Of honeybees and polar bears: Saving beloved species isn't enough — but it's a good start

If you ask children or college students to draw pictures to illustrate climate change, chances are that polar bears will make an appearance.

Since activists started fighting to protect the climate in the 1970s, certain animal species have become the poster children for various conservation movements. From images of polar bears drifting alone on melting sea ice to complex songs from whales taking over the radio airwaves to internet memes of sloths roaming their disappearing habitats, certain species rise to prominence in human perception, inspiring us to make changes and fight for their preservation. 

Yet in the past 12 years, at least 467 species have gone extinct, with most of these creatures — including a type of rodent called the melomy and a Hawaiian tree snail called Achatinella apexfulva — quietly disappearing and utterly unknown to the vast majority of humans. In part as a result of watching species after species go extinct, climate change burnout, in which people are overwhelmed by the severity of the climate crisis, and climate doomerism, in which people see climate change as irreversible and destruction as inevitable, are both increasing.

But in fact, history shows that humans do have the power to save animals on the brink of extinction. Such successes might be the most tangible representation of conservation that we have. Still, whether we rally behind a given animal species is largely based on whether we recognize parts of ourselves in them. 

When we see "polar bears on melting glaciers, we have an empathetic response," said Susan Clayton, a conservation psychologist at the College of Wooster. “It’s one way to take this big, amorphous concept," meaning climate change, "and make it more understandable.”

Whether we rally behind an animal is largely based on whether we recognize parts of ourselves in them.

In conservation, the term "flagship species" is used to refer to animals that represent something bigger, like an entire ecosystem. For example, the polar bear represents the Arctic, sea turtles serve as ambassadors to the sea, the bald eagle is iconic to North America and the giant panda symbolizes conservation efforts in China. 

Very often, these animals are larger mammals that live on land and share characteristics with humans. People are more likely to take action to protect a species if it is physically large and if they are flagship species.

Singling in on particular species can also help make climate change seem more personal. Studies show, for example, that people are more likely to help a single person than they are to take action to support a statistically large but abstract number of victims. 

“We are animals too, and as mammals with a certain biology, we are drawn to certain other species that have shared biological traits,” said Diogo Verissimo, a research fellow at the Environmental Change Institute. “It could also be, as is the case with the honeybee, that we seem to share their social structure in certain ways.”

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Honeybees — which are once again making headlines after commercial beekeepers reported record colony losses this year — are another species humans tend to rally behind for various reasons. For one thing, they are undeniably fuzzy and widely considered appealing. Bees have been anthropomorphized on screen, in films like “Bee Movie,” and on cereal boxes. As nearly everyone knows, honeybees also live in complex intelligent societies and work tirelessly to complete their tasks — something many humans can identify with. They are also, not incidentally, highly useful to human society, producing honey and beeswax — both of which are used in a wide range of products — while also pollinating the plants that feed us.

“We are more likely to pay attention to something if we think it’s useful to us,” as Clayton told Salon in a phone interview. “We have a sense that bees are important to our economy and provide us with useful services.”

Much of the movement to "save the bees" in the U.S. has been focused on a single species: Apis mellifera, the European honeybee. As its suggests, this species was not originally native to North America. It was introduced to the U.S. via colonization, where it is now out-competing many native pollinator species and also spreading disease to other insects. Honeybees are essentially domesticated insects, and in fact are far less endangered than many of the species they are now pushing out.

Nonetheless, activism on behalf of the honeybees may benefit other pollinators in some ways. For example, honeybee activism is partially responsible for some U.S. states and the European Union outlawing neonicotinoids, a highly toxic pesticide. (In one study in which 55 trees in Oregon were sprayed with neonicotinoids, it was estimated that up to 107,470 bees were killed.)

Raising awareness about a species in peril is most effective if the messaging is delivered with an actionable item, such as urging legislators to outlaw a specific pesticide. Studies show that making people feel guilty about climate change can motivate change, while others have suggested that shame, fear and anger can motivate behavioral change as well. But such emotions can easily fuel hopelessness if people are constantly made aware of new and overwhelming threats that they feel powerless to address. 

