Laden with familiar tropes from both factual and fictional crime writing, the story of Inmate #2020 directs our attention to two interrelated scenes: the crime scene and the scene of punishment, where the latter orients us to investigate the former.5 Yet our close attention to this specific crime scene , or others like it, can blind usāno matter how carefully we comb the area for visible clues āto one of the most important root causes for #2020ās repeat offending. In this case, it is not enough to arm ourselves with a range of criminological theories to explain why #2020 commits crime, precisely because these theoriesāwhether they include examinations of his psychology, socioeconomic class, age and sex, or discuss the city and culture in which his crimes took placeāhave been developed to account for crimes with human perpetrators. First and foremost, Inmate #2020 is not human. He is a polar bear who is doing time in the polar bear jail situated in Churchill, a town that has proclaimed itself to be āthe polar bear capitalā of the world. In Churchill, the human inhabitants have (re)structured their interactions with polar bears along the lines of a rudimentary criminal justice system, one built on the principle of deterrence and the spirit of conservation . Indeed, the process of imprisoning ābadā polar bears has been framed as a conservation effort that represents a marked improvement over meting out death sentences to recidivistic bears. However, the criminal justice analogy at the heart of this initiative assumes that there is a time-bound, body-bound criminal eventāthat is, a harmful incident that not only occurs at a specific time and place, but is also committed by a perpetrator who takes on a single bodily form.Behind thick steel bars, Inmate #2020 1 slowly paces the 20-foot by 16-foot cell. With his surprisingly lean, white body, the older inmate occupies one of the 28 cells in a jail 2 located on the western banks of the Hudson Bay in northern Canada. Imprisoned for the past 30 days, he has only been fed water, so that his gnawing pangs of hunger will serve as a powerful deterrent to any poor behavioural choices in the future. His release date has yet to be determined because his pattern of recidivism has marked him as higher risk than the other inmates in this small jail. To prepare for his release, state agents will forcibly relocate him to a remote area of the Arctic . Upon release, he will be constantly monitored. As a material reminder of his imprisonment, his ear will be tagged with a radio and his inner lip tattooed, both of which will aid in identifying, tracking and surveilling him in the future. As he awaits his release from what some have called the first, largest and most innovative jail of its kind in the world, let us consider Inmate #2020ās crime.With his dark eyes, strong jaw and deadpan expression, Inmate #2020 has been described by both bystanders and officials as an unassumingly quiet, but cunning predator; indeed, the upper half of his face is as calm as the lower half is violent. 3 Prowling the small town of Churchill, Manitoba, he has been repeatedly apprehended for trespassing and dumpster diving. Scrounging amidst the scraps of waste left in garbage heaps, Inmate #2020 searches for food in order to survive. Caught at gunpoint after patrol officers were alerted to his presence by a hospital workerās blood-curdling scream, #2020 was thrown in jail on Halloween night for aggressively breaking into the local hospital out of hunger. His presence, and the presence of others like him, have been a constant source of fear for the townās residents, many of whom will not go out at night, or will refuse to go out alone in the dark. Operating seven days a week and 365 days a year, a 24-hour telephone hotline 4 has been set up for residents to proactively report their sightings of these dangerous trespassers. Since the beginning of the year, the hotline has received reports of 226 sightings, including 28 during the week of Halloween. As a result of these reports, Inmate #2020 became one of five new inmates in the jail that week.
When we focus on the visible spectacles of a polar bearās hungry violence in terms of a ācriminalā event, we consider human encounters with a polar bear as blood-pounding, adrenaline-pumping incidents, so viscerally formed that these scenes are permeated with immediacy, urgency and human fear. We attend to the steady ringing of the 24-hour BEAR hotline in Churchill and become concerned about overcrowding at the polar bear jail (Pereira 2016). In these sensational, emotionally saturated representations of human encounters with nonhumans, however, we fail to notice what Rob Nixon has called āslow violence .ā According to Nixon (2011: 2), slow violence is a relatively invisible āviolence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.ā To see slow violence , in this case, requires a recognition that Inmate #2020 is reacting to the delayed and nonlinear effects of anthropogenic climate change in the Arctic. Relatedly, it requires an acknowledgement that #2020 is, in fact, a victim of human-induced environmental degradation as much as he is a nonhuman perpetrator of various kinds of petty and violent ācrimesā against human victims. In instances, such as this, victims can transform into perpetrators out of necessity, and perpetrators can themselves be victims in the staggered thawing of Arctic sea ice that has long been in the making. If we are going to investigate why polar bear alert systems are increasingly activated in northern towns and villages, where there have been unprecedented losses in Arctic sea-ice (ADS 2019; Labe 2019; Richter-Menge et al. 2016), then we should consider how these calls double as warning signs of slow violenceās effects. Losses in sea-ice have restricted the polar bearsā capacity to hunt seals, their primary food source, and compelled them to travel on land during hunting season in search of non-traditional sources of food, such as human garbage. Increases in the number of human-polar bear encounters (see Dickie 2018) have been cause for declaring a state of emergencyāas in the Russian town Belushya Guba in February 20196āleading a terrorized public to call for help. But what might those calls mean?
Provocatively expressed by Frances Ferguson (2013: 33), the phone is ringing off the hook and panic is sinking in because āthe sudden, sharp consciousness of [climate] change [has come] upon us like the ominous tones of an intruder bent on murder when the babysitter picks up the telephone receiver in a horror film: āIām in the house.āā Rather than look outside for strangers in bear form, danger is already in the house. Our house is now on the verge of collapse, having slowly deteriorated over time without much notice. In this metaphor, the house, our shared residence, is Earth, and it has been fraying at the edges with devastating implications. Drawing on climate forecasts made as early as 1988, James Lovelock (2007) describes how the āunfreezingā of Greenland and the Arctic basin alone would produce a range of cascading effects that could dramatically transform ecosystems and human civilizations around the globe. Such unfreezing has been a consequence of global warming. Because the record-breaking heat over the past decade has not bee...