Is The Polar Bear The New Canary?
In the Industrial Age miners often carried canaries with them into the coal mines. Nowadays, it is a cliché – metaphorical canaries are in mineshafts all over the place. Back then, though, it was a matter of life and death. The small birds acted as sentries alerting the coal miners to methane gas – no doubt saving many a miner’s life.
Someday there may be another cliché – polar bears on ice floats. Today, though, they are by no means figures of speech. Rather, it seems that more and more polar bears are literally drowning because their icy perches are now too far apart for many of them to swim to.
The difference between then and now? The miners paid attention to the canaries. We seem to be ignoring the plight of the polar bears.
Time we changed that.