The polar bear, really, was just a prop to underscore the problem of climate change—a problem that, if left unaddressed, begs the question of whether addressing anything else is worthwhile. But now everyone had been yanked into a frothing, bottomless argument about the prop itself. Six years after she’d filed the original petition to list the bear, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Kassie Siegel was in a federal court in Washington arguing the definitions of “endangered” and “threatened” again when, finally, the judge asked her: “What does all that mean in the real world?”
