The World of Coca-Cola is a ninety-two-thousand-square-foot attraction less than a mile from Coke’s headquarters, in downtown Atlanta. Taste It, an all-you-can-drink soda exhibit featuring more than a hundred flavors, lies near the entrance to Perfect Pauses Theatre, where Coke’s television commercials play on a continuous loop. Outside the Vault of the Secret Formula, a seven-foot-tall polar bear stands guard three hundred and sixty-three days a year, hugging children, posing for photographs, and even, on occasion, starring in marriage proposals. Each year, a million people pay as much as sixteen dollars a ticket to meet Coke’s “most beloved character,” a fluffy suit of synthetic white fur with a human inside, pulling strings to form a saccharine, glass-eyed grin.

In 1922, Coke débuted, in a French print ad, its polar-bear mascot—a jolly animal squirting soda from a bottle into the mouth of a thirsty sun. In the following decades, the image of a mother polar bear and her two cubs became a standby for the brand, used to denote the start of the holiday season. In 1993, Coke introduced its first animated bear, in “Northern Lights,” a TV spot that shows polar bears gathering to drink Coke and watch the aurora borealis. The company returned to this device in a 2012 spot, in which two bears sit on a couch of snow, cheering at the Coke Polar Bowl. Polar bears reflect “the best attributes we like to call ‘human,’ ” the creator of the first animated ad has said. “The bears are cute, mischievous, playful and filled with fun.”

In 1980, John Berger observed that, in the industrialized world, “no other source of imagery can begin to compete with that of animals.” So, too, in advertising: a 2010 study found that out of eleven hundred and fifty-one brand characters, more than half were nonhuman animals. Large wild animals—polar bears, tigers (Frosted Flakes’s Tony the Tiger), crocodiles (Lacoste)—appear less often than birds (Froot Loops’s Toucan Sam, Aflac’s duck), which are the most popular icons, followed by domesticated animals (Borden’s Elsie the Cow, the Energizer Bunny). Many of these characters were “born,” as some academics who study them put it, between 1950 and the early nineteen-sixties, a time when few thought to ask: What happens if our mascot dies off in the wild?

Extinction has always been part of life on earth, but current rates are alarmingly high—a thousand times greater than what scientists call the background (or normal) rate of extinction, according to a recent study. Between 1970 and 2010, according to the Living Planet Index, the earth witnessed a fifty-two-per-cent decline in populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. The status of large wild animals, in particular, is a dismal litany of loss: only thirty-two hundred to four thousand tigers survive in the wild, and African forest elephants could disappear within a decade. But despite a general awareness of such figures, few consumers associate species loss with Tony the Tiger or Melvin the Elephant (of Kellogg’s Choco Krispis in South America). Barbara Phillips, a professor of marketing at the University of Saskatchewan who has studied brand characters for eighteen years, explained to me that the more abstract and anthropomorphized a character is, the less consumers tend to think about the animal as it exists in the wild. “The further the character gets away from being a real character in the world,” she said, “the less a company needs to worry about what happens in the real world.”

Coca-Cola’s polar bear might be the rare exception to this rule. Coke’s animated bears appeared fifteen years before the animal received protection, in 2008, as a threatened species in the United States under the Endangered Species Act. The timing coincided with rising awareness that Arctic sea ice is melting, which has led polar bears to become the “poster species of climate change,” in the words of a 2013 study. According to the fifth assessment report of the International Panel on Climate Change, which was completed this week, in fifty to seventy years, polar bears won’t be able to live and hunt on most of the sea ice they can access today. “The Coke bear is facing a unique cultural situation,” Phillips told me. “The cultural meaning of the animal is changing. Polar bears aren’t just cute white bears who drink Coke. There’s this overlap between the advertising world and the real world. When people think of polar bears, they are thinking of a drowning polar bear—and that is not a happy polar bear.”

Polar bears sell products other than Coke—frozen vegetables, for instance, in this 2010 spot for Birds Eye. But a Nissan electric-car ad from that same year illustrates the shifting association with the animal. The commercial tells the improbable story of a polar bear’s journey to a leafy suburb, to give an electric-car driver a hug. Environmental groups have also produced dramatic fundraising videos of polar bears drowning in the slushy floes of the melting arctic, while activists in eerily lifelike polar-bear costumes make frequent appearances at protests. In a 2008 campaign to promote mass transit in New York City, white garbage bags were tied to street grates; when subway trains passed underneath, the bags inflated so as to create an uncanny scene of a mother bear and her cub walking down the street.

In contrast with these realistic representations of polar bears, Coca-Cola’s use of anthropomorphic polar-bear iconography has intensified. Brand faithful can now buy polar-bear tumblers for $14.95, and plush bears for $99.95 at Coca-ColaStore.com. A recent holiday spot included a family of polar bears making a snow polar bear. And last year the company produced an animated film about the antics of polar-bear siblings Jak, Zook, and Kaia.

Coke declined interview requests for this story, but the company has made some efforts in recent years to acknowledge the true state of the polar bear, too. Most significantly, it pledged some two million dollars to the World Wildlife Fund, delivered across five years starting in 2011, and it has supplemented that money by soliciting three million dollars in direct donations from consumers. The company touted these donations in a 2013 ad that ran in Europe, depicting actual polar bears in the wild. Its partnership with the W.W.F. has included such initiatives as an augmented-reality exhibit at the Science Museum, in London, and a Web site, called Arctic Home, about W.W.F. research efforts and Coke’s contributions to them. One of the four polar bears featured on the site is N26135, a thirteen-year-old female. After being tagged in April, 2013, she travelled from Norway to central Russia, walking “along the edge of the ice, hunting seals along the way.”

With these efforts, Coca-Cola has cast itself as the polar bear’s savior, in exchange for a fraction of its advertising budget and earnings. The Coca-Cola brand has an estimated value of nearly eighty billion dollars, according to Interbrand; between 2011, the year Coke announced its two-million-dollar pledge to the W.W.F., and 2013, it spent $9.8 billion on marketing and averaged $8.7 billion in profits. To be fair, the two-million-dollar donation is at least on par with the efforts of other companies with threatened-animal mascots. In February, Kellogg’s, which was facing protesters in tiger costumes and an online petition illustrated by Tony the Tiger pleading, “Kellogg’s: Don’t Let Me Go Extinct, Stop Deforestation Now!,” announced plans to use only “traceable palm oil” by the end of 2015, but the company has not given directly to tiger-conservation programs. In 2010, according to a story in the Independent, Lacoste pledged a hundred and fifty thousand euros, or a hundred and eighty-nine thousand dollars, over three years to the Save Your Logo project, to help pay for a census of a rare crocodile found only in Colombia and Venezuela. Lacoste would not confirm the donation, and in an e-mail said that it now works “by direct connection with local associations.” For example, in August, Lacoste U.S.A. announced a three-year sponsorship of the Everglades Foundation, for restoration planning of threatened species in the area, including the American crocodile.