Polar bears in Canada are running out of ice.
To save them, students in Tacoma are planting shrubs and trees on three-fourths of an acre in Point Defiance.
The connection between the two is in the atmosphere, where an overdose of greenhouse gases warms the Earth. It is melting ice on which ecosystems depend, and stranding the bears who prowl them as top predators.
The project is Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium’s “Acres for Atmosphere,” and on Friday it brought students from Tacoma Schools’ Science and Math Institute (SAMI) to help plant 1,500 native plants on a hillside at the park entrance.
(The work continues from 9 a.m.-noon today, and you are welcome to dress for dirt and help. You can park in the zoo lot.)
The SAMI students have studied the retreat of glaciers and pack ice, as close to home as Mount Rainier and as far away as Churchill, Manitoba, home of Polar Bears International’s Polar Bear Keeper Leadership Camp.
Derek Woodie, the zoo’s lead polar bear keeper, attended that camp last fall and came home with disturbing accounts.
Last year, he said, the ice disappeared in June and did not return until Dec. 9. It was torture for the bears, who hunt seals from floes.
“There were polar bears sitting by the shore, waiting for the ice to come back,” he told SAMI 10th-graders Angel Morales, Nene Bah and Felicia Thornton. “There’s nothing on land that they can find to eat.”
Sure, there are a few berries, but a 1,000-pound bear needs to eat about 50 seals a year.
Researchers have documented a dramatic retreat in Churchill’s ice over the past 30 years. Now they are beginning to see bears with more physical stress and fewer cubs because of the prolonged fast.
The SAMI kids can’t open a McSeal fast-food joint for hungry bears, but they are doing their bit to slow global warming.
Over the years, the patch of turf they helped tear out Friday has been a glutton. Mary Anderson, the parks’ natural-resources coordinator, calculated that last year it consumed 1.2 million gallons of water, 52 hours of carbon-emitting mowing, plus fertilizer that made its way into Puget Sound.
Oxygen-wise, grass is a slacker. The leafy trees and shrubs the students planted Friday are much more efficient at the carbon dioxide-to-oxygen switch.
The spot they’re working on is near an acre that Metro Parks converted from turf to shrubs last year. The park district also plans to do a similar rehab for slopes at its headquarters on 19th Street.
It’s a little bit of land and a giant atmosphere, but it’s a beginning – and an example.
Setting that example is part of what the zoo does. It has switched to efficient lighting, even for Zoolights. As equipment wears out, it is replaced with energy-efficient models. Staff members are encouraged to carpool. And not idle their cars.
Better yet, take a bus, said Nene and Felicia. The students get to SAMI, and around town, that way.
They’d do it anyway, for the fun and friendship they find on their rides, but the efficiency is what they promote to their family and friends.
“I made my parents buy all new efficient light bulbs,” said Angel, who is 15. “The knowledge of how everything you do affects the environment is power. The smallest things we do make the biggest difference.”
Much of what the SAMI students are doing at Point Defiance, where the new school was established last year, is not small at all. Every time they go on a science walk or an ivy pull, they carry out bags of garbage.
They’ve learned to put the party in work party, which is what it takes to make volunteer conservation a habit.
“The things I’ve learned, I will carry the rest of my life,” Angel said.
He and his classmates believe Friday’s planting will help heal the planet, and show others how to do the same.
Woodie believes that if enough people follow the students’ example, it may not be too late for the polar bears. Or the rest of the planet.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677 kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com blog.thenewstribune.com/street
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