Anchorage Daily News

As gorgeous and haunting as Steven Kazlowski's images are, there's nothing pretty about the work needed to get them.

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Photographer Steven J. Kazlowski

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Any competent wildlife photographer knows all about waiting. Far fewer have waited in bitter subzero cold for weeks on end, hoping for the wind and the sun and other conditions to be right for a glimpse at the planet's largest land predator.

That's why Kazlowski's "The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World" (Braided River, 208 pages, $39.95), published earlier this year, is such a marvel of wildlife photography and, at the same time, much more than gorgeous eye candy.

Kazlowski's polar bear obsession has endured for more than a decade, and while the book includes several writers' essays, Kazlowski's 235 images are the soul of a book that offer readers intimacy with a creature few will ever see in nature.

"For quite a while, it was an education just being up there -- to swallow that whole thing, that huge place that's the Arctic," said Kazlowski, who lives in Seattle. "It's been changing 40-50 years, and it's not completely visual, but people up there have been witnessing them -- and small changes are adding up to big changes."

While sales of "The Last Polar Bear" suggest it's not, as Kazlowski said, "a barnburner," the timing of its release may turn out to be fortuitous.

In May, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced polar bears would be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, concluding that the sea ice vital to polar bear survival had melted dramatically in recent decades -- with more expected.

Never before had an animal that's losing its habitat to climate change been listed. Polar bears use sea ice as a platform to trap their primary prey, seals. The listing followed a prediction six months earlier by scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey that only a small portion of the world's 25,000 polar bears would remain by mid-century, with two-thirds of the world's polar bears disappearing, mostly along the coasts of Alaska and Russia.

The timing is totally coincidental," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Steven Amstrap, who has studied polar bears for decades and consulted with Kazlowski on the book. "He's been working on this project a long time."

There's been plenty of work and plenty of sweat -- even in the Arctic.

Kazlowski initially slept in and worked out of a 1981 Buick station wagon for weeks at a time. "Then he got an old pickup that had a camper on it, but the heater didn't work. He stayed in it for about five years," said Larry Wagner, an Anchorage mechanic who helped keep Kazlowski's vehicles running.

Kazlowski washed dishes for a living in Kaktovik to get to know the community better and earn his keep.

And he was slapped on the back by a polar bear cub.

"This one mother, she (surprisingly) left the cubs with me to go feed," he said. "I felt something touch my back. They were playing tag, and this one, a 60-pound cub, wanted to tag me. It dropped down and ran off, wanting me to chase it."

In retrospect, that was humorous. But overall, Kazlowski's book sounds an alarm that the polar bear's world is melting beneath its feet. Photos like the one of mother and cub forming crossing a barren sweep of ice invite readers into this frigid world where only the determined and durable survive.

"For me photography isn't about going to the spots everybody else is going to because they're getting good pictures," Kazlowski said. "I've always tried to go to these out-of-the-way places where I could find something different."

SHRINKING POPULATION

There are 19 polar bear sub-populations worldwide, Amstrup noted, totaling what most biologists believe to be 20,000-25,000 animals. For some of the groups, there are good population estimates; for others, "not even educated guesses.

"Regardless of the number of bears there now, there will be fewer bears there in the future," he said. "There will be a decline, but it won't be the same everywhere across the Arctic."

Scientists like Amstrup aren't alone in noting changes. In a section of the book of which Kazlowski is particularly proud, editor Christine Clifton-Thornton interviews Arnold Brower Sr., captain of the ABC whaling crew in Barrow. Brower died this October at age 86 when his snowmachine went through the ice; although he managed to pull himself out of the water, Brower couldn't make the walk back to his cabin.

"The ice is not the same as it used to be," he told Clifton-Thornton. "The old ice that used to pile up and anchor out there, is missing. It's disappearing. There's more water than ice now.

"Here's my question," he said. "What's really happening? Something is wrong. Maybe the whole world is sick."

While the shortest essay in the book, Kazlowski considers it critical.

"I felt that there was a big hole in the project without it," he said.

"It's the most important essay in a sense because it comes from a person who walks the walk and talks the talk."

'AMAZING' IMAGES

The physical size of "The Last Polar Bear," 12-by-1014 inches, suggests coffee-table book, and there's no doubt the extra space gives Kazlowski's photographs more wallop.

"I did a coffee-table book before where the publishers added some stock photography to my story," said Charles Wolhforth, one of the essayists who contributed to "The Last Polar Bear."

"But this book had a very serious mission behind it and such an emphasis on quality. In that way, it's not at all a coffee-table book."

Wolhforth, the author who is a former Anchorage assemblyman and Daily News reporter, was particularly impressed with Kazlowski, even though the two never met face to face.

"The images he came up with were just amazing. And the way he did it was the old-fashioned way, without much money and really getting to know the people and the place.

"I have a lot respect for that."

Like Wohlforth, author of "The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change," Kazlowski believes changes are coming rapidly to the Arctic.

"You can see it from one season to the next. Open water in the Chukchi Sea, cabins washing off barrier islands.... The most favorable places are disappearing from under (the polar bears') feet."

But perhaps they will simply adapt.

A new study by researcher Robert Rockwell of the American Museum of Natural History in the journal Polar Biology points out that polar bears survived a period of significant global warming 125,000 years ago when the sea level was 12 to 18 feet higher.

They did it, Rockwell wrote, by changing their diet as the climate changed.

Rockwell suggests that might happen again in parts of the Arctic around western Hudson Bay where, he says, the ice pack's breakup will coincide with the time snow geese lay their eggs.

A diet of eggs from 40 goose nests can replace the energy bears gain from a day of hunting seals, he says.

But Kazlowski has his doubts. The environment, he fears, is changing too quickly to adapt.

"Even though the bears are powerful swimmers," he said, "they're not meant to swim for hundreds of miles between ice floes. And you have a lot more rough ice too, so they're not just climbing over pressure ridges. Cubs, I fear, are going to have a lot of trouble negotiating all the changes."

Find reporter Mike Campbell online at adn.com/contact/mcampbell or call 257-4329.

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