It's not everyday you encounter a polar bear on Vancouver's famous Sea Wall. Especially a really cranky one raising awareness about the environmental impacts of the Alberta Oil Sands industry.

You can check out the latest pictures we have uploaded to our Flickr account as part of DeSmog's Arctic Front initiative.

We have polar bears deployed all over Canada and since the initiative has become so popular, we now have polar bears deployed all over the world, including: Colombia, India, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Australia, Israel, and the United States (LA, Texas and DC).

If you're interested in joining up (and dressing up), please drop us a line at: desmogblog[at]gmail[dot]com.

We also have a very active Facebook group if you would like to join up.

Here's a few factoids about the massive environmental impacts the Alberta Oil Sands are having on our environment:

• Oil Sands operations could eventually cover 149,000 square kilometers of pristine forest - that's an area roughly the size of Florida.

• Each day the oil sands use 600 million cubic feet of natural gas to, in effect, melt the tarry sludge into a usable form - that's enough natural gas to heat more than 3 million Canadian homes.

• Producing a barrel of oil from the tar sands produces three times more greenhouse gas than a barrel of conventional oil.

• Oil sands operations use about the same amount of freshwater in a year that the entire City of Calgary uses (population 1 million) - 90% of this freshwater ends up in toxic tailing ponds.

• Toxic tailing ponds already cover more than 50 square kilometers and are considered to be one of largest man-made structures in the world.