buds through spring, the larvae hatch as caterpillars in the summer
and feast on the trees themselves.
All of this is, on one level, entirely natural. Both the spruce bark
beetle and the western black-headed budworm are natives of south-
central Alaska. But warmer temperatures have made conditions
increasingly favorable for them both: Warm summers have enabled the
bark beetle, for example, to halve the length of its life cycle from two
years to one, effectively doubling its population size. At the same time,
warmer, drier conditions are weakening the trees and making them
more vulnerable to insect attack. Such is the scale of the devastation
that, according to Juday, the “entire forest system is dying, and the
question is what will replace it.” According to some researchers, it is a
scene that is likely to be played out across the Arctic; some say as much
as half of the world’s boreal forest could be gone within decades.
STARVINGBEARS
A little more than a month after looking for black-headed budworm
with Juday, cruising up the west coast of Alaska, and recording the tes-
timonies of the residents of villages such as Little Diomede, I am
standing on the deck of the icebreaker Arctic Sunrise, anchored just off
Barrow on Alaska’s north coast, and, with most of the ship’s crew,
watching a black dot in the distance swim slowly toward us. At first, we
assume it is a seal; on closer inspection, however, it reveals itself to be
a polar bear. Eventually, it arrives off our ship, head in the air, sniffing
longingly at the scent of freshly baked bread wafting from the galley. It
clambers on to an ice floe in an attempt to get closer, and that is when
we notice: It is alarmingly thin.
It is unusual enough to find a polar bear swimming through so
many miles of open ocean: Polar bears are creatures of the sea ice,
across which they wander for miles in search of their walrus, seal, and
sea lion prey. Eventually, the bear gives up and swims slowly and sadly
away, but it does not take long to discover exactly why it was laboring
through open water instead of patrolling the sea ice. Shortly after enter-
taining our visitor, we set off in search of the ice edge, but despite our
traveling far north of where it should be, it takes days before we find it.
100 Kieran Mulvaney