A Tribute to Susan Crockford: A Clear-Eyed Voice About Polar Bears and Climate Change
By Stephen Heins, The Word Merchant
A Tribute to Susan Crockford: A Clear-Eyed Voice About Polar Bears and Climate Change
By Stephen Heins, The Word Merchant
Susan J. Crockford stands among the most resilient and clear-eyed voices in the often overheated debate over polar bears and climate change. A Canadian zoologist with more than four decades of experience in archaeozoology, paleozoology, forensic identification, and evolutionary biology, she has dedicated much of her professional life to understanding Arctic mammals through the lens of historical and empirical data rather than alarmist narratives from Greenpeace, David Attenborough, et al.
Her work exemplifies a real intellectual courage: the willingness to follow evidence where it leads, even when it challenges powerful orthodoxies and invites personal and professional backlash.
Crockford earned her undergraduate degree in zoology from the University of British Columbia, the same institution that shaped early polar bear biologist Ian Stirling. She completed a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary studies (biology and anthropology) at the University of Victoria in 2004, with a dissertation exploring animal domestication and vertebrate speciation.
Her 2006 book, “Rhythms of Life: Thyroid Hormone and the Origin of Species”, proposed a novel hypothesis linking thyroid rhythms to evolutionary changes, including aspects of polar bear evolution from brown bear ancestors.
For 15 years, until 2019, she served as an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria while co-owning Pacific Identifications Inc., a consulting firm specializing in identifying mammal, bird, and fish remains for museums, archaeologists, biologists, and even forensic police work. Her expertise in skeletal morphology and the Holocene history of Arctic animals provided a broad foundation for scrutinizing claims about polar bear vulnerability.
What truly distinguished Crockford was her decision, starting around 2012, to launch the blog PolarBearScience.com.
There, she synthesized peer-reviewed literature on polar bear ecology, population surveys, sea ice dynamics, and historical context—without conducting her own field studies—yet with a sharp eye for inconsistencies, data gaps, and overstatements in mainstream narratives. She argued that polar bears, as flexible predators capable of hunting seals on various ice types and even terrestrial foods when needed, were not facing the catastrophic collapse repeatedly predicted since the early 2000s.
Global population estimates, she noted, has risen from roughly 5,000–10,000 in the 1960s (post heavy hunting) to around 20,000–30,000 or more in recent assessments, with many subpopulations stable or increasing despite declining summer sea ice in some regions. She highlighted successful bears in areas such as the Chukchi Sea and Davis Strait, where bears were often fatter and more abundant amid changing conditions.
Her 2017 book, “The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened”, meticulously documented how media and activist messaging amplified worst-case scenarios from selective models while downplaying actual survey data showing resilience. Later works, including annual “State of the Polar Bear” reports for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, continued this tradition: tracking population trends, prey availability, body condition, and human-bear conflicts with transparent sourcing.
She also authored accessible titles like “Polar Bear Facts & Myths” (translated into multiple languages for children) and Polar Bears Have Big Feet for preschoolers, as well as the novel “Eaten”, a science-informed thriller about polar bear attacks. Her 2023 book, “Polar Bear Evolution”, further explored the species’ origins as a model of rapid adaptation.
Crockford’s contributions have oextended beyond polar bears. She brought a “big-picture” perspective—integrating evolutionary biology, paleoecology, and historical sea ice variability—to a field often dominated by short-term field observations and predictive modeling. During the Holocene Thermal Maximum (roughly 9,000–5,000 years ago), Arctic summers were warmer than today with less ice, yet polar bears survived and evolved.
She repeatedly emphasized that bears had endured multiple climate shifts without extinction, urging caution against treating every ice fluctuation as a harbinger of doom. Her blog became a go-to resource for those seeking data-driven analysis amid sensational headlines of drowning bears or starving cubs—images often drawn from isolated incidents or unrepresentative years.
This independence came at a cost. In 2019, the University of Victoria declined to renew her adjunct contract without a detailed explanation, despite her productivity as a speaker, author, and consultant. Crockford attributed it to pressure over her public dissent from the prevailing view that polar bears were gravely threatened by anthropogenic warming.
