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The big debate: Endangered polar bears

‘You know what makes me sick? “Human beings” who think they are so bloody damned important that the rest of the planet can go to hell.’

The story: Polar bears have been added to the endangered species list. A Tucson group was among three to petition the Interior Department to designate the bears as endangered.

Your take: “And they taste a little like chicken,” says Jim G., who, like much of the Citizen’s online community, isn’t getting too overheated about the plight of the bears. Scott F. is similarly blithe about the bears’ endangerment: “My bumper sticker? ‘Save the polar bears – feed them a diet of spotted owl and red squirrel.’ ”

One group that readers would like to see fall through the ice are “greenies,” as Chris C. calls them, who force the U.S. to “spend a buttload of money . . . on a made-up problem,” as 1broken 1 calls global warming.

A few readers were more ecologically minded, among them Jen C., who made the comment atop this column and who wishes humanity’s “parasites” would give back the natural resources “that you have destroyed or benefited from.” That’s unlikely, Steve D. says: “Those of you who are adamantly opposed to polar bear protection clearly don’t connect the economic value that protecting biodiversity brings.”

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TO LEARN MORE
Read what the Center for Biological Diversity has to say about the polar bear.

Citizen Online Archive, 2006-2009

This archive contains all the stories that appeared on the Tucson Citizen's website from mid-2006 to June 1, 2009.

In 2010, a power surge fried a server that contained all of videos linked to dozens of stories in this archive. Also, a server that contained all of the databases for dozens of stories was accidentally erased, so all of those links are broken as well. However, all of the text and photos that accompanied some stories have been preserved.

For all of the stories that were archived by the Tucson Citizen newspaper's library in a digital archive between 1993 and 2009, go to Morgue Part 2

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