THE BAY SNAPSHOT
This Burned Black Bear Is Our Climate Reality
The regal creature was observed walking on its forearms — because its paws were so badly charred by the Caldor Fire
“The Bay Snapshot” is a series from The Bold Italic that showcases the current mood of the Bay Area in a picture. If you have a tip for a future post in the series, email us or DM us on Twitter or Instagram.
As the East Coast floods, the West Coast burns. Again. (As if on some sort of looped Spotify playlist no one asked to play.) Each passing day affords us a new reminder of the severity of the climate crisis at hand
We’ve written about these pieces of evidence — the orange skies; the smoke-choked air; the almost empty reservoirs — on an almost daily basis this summer. And every one of those digital pieces of written testimony sits with a certain unique heaviness.
We’ve tangled the web of life, knotting it beyond some points of recognition. Now we’re threatening to tie a taut noose around Mother Nature’s neck because of the bindings we’ve caused.
But there’s something about seeing an apex predator, a black bear, in this case, completely hobbled by the very consequence of human-caused climate change that just sinks the soul further down than witnessing a house denature to ash.
Captured by San Francisco Chronicle photographer Brontë Wittpenn, a large black bear was recently spotted behind a neighborhood in Meyers near South Lake Tahoe by firefighters as the Caldore Fire continues burning. The bear was at one point seen licking its paws; it could only “walk” using its forearms.
Wittepen mentioned in an Instagram post that animal control was called to check up on the bear, though no more of an update was given on ursid’s condition.
Images like these have become all too common these days … particularly in the past decade.
(Remember when just last year we all shared pictures of wild animals salivating in an otherwise urban area, captioned those memes with “nature is healing”? Oh, the irony of it all. Or rather: This harsh truth that Mother Nature is, in fact, healing when left undisturbed, but we human beings continue to maim her and her creations in incapacitating fashions.)
When we see pictures of wildlife in distress, it hits at our biophilia: The innate human instinct to connect with nature and other living beings. Whether we humans — the dominant species on this planet — are aware of it or not, we’re interconnected to everything (and everyone) on this planet. We’ve tangled the web of life, knotting it beyond some points of recognition. Now we’re threatening to tie a taut noose around Mother Nature’s neck because of the bindings we’ve caused.
Oceans warm and sink our cities. Honey bees die and kill off our food supply. Whole forests burn and release sequestered carbon dioxide — making all of the above perpetually worse.
The climate has changed for the worse; we’re now firmly sat in the climate crisis. The question is just how many large omnivores we’ll allow to hobble in our disconnection with the planet.
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