Brigitte Bardot, the French actress and sex symbol who became a prominent animal rights crusader, died on Sunday at the age of 91.
Bardot, who rose to international fame in the 1950s and ’60s before devoting much of her life to protecting wildlife and campaigning against cruelty to animals, passed away at her home in Saint-Tropez.
While Bardot’s name is still a household word and her legacy is multinational in scope, one episode in her life reverberated in Alaska.
It was in October 2008, when the then-74-year-old Bardot issued a sharply worded open letter to Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who was governor of Alaska until she was chosen by Sen. John McCain as his running mate.
Bardot condemned Palin’s support for Arctic oil and gas exploration, arguing that drilling threatened wildlife habitats in one of the world’s most sensitive regions. More sensitive, apparently, than her Saint-Tropez estate. She also sharply criticized Palin’s opposition to listing polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.
Earlier in 2008, Palin had sued the federal government to block the listing, contending that it could restrict oil and gas development and disputing the extent to which human-caused climate change was responsible for sea-ice loss affecting polar bear populations.
According to excerpts widely reported at the time by Huffington Post and others, Bardot wrote that these positions showed Palin’s “total lack of responsibility” and an “inability to protect or simply respect animal life.” She tied Alaska’s Arctic policies to broader criticisms of Palin’s views on climate change and gun rights, and she wrote that by denying human responsibility for global warming, Palin represented “a true environmental catastrophe” and “a disgrace to women.”
Of course, Palin was right and Bardot was ill-informed and wrong. There are about 26,000 bears, more than double what there were in the 1960s, primarily because of international agreements to limit hunting.
The Bardot letter also took aim at Palin’s own self-description as a “pitbull with lipstick,” a phrase that had become part of Palin’s campaign persona. Bardot implored Palin not to compare herself to dogs, writing that no pit bull, or any animal, was as dangerous as Palin herself.
This was Bardot’s pattern of inserting herself into international political debates when she believed animal life was at stake, even when those debates centered on Alaska’s balance between resource development and environmental protection, and even when she knew nothing of animal life in the Arctic. She had never visited Alaska.
Bardot, who founded her animal rights organization in 1986, went on to campaign against seal hunting, fur farming, and a range of practices she viewed as cruel to animals. She became a vegetarian in the 1980s but was never challenged or taken to task for her opposition to traditional hunting and trapping practices that were part of Arctic nutrition and survival.
With Bardot’s death, tributes have focused on both her cultural impact as a film star, sex symbol, and her role as an advocate for animals.
But in Alaska, Bardot’s 2008 clash with Palin may be remembered as one of many episodes in which outsiders, including celebrities, inserted themselves into Arctic policy debates with little grounding in the realities of northern life or the science and tradeoffs specific to the region.
Over the years, Alaskans have seen a parade of high-profile figures embrace Arctic causes from afar, sometimes positioning themselves as moral or scientific authorities despite limited firsthand experience. That pattern has included figures such as Al Gore, and even Ghislaine Maxwell, now serving a federal prison sentence for her child trafficking activities with Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell, too, once promoted herself internationally as an Arctic advocate, without grappling with the practical challenges of living, working, and governing in Alaska.
At top: Michel Bernanau photo of Bridget Bardot.
3 thoughts on “That time Bridget Bardot blasted Sarah Palin over oil, polar bears, pit bulls with lipstick”
Bridget … who? I’m guessing she won’t be missed and/or appreciated, kinda like my ex-wife!
The Democrat party will cling to anyone who has the ability to bend peoples ears regardless of the integrity of the spokesman they use to get their message across for whatever reason or self interest in profiting from the “message”. Hollywood is full of actors/actresses and pimps that are very useful tools that a lot of people think are “experts” but in reality they are just actors who are good at deception of their true character with a financial profit motive. Jane Fonda (“Hanoi Jane” heroic hippie from the sixties) was very useful for the communist regime portraying the American soldiers as the real “baby killers” which was completely false and she will never be forgiven except for the fools who still believe an “actress”.
Bardot is, or was, a clown, then and now. She made her living by exploiting men in real life and movies. Talk about MeToo in reverse….