According to a report yesterday in the Los Angeles Times, the Bush administration will soon make a decision that in effect would officially acknowledge the environmental damage of global warming by naming its first potential victim, the polar bear. The Interior Department may reportedly act this week on its year-old proposal to list the polar bear as the first species threatened with extinction because of melting ice due to a warming planet. One study has shown a 22% drop in polar bear population since 1987 because of ice breaking up an average of three weeks earlier than it did 30 years ago, giving polar bears less time to hunt and sustain them until hunting resumes in the fall. Such evidence reportedly persuaded the Fish and Wildlife Service over a year ago to propose listing the polar bear as threatened with extinction because of vanishing ice. Then in September, the U.S. Geological Survey came up with an unexpectedly dire forecast that the habitat of two-thirds of the bears would disappear by 2050. In addition to the extra attention brought to climate change by listing the polar bear, a species widely known with perhaps unusually high positive association by a large segment of the public, as officially endangered with extinction, the practical impact could potentially be as wide-ranging as effecting regulation on emissions and causes of warming from various sources. In light of the scientific evidence that global warming is causing ice to melt at an extraordinary rate and that the polar bear population, while perhaps mainly in tact at the moment, is already reduced considerably in some areas and could be threatened with extinction in a few decades at the current rate of ice melting, should the US officially list the polar bear as a species in danger of extinction?