I refuse to pretend the electrocuted New Mexico bear wasn't trespassing

The discourse has been entirely hijacked by emotional appeals. A bear wanders out of the drought-stricken New Mexico wilderness, scales a high-voltage electric pole in search of food, and ultimately perishes. The onlookers wring their hands. The local news runs a tear-jerker segment about the tragic realities of habitat loss. The entire media ecosystem immediately aligns to frame this as a systemic failure. At no point in this exhausting news cycle has anyone paused to ask the obvious question: what gave this bear the right to interfere with critical infrastructure?

We need to have a serious conversation about personal responsibility in the animal kingdom, starting with the blatant disregard for public utilities. Yes, there is a historic drought in the American Southwest. Yes, natural food sources have evaporated, forcing wildlife closer to human settlements. We all know the macro-environmental trends. But we have spent decades building a delicate, highly calibrated electrical grid to power our air conditioners through these increasingly brutal summers, and this animal’s response to a slight shift in its ecosystem is to climb thirty feet in the air and risk a community-wide brownout.

The onlookers who gathered to film the animal’s so-called plight are part of the problem. They stood at the base of the pole, pointing their smartphones upward, projecting human desperation onto a creature that frankly should have known better than to touch exposed wiring. They demanded rescue operations. They demanded the power company cut the lines, as if the uninterrupted flow of electricity to thousands of paying customers should be paused just because a large mammal refused to forage at ground level like a respectable member of the trophic pyramid.

I recently sat next to a senior utility executive during a rather tense, off-the-record plenary session at COP, and we discussed exactly this kind of entitlement over a very reasonably sourced local sea bass. The transition to a greener economy requires shared sacrifice. We cannot reach our net-zero targets if every time a forest dries up, the local apex predators decide to turn our grid assets into their own personal jungle gyms. The emissions generated by dispatching a fleet of heavy-duty diesel utility trucks to scrape a carcass off a transformer entirely wipes out the carbon savings of a dozen electric vehicles. The bear, whether it intended to or not, actively committed an act of climate sabotage, dragging our collective environmental progress backward just to satisfy a momentary caloric urge.

This is what the activists refuse to understand when they publish their little infographics about shrinking habitats. They treat the wildlife as passive victims, entirely stripping them of agency. A bear is a massive, highly capable creature with apex status. If it cannot adapt its dietary habits to survive a routine, entirely predictable summer dry spell without resorting to property destruction, then perhaps we need to ask hard questions about the evolutionary fitness of the species. Nobody forced it to climb the pole. It saw a shortcut, it bypassed the regulatory framework of the local zoning laws, and it faced the consequences.

Consider the sheer arrogance of the act. Electric poles are not designed for hibernation. They are not giant, humming trees dispensing salmon. They are the arteries of American commerce. When a bear inserts itself into that circulatory system, it is essentially declaring a class war on the ratepayers who subsidize that infrastructure. The animal did not pay a connection fee. It did not apply for a high-altitude easement. It simply took what it wanted, assuming the safety net of human intervention would catch it before it touched the wrong wire.

Bears, in particular, have become the poster children for this brand of ecological entitlement. They wander into residential neighborhoods, tip over garbage cans that cost homeowners upwards of forty dollars to replace, and now, apparently, they are scaling municipal power structures to survey the damage they intend to cause. It is a level of brazen intimidation that we would never accept from a human demographic, yet we excuse it because they possess a layer of fur and a purportedly tragic backstory. I have seen the same behavioral patterns in anti-growth activists, and the overlap is frankly chilling.

I was reviewing a recent ESG report from a major regional energy provider—one of the few companies actually doing the hard work of balancing stakeholder value with baseline grid functionality—and the financial drain caused by these unauthorized biological incursions is staggering. Utility companies are spending tens of millions of dollars annually on raptor-safe insulators, squirrel guards, and public awareness campaigns that the bears clearly are not reading. This is an invisible tax levied on every single household, all to subsidize the reckless thrill-seeking of woodland creatures who refuse to respect the boundaries of private enterprise.

We are coddling the wilderness, and the wilderness is taking advantage of us. If we allow wildlife to use climate change as a blanket excuse for trespassing, we are setting a dangerous precedent for every hungry coyote who wants to chew through a fiber-optic cable, or every thirsty deer that decides to drink from a municipal cooling tower. The natural world must learn to coexist with our infrastructure, which means learning to stay away from it.

The American Southwest is baking, the forests are indeed a tinderbox, and the animals are being forced into our suburbs. But sure, let’s pretend that forgiving this blatant violation of utility easements is somehow an environmental victory, rather than acknowledging that the true stranded assets here were the hard-working citizens who had to reset their digital microwaves.