Frozen Planet Reviewed

Hello everyone and HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

I’ve finally returned from Paris and completed my other project, so now that I’m in La Plagne skiing, I thought it particularly apt to write a blog post about “Frozen Planet”, especially after seeing the thick ice that had accumulated here. (Thank God London is ice free though, not too big a fan of slush).

Frozen planet was a 2011 documentary series that captured our imagination about the Polar region, 7.2 million people in fact, making it the most watched Natural History series. ( David Attenborough's Frozen Planet tops TV ratings ) Unsurprisingly, viewers seemed to related a lot more to the polar bears in the north and the Adelie penguins in the south. (Don’t we just love those massive beasts that we see in the zoo and those smart, cuddly penguins?) But why exactly was Frozen Planet so popular? Surely, there have been many documentaries that have given us great insights into snippets of animal life as it is.

Alastair Fothergill, Frozen Planet Executive Producer, wrote:
“One of the key aims of the series was to take the audience on a journey to a place most would never be fortunate to go to. The scenery in the Polar Regions is unmatched anywhere on our planet, but capturing its true beauty was an incredible challenge as well.”
( A look back at Frozen Planet )

I have a younger brother who really loves animals, and he would have loved to watch this documentary as well, but probably not specifically this one. Hence, out of curiosity, I asked my many friends who had lauded this as one of the “must-watch” documentaries what exactly had piqued their interest, and one of them had this to say to me:
“It is interesting because of the animals they chose, everyone loves Arctic animals, such as Penguins, whales, polar bears. Though I have no idea why.”

Like what the producers had anticipated, the story of this polar region is interesting because it is mysterious. Mysterious, dangerous and fragile – that is why people love the polar region so much. Mysterious because people had always imagined that the polar region is a place covered by white snow, inhabited by large exciting creatures; dangerous because of its extreme temperatures, and yet again, exciting dangerous animals, and fragile because of the climate change and its effects on the large, beautiful creatures.

All right, so maybe I overplayed it about the animals. Neither am I discounting the wonder that is Frozen Planet with its picturesque scenery and death defying shots (I meant the crew and cast of course).

If we were to examine the impetus behind this UK documentary, we might discover a different side to this documentary. To do this, we need to explore the history of the polar region.

Arctic exploration had begun early in 9th to 13th centuries by Vikings who had first discovered the presence of a white desert. However, it would only be in 1492 that the first explorations of the Arctic were recorded as Europe searched for a westerly passage. In 1845, Sir John Franklin departed England for the Arctic but never returned, unable to survive the harsh weather there. This highlights the long established quest of the human race to “conquer” the Arctic, either scientifically or for resources. Because of the prevailing difficulties that humans face in this difficult terrain, the Arctic, till today remains somewhat mysterious, and often associated with heroic behaviour.

In recent times, however, with the constant need for new sources of coal and other natural resources, the Arctic has started to become a place for geopolitical contest. With the melting ice caps, and improved technology, the Arctic has become easier to conquer. That is exactly what countries have been doing. Cities are increasingly located within the Arctic circle, and funding has increased for Arctic explorations by governments trying to establish their sovereignty over various plots of lands. The Arctic became a place reimagined as an area of great resource potential and scientific discovery.

Like many countries in the world, the UK has also taken a keen interest in the area. In 2009, then then-minister for international defence and security Ann Taylor noted:

“It’s clear to us that security in the Arctic is not foremost a military concern. We are not returning to the Cold War. But security cannot be divorced from economic activity, environmental interests and political considerations.” (Depledge and Dodds 2011, 72)

It is clear that there has been renewed interest in the Arctic from the government: The Canada – UK Colloquium on ‘The Arctic and the Northern Dimension of World Issues’ House of Lords debates in 2010, strategic relationships with Northern Europe. The Geographical influence of the Arctic on the climate system of UK was clear when the Arctic Oscillation triggered UK’s severe weather conditions in 2009 and 2010. Politically, interest in the Arctic has solidified the political alliance between UK, Canada, US and Nordic countries against the supposed threat of Russian interest in the region. Besides all these, there have been increasing debates on the role and responsibilities of sovereign nations on this open, shared space, and the construction of an Arctic Inuit Polity to try and engage indigenous populations in policies on the Arctic that seem to exclude their role and presence within the Arctic diversity (Shadian 2006).

