order to host a DataRescue event, the participation of librarians and archivists, without whom the project and the retrieved data would be meaningless to researchers in the future, is critical. After the information is retrieved, it is the tireless work of data librarians and archivists to examine the information and fill out its metadata before dumping it into servers and repositories throughout North America.

In addition to being held in the Internet Archive, harvested data are stored across multiple repositories, and can be publicly accessed within the DataRefuge ckan. Our partners at the Libraries Network, a coalition of research libraries across North America are working to preserve born-digital government data as well.

What constitutes evidence today? Beliefs and belief systems are usually constructed out of some kind of evidence (from ancient texts to first-hand observations). Do you perceive any recent shifts in what popularly qualifies as reliable evidence? Are beliefs more resilient/resonant than evidence, or are beliefs only as strong as the evidence upon which they are based?

Data are that which are given by and for a group of stakeholders, and often form the foundation for evidence. In some cases, the data are the evidence. Evidence and data collection need a group of experts or a power-wielding agency to give the information and claims legitimacy. Belief systems and facts depend on a set of givens and indeed need evidence to work—but the ethics of their constitution and interpretation may vary.

Our president believes in national polls when they reflect well on him, but will disavow the same polls when they are negative. In other words, he will legitimize the evidence as true when it serves his needs. In this case, his belief in his own greatness is more resilient and resonant than the evidence and data. Unfortunately, the fact of manmade climate change, the evidence for global warming, and the data that demonstrate a wetter, hotter planet are more stubborn than his self-interests.

As you mention, when confronted with evidence that contradicts him, the new president’s reaction is to presume the evidence must be wrong. There’s no amount of evidence that can shake his certitude. Do you think this suggests a disrespect for the process of scientific knowledge that deals in levels of confidence and probabilities? Or is dismissiveness toward climate change data driven more by the fear that it undermines the legitimacy of the new administration’s policies – economic and environmental?

I don’t think it is scientific or probabilistic knowledge that the new administration disrespects. Wall Street, for instance, deals with a lot of knowledge and data that incorporate probabilities. This is, in some sense, what big banks and large corporations (EXXON, Carl’s Jr., Goldman Sachs) use as their bread and butter.

I think they just don’t care about scientific data and knowledge that pose threats to their own economic interests. Or even worse, they pick and choose which probabilities to accept or cast doubt on in order to serve their needs. Scott Pruitt (new head of the EPA), exemplifies this. On manmade climate change, he has written, “scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind…”

What is given is that the fossil fuel industry or hydraulic fracking pose threats to public health and safety. The data that demonstrate this are seen as harmful because they threaten the ways in which these power-wielding agencies make money. Thus, those that profit from environmental degradation see the data itself as harmful, as opposed to the effects it reveals.

Science, as we know it today, didn’t develop to predict the future. It developed to more accurately be able to connect effects to causes, which allows humans a greater ability to know what outcomes to expect from certain actions. Do you think that resistance to the idea of anthropogenic climate change might in some part be because it is often depicted as climatologists being prophetic, divinatory, or reading the future? And that perhaps if the concept of climate change is treated less like a prediction and more like the effect of a cause that the issue might have more public traction?

I think we need to distinguish between people that are willing to connect climate change as the cause to any of the disastrous effects, and those that connect human activities to global warming. I think some U.S. power-holders resist the idea of anthropogenic climate change because it would force them to completely re-imagine what it means to be a society. It would force us to overhaul our energy systems, to change the way that we live as an ecosystem, and to re-imagine our material worlds and material relations.

I am not sure if climatologists are necessarily painted as prophets—particularly since the effects of climate change are already so pervasive in present day-to-day life. However, you do raise a good point about the temporality of climate change and global warming.

On the one hand, climate change and geological processes occur on a timescale that is longer and slower than humans seem to be able to bear—but we can see, feel, and emotionally respond to disasters like floods and hurricanes—which impact the poorest of us by the way—much of which are consequences of climate change. Because we can see these discrete disasters and crises instantaneously and immediately, we are better able to respond—but of course there are examples where the response is inadequate. How to register these multiple existing temporalities together, or explain how these two incommensurate temporalities are part of the same phenomenon of change is the challenge.