Critics, including some polar bear specialists and papers in journals like BioScience, accused her of cherry-picking data, lacking field credentials, and associating with organizations skeptical of climate catastrophe narratives (such as past payments from the Heartland Institute for literature summaries).
She countered her critics by disclosing details transparently and noting that her analyses drew on the same published surveys used by others. Detractors often highlighted her absence of peer-reviewed papers specifically modeling sea ice impacts on bear demographics, yet supporters value her role as a synthesizer, challenging groupthink. The episode has at least 0’fueled broader discussions about academic freedom and the politicization of science.
What makes Crockford’s story compelling is not just her data but her steadfast refusal to engage in fearmongering or advocacy-driven science. She consistently stated she makes no firm predictions about future polar bear numbers—only that current evidence does not support imminent catastrophe.
In an era when polar bears have become a potent symbol of climate activism (famously featured in several documentaries and campaigns), she has insisted on separating the realities of charismatic mammals from policy agendas. Her work has reminded her readers that conservation should rest on rigorous population monitoring, sustainable harvest management where applicable, and protection from overhunting or conflict—not on speculative models that have repeatedly overstated declines.
Beyond the controversies, Crockford has displayed a scientific humility and persistence. With over 40 years of identifying bones and reconstructing past ecosystems, she understood that species adapt, populations fluctuate, and narratives can outpace evidence. Her Substack and ongoing blogging reflect a commitment to accessible science for the public, countering what she saw as distortions in mainstream coverage. Whether one agrees with every interpretation, her emphasis on empirical trends over apocalyptic headlines encouraged critical thinking.
Susan Crockford’s legacy lies in her defense of evidence-based discourse against pressures to conform. In highlighting that polar bears have proven more resilient than many predicted—thriving in a modestly warming world with abundant sea-ice variability for hunting—she has consistently served science and public understanding.
She has shown that questioning dominant stories, when grounded in data, strengthens rather than undermines the world of conservation. For that intellectual honesty and dedication to zoological truth, she deserves climate sanity recognition as a distinctive and valuable contributor to our understanding of Arctic life. In a field too often swayed by symbolism and urgency, her voice urged us to look closer at the bears themselves: adaptable survivors, not fragile icons of impending doom.
Thanks for this. Susan Crockford stands on the opposite end of a spectrum from the Atlantic contributor with an Ivy bioscience PhD who wrote a silly piece a couple years ago based on a study of grizzly bones in California. The study, which I dug up and read, indicated that pre-colonial bears in Cali had eaten more forage, particularly berries, etc. Of course that stuff is still part of their typical diet. But the ‘money shot’ was that the introduction of cattle had changed the grizzly diet - an observation that must’ve been hard to miss, given the sophisticated hi-tech analysis the original study’s authors brought to bear (no pun).
But the Atlantic writer took the ball and ran with it in a transparently slanted direction, leaving her own dietary preferences - likely meatless - lurking just offstage. Two excluded points were glaring for their absence, and undermined the slanted interpretation, at least for anyone who bothered to think about it for an extra few seconds. First of all, it stands to reason that Natives and the other creatures sharing the precolonial grizzly landscape would’ve developed effective bear detection and avoidance sensitivities over millennia. Secondly, imported livestock and grazers would lack same, and thus present the bears with a rich and previously unavailable food source. That the bears took full advantage, probably leading to a bit of a population surge, and therefore incurred the deadly wrath of ranchers and vaqueros / cowboys as a result, seems likely.
None of that was articulated in the article. The emphasis was misplaced instead on the ecological depredations of colonialism. This was dated to the Cabrillo expedition that originally explored the California coast in 1539. The problem from there was twofold. No settlement of what is now the US state of California occurred for another 230 years; a few shipwrecked sailors came and went, but that was it. Settlement of places north of San Diego was marginal and sparse until about 1800. Secondly, the bone samples the original study were based on were not particularly numerous, with very few (less than 5, as I recall) dated to the immediate post-Cabrillo decades. The whole thing was a cock-up that diminished the author, her conclusions, and the magazine they were published in. It read like a puff piece for teddy bears. But it got traction and a similar article came out in the Smithsonian magazine shortly thereafter.