Blogposts tagged 'Polar Bears'

At about a quarter to eight, still sitting in the Mess having just cleaned off Ronnie's lasagne, we got a call from Paul, the first mate, over the ship's tanoy system. "There's a big polar bear to our starboard."

Woken up as usual at 7.30 for breakfast and cleaning, I'd had a shower and was getting clothed when someone said 'polar bears outside'. I said to Ethan, the assistant cook who is also my roomie, who has been aboard two weeks already: 'Wow, they're saying there's polar bears outside.' He replied, 'Nah, there isn't man. They're just saying that to get us up.' 'Well, I'm popping outside to check.'

So I was thinking about polar bears the other day. They're not my normal topic for musing while dodging London traffic on my bicycle, but I was thinking about them because a friend told me something I just couldn't believe. She said that polar bears could be the first mammals to lose their entire habitat to climate change. I was shocked. Polar bears have no natural predators. They're on the top of the food chain. They're perfectly adapted to the inhospitable Arctic environment, but now their icy home is disappearing beneath their paws because of our carbon polluting lifestyles.

We've had a bumpy week in the blog relay after Jim dropped the baton earlier this week (shame Jim), but here's hoping one of our other climate campaigners, Anita, will get us back on track in this whistle-stop tour of Greenpeace staff here in the UK. Click here to catch up on the other entries.

I'm on my second run at Greenpeace having taken a short trip around other non-governmental organisations in between times, but I've always worked on climate issues here.  At the moment I'm lucky enough to head up the aviation team and work with some really smart, fun and inspiring people. But Greenpeace is like that. It has introduced me to some of the most amazing people from around the world. From schoolteachers, children and subsistence farmers in the Philipinnes who we worked with to successfully defeat a proposed new coal fired power station, to grandmothers who chained themselves to petrol pumps to ‘Stop Esso', and now, with local residents from Sipson who will lose their homes if the government and BAA go ahead with their crazy plans and build a third runway at Heathrow.  Not that we will let them!