It's Not Just About Bears: A Problem-Solving Workshop on Aboriginal Peoples, Polar Bears, and Human Dignity

Abstract

Throughout the Arctic, the conservation of polar bears (Ursus maritimus), based on the goals and principles of the 1973 International Agreement for the Conservation of Polar Bears and Their Habitat, has long been considered a wildlife management success story (Fikkan et al., 1993; Prestrud and Stirling, 1994; Ross, 2000). Recently, however, a rapidly warming climate and accelerating social changes in the Arctic have raised increasingly difficult questions not only about conserving polar bears (e.g., Derocher et al., 2004), but also about the polar bear management system itself, particularly the roles of northern aboriginal peoples in making decisions about wildlife (Berkes et al., 2005; Tyrrell, 2006; Clark et al., 2008; Dowsley and Wenzel, 2008; Lemelin et al., 2008). Conserving polar bears has now become a complex and sometimes volatile issue with social, political, and ecological dimensions spanning a range of geographic and institutional scales. Multiple competing perspectives are expressed by different participants in a decision-making system that has become increasingly fragmented and symbolically charged by issues such as the 2008 listing of polar bears as Threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Human dignity is important for all people involved with or affected by wildlife management decisions, and it is a policy goal to be considered alongside biological conservation. However, this objective is especially important in the polar bear situation because of northern aboriginal peoples’ subsistence needs and their historical identity as wildlife users (e.g., Keith et al., 2005; Freeman and Wenzel, 2006; Foote and Wenzel, 2009). Over the past three decades, aboriginal people in northern Canada have gained in general a greater measure of authority and control over natural resources through land-claim agreements. The comanagement regimes resulting from those agreements have not only changed the distribution of power in wildlife management systems, but also introduced traditional ecological knowledge, alongside science, as a basis for decision making (Treseder et al., 1999; Armitage and Clark, 2005). In the case of polar bear management, these ongoing trends have led to successes (Brower et al., 2002; Johnson, 2002) as well as controversies (Tyrrell, 2006; Dowsley and Wenzel, 2008; Nirlungayuk and Lee, 2009). Further, different regions have had different experiences as their comanagement systems evolved, and consequently one cannot say that any specific definition of a management problem—or indeed any specific proposed solution—holds across the entire range of polar bears in Canada, let alone worldwide. Similarly, appeals to simply substitute “top-down” management with a “grassroots” approach overlook not only the complexity of situations on the ground and the considerable strengths of the existing management system (Berkes et al., 2005), but also the real and diverse roles that aboriginal people have long been playing in polar bear conservation across the Canadian North. Clearly, as the challenges of conserving polar bears become increasingly complicated, there is an urgent need to build on the acknowledged successes and move beyond the divisive controversies.