The loneliest polar bear has company in a warming world
In early November 2015, a polar bear cub named Nora was abandoned by her mother at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, leaving her fate in the hands of a team of veterinarians and zookeepers. The Loneliest Polar Bear: A True Story of Survival and Peril on the Edge of a Warming World tells the story of the frantic effort to keep Nora alive and well, from the struggles of replicating polar bear milk to an hours-long surgery to fix a broken bone in her leg.
But the book, an expansion of author Kale Williams’ 2017 series about Nora for The Oregonian / OregonLive, goes beyond the life of a single bear. It details the political battles over the existence of climate change, debates about the ethics of zoos, and the already disastrous effects of...