video recorded in Hudson Bay, Canada, showed a mother polar bear and her pair of cubs searching

for food with one of the cubs observed to experience seizures and both sadly perishing

within two days of the filming. Global warming is thought to be the cause of these and other

polar bear fatalities as accelerated sea ice melt diminishes both the space and time for

the bears to rest and to feed themselves. Climate change in the western Hudson Bay alone

has been noted to cause melting of ice three weeks earlier than 30 years ago, while the

freezing is now also delayed by several weeks.

In addition, a recent study by the World Wildlife Fund showed that for the past several years,

the bears and sometimes their cubs have been forced to swim up to 650 kilometers at a time

as their ice habitats disappear. The young ones are especially at risk because they are

not yet able to adjust to the cold. In fact, between 1987 and 2004, the population of polar

bears in the Hudson Bay area declined by 22%, with forecasts from the US government of their

complete extinction by 2050 in some areas. Kassie Siegel, director of US research group

Center for Biological Diversity, said, “Global warming isn’t a crisis that’s decades

away. It’s here now. The sad truth is that polar bears are already starving as global

warming melts the Arctic.”

We thank World Wildlife Fund, Center for Biological Diversity and all others for your efforts

to raise awareness about the tragic predicament facing the polar bears. May we act swiftly

to co-exist in harmony with nature for the safeguarding of all life on our planet. Expressing

her concern for all beings, Supreme Master Ching Hai during an October 2009 videoconference

in Indonesia emphasized the need for urgent actions to reverse the consequences of climate

change for all Earth’s inhabitants.

Videoconference with Supreme Master Ching Hai

Jarkata, Indonesia, October 22, 2009

Supreme Master Ching Hai: Now, according to expert scientists, the atmospheric temperatures

are rising so steeply that we do not have much time left to change. We have to halt

the meat consumption and the livestock raising. The greenhouse gases released from the animals,

from their waste, agricultural runoff, and the activities related to these massive operations

have been identified as the primary, the number one, cause of global warming. As the harmful

emissions of these animal raising operation cause atmospheric temperatures to get hotter

around the world, especially at the Arctic, the destructive effects are too many to count.

They include disturbances to birds’ migration patterns; homelessness of Arctic animals,

such as seals and penguins and polar bears, because the ice is nearly gone.

So please, everyone, plant veg, be veg and we can go green later when we’ve already

saved the planet. Save our planet, please.