Photographs courtesy of explore.org Collage by Tessa Forrest
WORDS BY OLIVIA ROSANE
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: The air is getting crisper, the trees are tinting yellow, and the gorging brown bears of Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve are furiously converting sockeye salmon into majestic rolls of undulating flesh.
That’s right—Fat Bear Week begins today. If you don’t know what Fat Bear Week is, it might be the one good thing left on the internet. Every year since it was launched in 2014 (originally as Fat Bear Tuesday), thousands to millions of people follow the bears of Katmai National Park’s Brooks Falls as they feast before their six-month hibernation. Following along on live cams, spectators vote March-Madness style for which bear “best exemplifies fatness.”
As Katmai media ranger Naomi Boak put it, “I don’t know how much more joy anyone could have than watching a bear get fat and succeed.”
There are countless reasons to love Fat Bear Week—the visual transformation from stick figures to 1,000-pound orbs; the drama of fishing-spot standoffs; the tenderness of surprise cub adoptions; the relief of witnessing an ecosystem that is not only surviving, but thriving. Yet, as I prepare to follow my fifth Fat Bear Week, one reason stands out: The ursine corpulence contest may be the one media event in U.S. culture that demonstrates a healthy relationship to consumption.
View this post on Instagram
To say that the U.S. has a vexed relationship with consumption is an understatement. On the one hand, the nation as a whole, and especially the rich, undeniably does too much of it. If everyone on Earth lived like U.S. residents, we would require 5.1 Earth-like planets to sustain us. Still, in the U.S., wealth—signified by big spending—remains the ultimate marker of success.
At the same time, U.S. culture shames anyone it perceives as consuming wrongly or too much. This extends to people with more body fat (despite the fact that weight loss depends more on food quality than quantity); hoarders; or people perceived as spending beyond their means, like food stamp recipients buying lobster.
Perhaps some of this can be laid at the feet of the nation’s Puritan forebears, who saw physical pleasure as a sin, yet counted material prosperity as a sign that they were part of the elect. Perhaps some if it is a disdain for capitalism itself—a system that requires spending to keep spinning, but could (or should) topple over entirely as wealth inequities widen.
“I don’t know how much more joy anyone could have than watching a bear get fat and succeed.”
Whatever the case, Fat Bear Week offers a marvelous antidote. The bears’ relationship to consumption is beautifully straightforward: They eat as many salmon as they can to survive the winter hibernation, which is more extreme than that of other mammals.
“They don’t eat, they don’t drink, they don’t urinate, they don’t defecate,” former ranger and Fat Bear Week founder Mike Fitz explained.
The splurge isn’t gluttonous, but imperative. The weight they bring into the den with them maintains their body heat, provides the energy for their metabolic processes, and—in the case of pregnant female bears—sees them through childbirth and milk production.
“They need enough body fat not only to support their own survival, but that of their newborn cubs,” Fitz said.
During Fat Bear Week, the bears aren’t shamed for their largesse. The opposite, in fact. When bear 435, Holly, took the title in 2019, she was crowned “queen of corpulence” without any hint of sarcasm or mockery.
The bears’ bacchanal doesn’t benefit just them, either. They are “ecosystem engineers” because “they distribute nutrients from salmon across the landscape,” Fitz explained. Unlike the toxic waste spewing from human consumption, the bears’ waste is healthful, nourishing trees and giving gulls, eagles, and other scavengers early access to salmon carcasses before the fish would die after spawning later in the season. Katmai National Park may be the one trickle down economy that actually works.
View this post on Instagram
And, with live feeds to follow the action and increasing internet virality, millions of distant humans are beneficiaries.
Boak said that connecting to nature through the bear cams is “healing” for many people, and in one recent case, potentially life-saving: A lost hiker appeared to mouth the words, “I need help” into the Dumpling Mountain cam, and livestream viewers, Explore.org, and park rangers coordinated to rescue him.
Unlike consumption in the U.S., the abundance of Fat Bear Week is created by limits. One of the reasons Katmai is such a successful ecosystem, Fitz explained, is the way that the state of Alaska manages the Bristol Bay Fishery.
“They do an excellent job, and have for the last several decades, to ensure that enough salmon are swimming upstream to sustain the run,” he said.
Each year, 800,000 to 2,000,000 salmon return to the Naknek River, which feeds Katmai National Park, to breed, explained Bristol Bay fishery biologist Travis Elison. If that number isn’t being met, the state will close fishing during certain tides. Elison said that the fishers, the majority of whom are lifers or come from fishing families, respect the need for this.
“Everyone kind of understands that there might be a bad season here or there,” Elison said. “As long as we make sure you get enough fish up river, then we’ll be able to do it again in the future.”
If everyone on Earth lived like U.S. residents, we would require 5.1 Earth-like planets to sustain us.
What’s good for the bears is good for the humans, too, and the fishery didn’t invent salmon management, Boak pointed out. Humans have lived sustainably in the park’s current borders for at least 9,000 years.
“We always have to think of people as part of the natural mix,” Boak said.
But beyond Bristol Bay, capitalism has spent nearly half a millennium trying to split human profits and labor from the natural mix. The system demands that abundance be unabating—that it should be always summer and never winter, and in the process is turning winter into summer and summer into hell.
There are other ways of organizing resources, however. Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics, for example, envisions a sweet spot of consumption which sustains humanity without overshooting planetary boundaries—where the inner ring of the doughnut represents societal needs and the outer bound delineates Earth’s limits.
View this post on Instagram
Another stand-in for the doughnut might be the round of fat circling the belly of a satisfied Katmai bear. They exemplify what can happen when the outer edge of the doughnut is respected while allowing the inner ring to be met: Limits make Katmai’s abundance possible, and abundance allows bears to meet their needs. This circular ecosystem regenerates rather than depletes.
It will be easier for our society to tighten its belt within planetary boundaries if it’s done from a place of unabashed love of the things of this Earth, from bears play-fighting on full stomachs to a perfectly cooked salmon flake melting on our own tongues.
Both Boak and Fitz insisted that celebrating the success and wholeness of places like Katmai is essential for conservation. Fitz called it a “beacon of hope” in a “wounded world.”
“We need to protect places like this,” Boak added.
The bears of Fat Bear Week—and the ecosystem they feed on and are fed by—give us a model of consumption to both preserve and emulate: one that pursues physical needs earnestly, shamelessly, and playfully while respecting the boundaries that make its bounty possible.
Join our membership community. Support our work, receive a complimentary subscription to Atmos Magazine, and more.
It’s Fat Bear Week—the Paragon of Healthy Consumption
