Rockridge Author's Surprising Polar Bear Encounters

Zac Unger, like many people, grew concerned about the plight of the polar bears amid reports of the melting ice caps and the bears' threatened existence.

But unlike most people, he decided to take direction action. He moved with his wife and their three small kids to one of the coldest, most remote places to live on the planet – Churchill, Manitoba, in northern Canada.

His plan, he told NPR, "was to become a hero of the environmental movement. I was going to go up to the Canadian Arctic, I was going to write this mournful elegy for the polar bears, at which point I'd be hailed as the next coming of John Muir and borne aloft on the shoulders of my environmental compatriots."

It didn't turn out that way. He ran into a lot more polar bears than he expected, as he recounts in the book about his adventures, Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye.

Unger is appearing at a book publication party at Diesel Books at 5433 College Ave. in Rockridge Thursday night, Feb. 7 at 7 p.m.

Unger is also a firefighter/paramedic and author of Working Fire: The Making of Fireman.