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The boy was deaf and the bear was a polar bear. Both details are important to understand what I experienced fifteen years ago. It is also clear that deaf people are not dumb and polar bears are not white. Deaf people communicate with gestures and draw words with the muscles of their face and hands. I studied sign language a long time ago. I’ve forgotten almost all vocabulary, but I still know how to spell, introduce yourself (my name is one iota that makes your forehead curl) and express skeptical distrust with a sign whose most accurate translation into Mexican Spanish is ” No mames” is. How do you say bear? With his right hand he forms a thick snout and covers his mouth and nose with it. How do you indicate that the bear is a polar bear? In Mexico, the adjective “white” is added to “bear” formed by stroking the back of the hand with the other (perhaps the etymology of this sign is a brush painting a surface). But the fur of the Ursus maritimus is not white; Lacking pigment, it is transparent and hollow, which allows light to heat the bear’s black skin.
The boy lived in Mexico City and the bear in the Arctic Ocean. Despite the distance and difference in size (one was a tiny biped and the other was the largest carnivore walking the earth), they met one morning at the Pedagogical Institute for Language Problems, where I volunteered. .
Since my sign language was very limited, I was asked at school to classify the holdings of the library in which the small projection room was located. One morning they took several groups to watch a nature documentary. About twenty children sat on the floor facing the white wall that served as a privacy screen. Silently and subtitled, the film examined the planet’s most charismatic fauna and concluded with a warning of ecological destruction, juxtaposing images of smoke generated by a thermal power station with those of the starving bear floating on a small ice raft
At the end of the show, the teacher turned on the light. Immediately the boy got up, pushed his way through his companions and ran to put it out. The teacher flipped the switch again. He didn’t give up. Light, Dark, Light, Dark: The space turned into a low-budget nightclub. The teacher and the pupil argued amid silent shouts; The body prosody made me realize there were complaints, frustrations, and disciplinary warnings. While the students were being chased away, another teacher explained to me that the rebellious boy wanted to turn off the lights to save the bear from dying from our electricity use. His rebellion seemed cute and funny, if no less reprehensible. For me it was excruciating. As he turned off the light, the boy darkened something in me. I keep looking for the switch with the words.
I remembered the episode in very different situations. For example: When I saw another documentary, Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man,” which was made using the videos of Timothy Treadwell, a lunatic who spent thirteen summers living with the brown bears of Alaska (state where the US government has just… approved a huge exploitation project). oil company that will contribute to a further increase in greenhouse gas emissions). Herzog draws a nihilistic moral from the story: “What haunts me,” he says in his slow, somber English, “is that I see no familiarity, no understanding, no compassion in all the faces of every bear Treadwell has filmed .” I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. I think Herzog was projecting his own incomprehension and indifference onto the mirror. At the other extreme of anthropocentrism, Treadwell treats bears like pets, and his story ends badly as a result.
I think of that boy and wonder if he saw something in the polar bear that Herzog, Treadwell and the rest of us can’t quite make out. Without the support of melodramatic music and a manipulative off-voice, the boy recognized his personality, understood his situation and felt sorry for him. Perhaps his deafness made him more sensitive to the experience of being alone in an ocean of indifference. Perhaps his ability to interpret gestures and looks allowed him to understand the wild language of this shipwrecked man.
When I read Arctic weather forecasts, I think of polar bears. The picture looks thawed: “The Arctic will be ice-free for the first time in September before 2050. It is already too late to continue protecting the Arctic summer sea ice as a landscape and as a habitat.” By now we have become accustomed to breaking the most catastrophic records. We have just experienced the hottest May on record at the poles. Sea ice in Antarctica is also at record lows. Siberia is in fever, and Canada burned more than five million acres this spring (the fires only made international headlines when they engulfed New York in apocalyptic smoke). The ice-free Arctic is an endangered sea (navigable, fishable, militarizable, drillable, pollutable); The ice-free Arctic is a hostile sea for ringed and bearded seals and the bears that depend on them.
I think of that child again when I saw two Swedish activists attacking Claude Monet’s painting The Artist’s Garden at Giverny with red paint. Adults scold young people for getting up to turn off the light or for being conspicuous by harmlessly desecrating works of art. “Don’t you see that we’re already selling carbon credits and electric cars?” Don’t you see that we’re already mixing migratory birds with giant wind turbines? What else would you like?’ Although I’m not aware that the boy became an activist, I can picture him holding a can of white paint trying to save polar bears at the Museum of Modern Art. Unless governments take action to stop the social and environmental disasters that are causing inertia and greed, the protest will continue to grow, vehement and angry, incomprehensible to some, hopeful to all others.
At this point, I can imagine a reader frowning and asking herself, “Don’t be silly!” And then? Didn’t the boy want to save the bear?’ He may not have saved the bear from the documentary, but when he flipped the switch in the library that day, he set off a long chain of reactions (this column is one of them) designed to end ecocide turn off the power to the electric chair we’ve been sitting the whole world in.
George Diner He is the author of Las mutations, Junkies de las letras and Este emptiness that siedes. He works with Transformación de Conflictos Socioambientales, AC and the Condor Reintroduction Project in Baja California, Mexico.