December 11, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
When Robert Buchanan seven years ago took over a tiny charity dedicated to preserving the world’s polar bears, he realized that scientists who study the bears couldn’t easily conduct their research — or bring their findings to the public’s attention — because they were so busy trying to find money to support their work.
So Mr. Buchanan, a former marketing executive at the beverage company Seagram’s, helped build the nonprofit group Polar Bears International into a larger operation that raises money to enable researchers to conduct investigations in the Arctic and helps them educate young people about saving the bears.
The volunteer-run charity, which was started in the early 1990s by a friend of Mr. Buchanan’s, relies on donations from foundations, individuals, companies, and other sources. It raises between $700,000 and $1-million per year, compared with roughly $25,000 in 2002.
The group’s mission has become more urgent by the year.
Warming temperatures are now expected to melt the Arctic’s ice during summer months within 10 years, killing off two-thirds of the world’s polar bears by midcentury.
But Mr. Buchanan isn’t a pessimist. The rate of decline can be reversed, he says, if scientists can gather data to make sound decisions, and if young people are empowered to become leaders in the fight against climate change.
“We have a very rare opportunity to, working together, create the greatest generation of conservationists the world has ever seen,” he says.
Polar Bears International, which is based in Sepastopol, Calif., finances videoconferences that allow polar-bear experts to speak to students. It also conducts a weeklong camp that brings high-school students to Canada’s Hudson Bay, where they learn how to live off the land and motivate their peers to become environmentalists.
The group supports scientists by paying for censuses of polar bears, like this one in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea. Here, Steven Amstrup, a polar-bear researcher, and other colleagues, study a sedated male bear.