Frozen Planet can be argued to have come in conjunction with renewed interest in these geopolitical issues in the UK revolving around Arctic exploration and sovereignty. It would reignite popular imagination and interest in the region, and at the same time emphasize the British role in conserving the flora and fauna there in a bid to stop the adverse effects of climate change. To viewers, of course, the point of this documentary is to reveal to them the beauty of a place untammed by humans (or so they believe). That is why so much unhappiness arose when viewers realised that the scene on the birth of polar bear cubs was filmed at a zoo. To them, such a revelation disrupted their imagination of how “wild” the Arctic could be.
BBC denies misleading Frozen Planet viewers over polar bear filmed in zoo
)
Why should we be so upset? After all, much research had gone into polar bear livelihood. If filming the scene live would have caused the polar bears there great distress, then documentary filmmakers would have to make do with the next best thing. It is precisely that the unknown needs to remain unknown and mysterious to viewers, and not something in our own backyard that made this documentary as popular as it was. And in that way, create a heightened interest in the Arctic and all its political issues when debates about it appear in the news or political debates. Perfect strategy?

Well, we will never know the true intention of the BBC explorers. After all, if it was all just to support political debates that may not have been in the forefront of people’s interest (especially now with all the budget cuts), then they certainly went to great lengths and harsh conditions to film such a documentary. However, we must know that documentaries also play on prevailing interests during that time, and therefore, may have gotten some inspiration for this new epic show from climate change and political security concerns.

I am not here to say that the documentary was filmed completely without any purpose to inform viewers about the flora, fauna and human impacts on this area. It was truly a remarkable film and very beautifully constructed. I am sure that many people have taken away a lot more about Arctic animals (or at least those they are particularly interested in) from this documentary series. However, I am just examining other possible impetus for this project and the possible implications it has on citizen’s interest in future debates about the future of the Arctic circle.

References:

Shadian, J. (2006) “Remaking Arctic governance: the construction of an Arctic Inuit polity”, Polar Record , 42, 222, 249–259.

Depledge, D. and K. Doods (2011) “The UK and the Arctic”, The RUSI Journal, 156, 3, 72-79.

Edwards, B. (2000) “A Brief History of Arctic Exploration” (WWW) http://geography.about.com/library/misc/ucarctic.htm (Accessed 1 January 2012).

BBC ONE “Frozen Planet”

In Other Bear-y Cool News

OMG!! Check this out:
Ancient bear had the strongest bite

and this
Can polar bears and people coexist?

Actually, I've always wondered... is it better to leave nature and humans as separate spheres? (by that I mean it in the most simplistic way possible, no debate about nature culture dialectics), or should we co exist next to them. Imagine having a polar bear friend... or not.

Whatcha think?

*please ignore the blog language)

My Poor Polar Bears are Dying!!

I know this is my first blog post with a documentary in it. (I promise more to come!!) This is actually the real inspiration for the topic that I chose for this blog. One day I was lying in bed, worrying about a topic for my blog (then worrying about the module, then worrying about the blog again), and so I decided to consult the soft toys on my bed about what topic I should focus on. Of course they weren't of much help in terms of helping me bounce off topics, but I have a white bear soft toy on my bed, and it reminded me about polar bears, and polar bears remind me about "An Inconvenient Truth" featuring Al Gore. And hence, I thought that media portrayals of the environment would be an interesting topic to focus on. Just in case you have never watched this overated documentary, you can watch it here:



For all those who weren't annoyed with the political promotion Al Gore was doing for himself, this film is actually successfully emotionally provoking, or what Rosteck and Frentz (2009) would describe as "'political jeremiad’ (the pragmatic attempt to persuade that the environment is doomed without immediate action)". His use of theatrics to create a documentary of argument was able to spur nations of people into emotional outrage, if not action. I too, admit, that I was very taken into the arguments presented in his documentary. Since I have gone on and on about the nature of documentaries before, I will not harp upon his cleverly juxtaposed scenes of nature and disaster and use of scenes of graphs that reinforce the apparent "scientific basis" of his facts. Rather, I would like to discuss the validity of some of his claims.