Most importantly, if we communicate and tell more stories about the effects of global warming in various communities, climate change would gain more public traction as a public health, economic, and social concern. It is not enough to make the data available—we must make it legible to the multiple publics it threatens.

Further Reading:

Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. 2016. Vulnerability in resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Castree, Noel. 2014. The anthropocene and the environmental humanities: Extending the conversation. Environmental Humanities 5 : 233-60.

Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil capital: The rise of steam-power and the roots of global warming. Brooklyn: Verso.

Working on race, I initially began reading science journals as a way to keep up with claims and counterclaims in the polemics over its social construction. But as my focus shifted from people to plants (still keyed in on race), and as I developed an ethnographic project on biodiversity research, I began reading the journal articles to better understand what these plant scientists are up to. Along the way, the items in these reports (concepts, techniques, analytics) shifted, in my view, from socially constructed artifacts to crucial means for comprehending the very subjects that interest my ethnographic subjects. Now my approach to cultural analysis is changing.

Looking at the TOC highlights this shift. There were so many articles—beside the one I was looking for!—that I wanted to read. Why? Before answering that question, here’s a glimpse of what I encountered.

“Competing neighbors: light perception and root function”; “Testing the risk of predation hypothesis: the influence of recolonizing wolves on habitat use by moose”; “Can transgenerational plasticity contribute to the invasion success of annual plant species?”; “To breed or not to breed: past reproductive status and environmental cues drive current breeding decisions in a long-lived amphibian.” Then there was the section on plant-microbe-animal interactions, which featured “Thermal tolerance affects mutualist attendance in an ant–plant protection mutualism”; “Generalist birds govern the seed dispersal of a parasitic plant with strong recruitment constraints.” This was followed by a section titled, Community Ecology,” with such articles as “Partitioning the non-consumptive effects of predators on prey with complex life histories”; “Woody plant phylogenetic diversity mediates bottom–up control of arthropod biomass in species-rich forests”; “The effect of habitat structure on prey mortality depends on predator and prey microhabitat use”; “Niche-habitat mechanisms and biotic interactions explain the coexistence and abundance of congeneric sandgrouse species”; “Habitat fragmentation, tree diversity, and plant invasion interact to structure forest caterpillar communities.”

The first one, “competing neighbors,” involves an effort to analyze forms of plant sociality while raising the issue of anthromporphizing in the very title. But “recolonizing wolves” and “forest caterpillar communities” quickly destabilizes the assumption that the principle association for such terms should be or is humans. But how can the question, “To breed or not to breed?”, ever be regarded at a neutral remove from the recurrent forms eugenics or the immense agential complexities of domestication? Mulling that, I recognized that plant-microbe-animal interactions are crucially important to pursuing multispecies ethnography; so I need to learn something more about how these work, regardless of the species involved. That means reading about “microhabitat use,” “niche-habitat mechanisms,” and “bottom–up control of arthropod biomass.” Then topics such as “seed dispersal” and “plant invasion interactions” caught my attention, because many of the plant scientists I study are concerned with this aspect of species dynamism. Finally, though, I was perplexed at the recognition of a primary fodder of ethnographic work—“complex life histories”—turning up in a discussion of prey mortality. Oh my, where do I start?

Before proceeding further I had to settle on a typology of my interests in life sciences journals and research projects. There are articles here that 1) I need to read to keep up with the plant science, whether pertaining to the species my researchers are studying or the questions they’re trying to answer; 2) toss up interesting challenging objects to think about; 3) illustrate concern with “naturalizing” or “biologizing” social hierarchies or concepts; 4) open the possibility of analyzing culture/sociality across species lines; and 5) are the kinds of things I need to consider if I’m doing multispecies work in cultural anthropology on biodiversity. Taken in concert, these suggest a dual role for cultural analysis in the life science—maintaining an attention to the socially interested (or “loaded”) aspects of scientific objects while also learning (through gleaning and rearticulating) new means of looking at and developing interesting accounts of the world.