Oregon Public Broadcasting

The polar bear ranks high on any list of animals threatened by climate change.  Melting ice, shorter winters, and loss of habitat all pose a risk to the bear's future.

Northwest  photographer Steven Kazlowski talked with Pete Springer about his new book “The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World.”

Photographer Steven Kazlowski spent the last eight years photographing polar bears in the Arctic.

Audio Slideshow: Steven talks about some of his photographs

It’s not an easy place to do much of anything -- let alone  shoot documentary photos. And his chosen subjects -- polar bears and climate change -- present  challenges even for an experienced wildlife photographer such as Kazlowski.

Steven Kazlowski: “You need to get in close and you really need to show the expressions, I mean, photographs are two dimensional and we live in a three dimensional world so it’s often these angles and these positions that make an image that’s two dimensional, feel three dimensional.”

Patience is also required since it might take weeks to get a single photo.  Like the time Kazlowski spent three weeks camped outside a polar bear den in a blizzard at below zero temperatures.  

Steven Kazlowski: “It took quite a bit of learning to understand what’s going on -- I actually cracked a 500 mm lens, the front element, just before those polar bears came out of the den, and luckily it focused right through the crack and I was able to still get these images.”

But what keeps Kazlowski going is his drive to show how climate change is impacting Arctic ecosystems and the polar bear in particular.   The bears depend on sea ice to mate, hunt, and prepare for long winters.

If that ice melts and polar bears die off, Kazlowski believes that would be an ill omen for humans.

Steven Kazlowski: “You know, it’s good to stop and to start thinking about what’s going on in the Arctic and how it’s changing so then we can start addressing why it’s happening and what’s gonna happen to the rest of the planet and how it’s gonna affect the human species.”

And though humans may still be around for a while yet, the news isn’t so good for polar bears.

U.S. scientists  predict  that the entire polar bear population of Alaska will disappear by 2050 if the Arctic ice continues to melt at current rates.

"The Last Polar Bear" is published by Braided River Books in Seattle