Polar bears are dying because the ice is shrinking
Although that's how I interpreted it when I watched the video, his actual claim was that "a new scientific study shows that for the first time, they are finding polar bears that have actually drowned, swimming long distances like 60 miles to find the ice" because the ice sheets in the arctic is now disappearing into a "vast ocean at the top that once used to be covered by ice". It is important to understand his argument. He had proposed that the greenhouse gases that we are emitting into the atmosphere (specifically CO2), has trapped heat in the atmosphere that is concentrated at the top of the earth, hence melting the arctic at an exponential rate.

Here we see two premises:
- It is entirely our fault that the arctic is disappearing.
- Polar bears are drowning because of loss of ice in the arctic.
For the sake of this post, we assume that his science explanation that the build up of CO2 leads to global warming is completely accurate (we know that it is not, because greenhouse gases isn't just about CO2)

1. Polar bears are drowning because of loss of ice in the arctic

There is basis for this claim. According to a powerpoint presentation done by Hansen (2008), "future loss of Arctic sea ice could result in a loss of 2/3 of the world's polar bears within 50 years". This is backed up by data from the USGS (2009) that stated that "The polar bear depends on sea ice as a platform to hunt seals, their primary food, and projected loss of sea ice due to global warming was believed to jeopardize polar bears throughout their range". Note that of course that the term "loss" is open to interpretation. Loss could refer to the general extinction of a species of animal, or to the migration of the animal away from the habitat they are most familiar with to another place with more suitable climatic conditions. For example, in a paper written by Ferguson et al (2000), "polar bear movements and habitat selection seem to follow a season cycle of ice distribution and characteristics" that is dependent on "accessibility of their prey [that] vary with structural and spatial characteristics of sea ice" (Stirling and Archibald 1977, Smith 1980). So the loss could be related to polar bears moving to less preferred environments. Of course, we do not doubt that polar bears are indeed decreasing in numbers because of the loss of productive ocean areas that could reduce individual survival rates and hence breeding ability (WWF 2005). However, polar bears are not DROWNING because of the abrupt wind storm in 2004. Data shows that their deaths would probably have greater correlation to seal numbers than distances travelled. Of course that image of the polar bear desperately clinging onto sea ice had a huge impact on our visual understanding of climate change. Furthermore, according to WWF, Polar bears have evolved from brown bears during the Pleistocene the time period that spanned from 1.8 million to 11,000 years ago. In that period of time, the earth has experienced temperatures that are far warmer than that of today, and yet, the polar bears still survived. Admittedly our understanding of animal adaptation is limited, although one can still argue that the time frame for adaption has been significantly shortened by human induced global warming.

Furthermore, to assume that ALL polar bear populations are decreasing is not entirely true. A polar bear map on WWF suggests that despite warming temperatures, there are some increases in polar bear population, or that we are mostly data deficient.

(source: http://assets.panda.org/img/original/polar_bear_subpopulation_status_170709_1.jpg)

I am less inclined to question the information that polar bear numbers are declining due to global climate change, than I am to question the link Al Gore drew between global warming and polar bear deaths. I still believe that we should protect the habitat of polar bears, as far as our understanding of their habitat goes.

Oh dear, I have gone on too long about my warm fuzzy polar bears. I'll discuss ice sheet melting in my next blog post. :)

Sources:
If you want to learn more about the many fallacies that Al Gore's video holds (this is a very myth buster kind of article), you can refer to this 110 page long paper:
Lewis, M.J. (2006) "A Skeptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth", Washington: Competitive Enterprise Institute. (DRAFT)


Or you could refer to the polar bear fact sheet at WWF:
World Wildlife Fund (2005) "Polar Bears", http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/where_we_work/arctic/area/species/polarbear/, assessed on 5 November 2011


The alternative fact sheet is at the USGS website:
USGS (2009) http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/special/polar_bears/, assessed on 5 November 2011


Other resources used here:
Hansen, J. (2005) "The Threat to the Planet: Dark and Bright Sides of Global Warming", Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research, Iowa: University of Iowa. (Presentation)


Rosteck, T. and Frentz, T.S. (2009) "Myth and Multiple Readings in Environmental Rhetoric: The Case of An Inconvenient Truth", Quarterly Journal of Speech , 95,1,1-19


Ferguson, S.H., Mitchell, K.T. and Messie, F.O. (2000), "Influence of Sea Ice Dynamics on Habitat Selection by Polar Bears"Ecology, 81,3,761-772