Patrick Bennet 
Very recently one hard to digest video emerged, showing a polar bear in the wild, which has starved to a near-death condition, finding it difficult to even walk around the desolate iceless area in hope to find food.
The video is so heartbreaking that the man behind the camera started crying. The images captured show the starving wild polar bear, fighting to move through the terrain. The bear fell to the ground powerless after trying to find food in a bin which turns out to be empty.
The man behind the camera is Paul Nicklen, who was a biologist before, but decided to take on photography of the wildlife. He recalls that everyone at the moment of filming was crying, and even if they could feed the bear, which is illegal, there was not much they could do to save its life. They were not able to react in any way in order to help. He posted the video on Instagram, reaching over a million views. Nicklen said that the bear has probably passed away just hours after filming. One of the back legs of the animal was hurt or most likely had muscle atrophy due to the hunger. The photographer and his preservation group Sea Legacy were overwhelmed with emotions upon shooting the video of the dying bear.
/ Intragram
Polar bears are directly affected by the global warming, which leads to disappearing of ice. The bears’ ways of finding food and surviving are impossible to happen without ice, where they capture their prey – seals. The location of the video – Baffin Island in Canada, has been hit pretty hard by the climate changes.
Nicklen adds that he had to share this to raise awareness and to break through apathy. He says that he mainly wanted the dying bear’s agony to not go to waste and he hopes that it is both a heartbreaking and brutally honest sight of global warming’s aftermath.
Greenhouse gasses are constantly building up in the atmosphere, elevating the temperatures in the Arctic, causing ice to melt fast. In fact, scientists claim that within 300 hundred years from now the last ice traces of the North American sheet would perish. The solution for this is neither quick, nor simple, just like feeding this bear would not have saved it from dying at this point.
The truth is that if global warming continues at this rate, Earth will suffer, losing bears and entire ecosystems. The solutions must be applied now – lowering the carbon footprint, producing food that’s right, put an end to cutting trees and actually start treating our planet like the home it is.
This video is not the first evidence showing how affected polar bears are by the melting ice. Videos and pictures have been seen before, clearly showing the horrific effect of climate changes on the wildlife. The animals struggle to survive, not knowing how or why their natural habitat has changed. As heart-wrenching as this and other videos are, they need to be seen by as much people as possible, and hopefully everyone will understand how serious the situation has become.
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