ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Late every summer, hulking white bears gather outside a tiny Alaska Native village on the edge of the continent, far above the Arctic Circle, to feast on whale carcasses left behind by hunters and to wait for the deep cold to freeze the sea.
It’s a spectacle that once brought 1,000 or more tourists each year to Kaktovik, the only settlement in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in a phenomenon sometimes called “last chance tourism” — a chance to see magnificent sights and creatures before climate change renders them extinct.
The COVID-19 pandemic and an order from the federal government halting boat tours to see the bears largely ended Kaktovik’s polar bear tourism amid concerns that the tiny village was being overrun by outsiders…