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Most people love polar bears.

If you doubt that statement, then you have obviously missed Germany’s Knute mania and Flocke fanaticism that has become global. We just can’t get enough of the Ursus maritimus, “bundles of love and hell at once.”

This adoration comes despite the fact — or perhaps because of it — that polar bears are at the very top of the food chain in the most hostile and barren place on Earth. They are efficient and adaptable predators, well fit for their difficult life in the Arctic.

They’ve become somewhat of a cause celebre lately, as well — the visible image of a rapidly warming world, the canary in the coal mine of global warming.

So when I picked up this large picture book with the obviously biased title, “The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World,” by wildlife photographer Steven Kazlowski and others, I admit, I was expecting a treacly, preachy diatribe on the evils of man and technology, filled with pictures of cute polar bear cubs and their parents, and the beat-it-into-my-head message that global warming MUST BE STOPPED. It doesn’t help when the accompanying press release touts breathlessly: “(The book) is a photographic journey through the changing Arctic landscape and its animal inhabitants … Kazlowski’s eye-opening imagery is juxtaposed with telling commentary on nature’s warming signs in climate change.”

I was wrong on most counts. Far from being overly sweet and anthropomorphic, Steven’s exquisite photos show us real bears in their natural habitat — swimming in the ocean, sliding down ice mountains and even covered in blood after a meal. They are raw and sometimes, cute.

Then there are the other denizens of the North — bowhead and beluga whales, ringed and bearded seals, Arctic foxes, birds of all feathers and habits, caribou and moose, and man.

Kazlowski also shows us the habitat itself — large ice floes, soaring cliffs where terns and murres nest, open leads where the local Inupiat wait for bowhead whales to surface, and even civilization, with all its trash and detritus. It’s a fitting backdrop to the message of the accompanying text.

Kazlowski spent more than eight years traveling in the most inhospitable parts of the world, living and working with the Natives, listening to their stories and tales and advice. This isn’t an easy job, as he tells the reader in his preface and through his journal notes, and even some of the photos. Weeks can go by when the temperature sits at 50 below zero; camera equipment suffers from cold and/or damp; wind and snowstorms tear through the landscape; ice breaks and rises and falls without a moment’s notice. Sometimes the right shot presents itself, and your lens is cracked. And sometimes the bears just don’t cooperate, or even show up.

It takes perseverance, fortitude and lots of luck to get decent shots.

The accompanying essays are short of preaching and conjecture, long on fact and science. These are, as the publicity notes, noted people in the environmental fields: Theodore Roosevelt IV, active conservationist and chair of the Pew Center for Global Climate Change; and environmental writers Charles Wohlforth, Richard Nelson, Daniel Glick and Nick Jans of “The Grizzly Maze” fame. There’s also a conversation with Inupiaq elder Arnold Brower Sr., captain of the ABC whaling crew in Barrow. The essays have one overriding theme — the climate is changing, no matter what the cause, and we’d better accept and do something about it, because as the polar bear goes, so do we all.

“In the far north, the ice conditions are changing, affecting not only polar bears but all creatures that are sustained by a relationship with the Arctic ice,” Kazlowski tells us. Ice is thinner, melts earlier, freezes later; bears and walruses both find themselves stranded on shore for weeks at a time when there’s no ice near. Drowned polar bears are being seen more often, because although these animals are prodigious swimmers, they have to swim gaps of hundreds of miles between floes. The young and even the strong don’t always make it.

Lest you think this is just another anti-technology treatise, let me tell you — this book is filled with facts that will intrigue the thinking reader. For example, polar bears are the youngest of the ursus species, having only diverged from their brethren and taking to the ice a mere 200,000 to 250,000 years ago. When food is scarce, the polar bear’s metabolism slows down to save energy.

Whether or not you believe in global warming, whether you agree that humans are the root cause and that mankind is on the brink of disaster, whether you support drilling for oil in ANWR or embrace the environmental cause, Kazlowski’s book is worth reading. The essays are thoughtful and well written, with facts laid out and arguments presented logically and objectively. The message is clear, but the messengers understand that beating us to death with rhetoric and hyperbole might not be the best way to go about things.

But the reason to run out to the bookstore and get this book is visual. Kazlowski’s photos are superb — elegant, breathtaking, magnificent — all the hyperbole not used in the text can be attached to the pictures. They are stunning visual compositions that show the Arctic in all its savage, raw, beautiful wonder. The bears pictured here are not stuffed toys or marketing creations. They are Nature’s creatures, playful and loving at times, savage and wild at others. If ever a cause had a face, it would be this.

The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World

by Steven Kazlowski

Braided River Publications,

March 2008, $39.99