With a deadline looming, the majestic polar bear, king of the icy north, is at the heart of another battle over global warming in the US, dpa reported.
The Bush administration is under order by a federal court to decide by Thursday whether the polar bear is protected under the 1973 Endangered Species Act because of impacts on its environment from the warming climate.
But with an administration that only recently conceded there was a connection between carbon emissions and global warming and which has been reluctant to undertake any mandated controls on greenhouse gasses, the polar bear's advocates were not optimistic about the outcome.
Current pressure to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act comes at a time when the Arctic ice has been melting at a rapid rate. Some scientists project an ice-free Arctic summer as early as 2050.
The polar bear, fighting tooth and nail to maintain a slippery toehold, is the so-called canary in the mine - a symbol of alarm among environmentalists and scientists.
In early 2005, Greenpeace, the Centre for Biological Diversity and the Natural Resources Defense Council began pushing the US Fish and Wildlife Service to protect Alaskan polar bears under the endangered species law.
The groups, acting as the polar-bear's lobby in Washington, got support from one of the divisions in the federal agency. The Marine Mammal Management office concluded that based on observed and projected losses of Arctic sea ice, the species should be classified as threatened.
They had support from the US Geological Survey data from Alaska showing the threat of global warming to critical polar bear hunting habitat.
But the decision to protect the bears has not yet carried up through the layers of bureaucracy to the political level, where Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, an appointee of US President George W Bush, must make the final call.
Kempthorne met in Ottawa last week with Canada's environment minister to discuss the polar bear, but no details about the discussion were released to the media. Canada is home to two-thirds of the 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears living in the circumpolar region. The Canadian population has seen at least a 22 per cent decline in recent years.
Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for Kempthorne, declined to comment on what the decision will be.
"This has been almost our sole topic of conversation for almost a year now," she said. "If we follow what the court has scheduled us to do we will make some decision by Thursday."
Her comments left open that Kempthorne may defy the court order and make no decision at all. That could stall the issue for time until a new president takes office in January 2009.
But if the polar-bear lobby - which brought the case to federal court out of frustration over three years of inaction - get their way, the Arctic marine predator would become the first animal in US jurisdiction to be listed as a consequence of global warming.
The bear is already under huge pressure from loss of habitat, as more animals succumb to exhaustion from increasingly longer and tougher swims through open water in search of food where once there was ice sufficient for fishing.
Members of the species that reach land in Hudson Bay, the southernmost reach of polar bear habitat, for example, are showing signs of extreme weight loss, scientists say.
"We're talking about losing an entire ecosystem," said Melanie Duchin, a veteran Greenpeace global warming and energy planner.
"The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world. It is a harbinger of what we are expecting in the rest of the world in the next 25 or 30 years," Duchin said.
As temperatures climb, there is a multiplying effect as tundra blanketing the Arctic region also defrosts, releasing huge amounts of methane that contributes to carbon emissions.
Duchin also pointed out that since the fight began in 2005 for endangered status, the same interior department has approved some 2.7 billion dollars in oil and gas leases in the Chukchi Sea, prime habitat for half of the US population of polar bears.
Even a decision to protect the polar bear would be a huge challenge for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. It would be immediately responsible for establishing a remediation plan to restore polar bear habitat.
"Agencies would be obligated not to adversely modify their critical habitat," said Scott Schliebe, the lead Fish and Wildlife specialist on polar bears, who said the biggest challenge for his team is "how to address the loss of the polar icecap."
"We're really anxious to see this effort come to a conclusion. We're hopeful it's the right one," he said.