“Fear-type campaigns that appeal to things like guilt have been used frequently,” said Laura Thomas-Walters, deputy director of experimental research at the Yale University program on Climate Change Communication. “But they can also lead to disengagement. It can make people want to deny the problem or not look at the campaign, or question whether the messenger is trustworthy at all.”

As our climate heats up, primarily because humans continue to burn fossil fuels, that increases the frequency and severity of natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes. Excessive heat alone now kills thousands of people each summer. We can expect hundreds more species to die off within the next decade if we do not take significant action to reduce emissions and enact further environmental protection.  

Polar bear, Harbour Islands, Nunavut, Canada (Getty Images/Paul Souders)Yet the majority of U.S. adults rank climate change lower on their list of priorities compared to other threats like the state of the economy or health care costs. Our global society is juggling the looming threat of another pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and political turmoil. Many people report experiencing climate burnout — perhaps after years of trying to reduce their carbon footprint without seeing larger-scale changes from people in power.

Although oil and gas production continued to increase during Joe Biden's administration, the former president did make significant progress toward protecting the climate, including signing the largest federal climate change investment in U.S. history with the Inflation Reduction Act. But in just three months, the Trump administration has already rolled back more than 125 environmental protections and fired hundreds of employees at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We’re seeing an increase in climate doomerism, where people think climate change is real but there is nothing we can do about it, so what’s the point,” Thomas-Walters told Salon in a video call. “If you are already in the climate-doom mindset, then one more ad about the polar bears or bees dying is just going to reinforce your existing beliefs and make you feel even more hopeless.”

Millions of people all over the world have felt the impacts of climate change in the form of natural disasters, rising sea levels and heat waves that impact their health or food sources. Those who have experienced climate disasters report forms of PTSD that may be triggered by similar events.

Globally, an increasing number of people recognize climate change as a threat, said Tobias Brosch, a psychologist at the University of Geneva who studies studying how emotion affects behaviors related to sustainability. But in the U.S., a significant proportion of the public continues to believe that climate change is not real, a phenomenon closely linked to political partisanship. 

Denying climate change could be understood as a psychological maneuver to process an irreconcilable threat, Brosch said. Ultimately, climate change poses an existential threat to humans, invoking one of two responses: fight or flight. Choosing to fight would require someone to change their lifestyle and make potentially challenging sacrifices, so it may be psychologically advantageous, in the short term, to "flee" by choosing climate denialism, Brosch said.

Climate change “is a statistical thing that requires a fair amount of complexity, which leaves the human mind lots of avenues to escape from it,” Brosch told Salon in a video call. “If you have leaders saying it is not an issue, it is also easy to jump on that train.”

It is unquestionably painful to face the truth about the global climate crisis, and emotionally logical to avoid the let-down of investing in a cause without seeing significant or meaningful change. Caring about the species we share the planet with, cute or otherwise, has been shown to be a major driver of conservation. It’s a tangible connection that implies goals we can work toward together. 

That remains true if the animal in question is a reptile or parasite with few visible shared characteristics with humans — we can still recognize it as a living being sharing our planetary space, and that can move us to take action.

“These emotional reactions that people feel in the context of climate change are among the most important predictors of wanting to take climate action,” Brosch said. “Emotions work as a sort of relevance indicator. They show us that something is important to us.”

It's clearly true that individual changes to preserve the environment can only go so far without significant changes implemented by government and private industry. But humans have already saved dozens of species through conservation efforts. Those almost always begin with bringing awareness to a species, as has apparently happened with polar bears and honeybees.  

“It’s also a form of denialism to say it’s all up to the politicians and industry to do something,” Brosch said. “As citizens, we do have a lot of potential impact. It’s just important that it's not just one person, but that there's some kind of collective action.”