We can learn valuable lessons from the ‘polar bear capital of the world'

As the climate crisis pushes humans and animals closer together, it's crucial that we coexist with kindness

- VICTORIA GILL

Polar bears are “not encroaching on Churchill,” insisted artist Sandra Cook when I visited her home studio. “This is the polar bears’ land.” Given that fewer than 1,000 people live year-round in Churchill, on the edge of the Canadian Arctic, there are approximately as many polar bears as there are humans.

The remote community in Manitoba sits on a spot where the river meets the Hudson Bay. It’s here that, for thousands of years, bears have gathered at the start of winter, waiting for the first ice to form. However, as the Arctic continues to rapidly warm, each year the bears have to wait longer on land.

Cook has seen bear footprints in her backyard – “right where I walk every morning. That was terrifying.” Her teenage daughter, Kara, has been rushed indoors during breaks at school, because a polar bear was spotted approaching. This is part of everyday life in the so-called ‘polar bear capital of the world’.

The story of human/polar bear coexistence in a changing Arctic climate is what brought me to Churchill late last year. With its local population of bears, known as the Western Hudson Bay polar bears (or “blubber-hunting ice bears” as Alyssa McCall from Polar Bears International describes them), climate change puts the remote town in a uniquely difficult position.