Recently the pictures of an emancipated polar bear has been making the rounds of the news sites and blogs.

Photographer Paul Nicklen and filmmakers from the conservation group Sea Legacy posted a video of the starving bear and stated that they believed its condition was a direct result of Climate Change. This has left many on both sides of the issue arguing whether that is the true reason for its condition.

Most who wanted to dismiss that Climate Change is happening and had any responsibility for this bear's starvation, argued that it was possible that the bear was just old or suffering from a disease or injury.

And that is true.

It is also hard not to argue that even if this is true, that changes in the Arctic climate contribute to a real and documented decline of the polar bear population we have seen over the past couple of decades. Studies have predict that the effects of Climate Change will be greater and happen faster in the Arctic region as sea ice decreases. Polar bears are hunters on the ice, waiting around holes for seals to surface so they can attack unseen. With no ice, they are left to try and hunt at the shorelines, where seals can see them coming and flee.

So can we say that this particular polar bear was killed by Climate Change?

Probably not but the "Collapse" of our modern civilization, the Long Descent back into another Dark Age, that we talk about here on Green Wizards isn't just Climate Change. Resource depletion, economic and financial disruption, income inequality, social strife and war, and yes Climate Change are all factors that happen to a society when it runs up against the Limits our Planet imposes when an Empire gets too large to be supported.

We can not peg the death of that polar bear on any one of these, and yet we can peg it on all of them.

When last year Europe was flooded with migrants, many forgot that it was a drought in Syria which contributed to the social strife and eventual civil war there. People couldn't find food to feed their children and when that happens, they fight and they flee.

The pictures of a starving polar bear are heart breaking, but I fear the true Face of our Future Collapse will look like this.

Is that picture too harsh?

Children are dying all over the World and I can't seem to see where anyone gives a damned?

We as a Society loose our minds when a person, whose only claim to fame seems to be that we want to hear about her, balances a glass on her butt and posts the picture of it to the Internet. We spend hours and hours talking about a fictional woman with dragons, who tells us "Winter is Coming!".

The people who we elect to represent us and govern us, play partisan games and tell us things that we all know are lies, yet we let them. They certainly will never know want or hunger and we blindly support them while they screw us all for their "thirty pieces of silver". We let snarl words and false boogie men like immigrants frighten us over things that really won't effect us, and we let the real problems in our World fester untouched.

I don't know but I honestly have no hope that we can get our collective act together in time.

It is up to us each, individually to protect what we can. Maybe with just some of us doing that, we can preserve a little of what we have learned through the coming Long Descent.

I can hope for that at least.