Farthest North The End of Ice

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Greenland again. What was once an icy paradise that kept luring me back is now a world of ruined ice. I’ve come to witness the demise of the great ice-age hunters of northwestern Greenland. My book, THIS COLD HEAVEN, was a celebration of these people who travel by dogsled and kayak, wear skin clothes, and hunt with harpoons. The new book I’m writing is an ode to their brilliance and genius on the ice and a lament about the end of a culture, the end of ice, and a warning to the whole world to act fast.

Morning. I’m horrified by my carbon footprint as I jet around the far north talking to Arctic people, well aware that my well-intentioned trips are only adding to the problem of climate change. Theirs is a “green” existence. Mine is not.

Arctic travel is never direct. For example: to get to this biggest inland in the world in the winter I have to fly from Massachusetts to Copenhagen, then halfway back across the Atlantic to Greenland’s west coast.

Copenhagen. Six-thirty a.m. One of my duffels has gone missing, the one with the National Geographic photographer’s cold weather gear - generously donated for this trip by Patagonia. I patiently explain to the lost luggage people that we cannot travel on dogsleds in Greenland without proper clothes, but they don’t really understand. At 10:30 pm, however, the bag and Carsten Peter, arrives.

Dinner with Rune Fjellheim, from the Arctic Council’s Indigenous Peoples Secretariat, and Evelyn Hurwich, director of the Circumpolar Conservation Union in Washington D.C.

Rune admonishes finger-pointing countries such as the US and Europe that they can’t be part of the problem unless they are part of the solution. We are a world of procrastinators. This is a global emergency and any country that stops polluting the world with CO2 and contaminants will have enormous power. Sweden wants to be the first fossil-free nation in the world, Russia has paid off its debt and nationalized oil and gas, and China, with its immense work force, could quickly turn any product “green.” Rune says that China is already experiencing a decreasing water supply because of decreasing meltwater from their mountains. “But they could use their people-power, their nationalism to change things, if only they would.”

My friend Sheila Watt-Clouthier, an Inuk from northern Canada who has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, has made the point that climate change is a human rights issue, but I say, it’s even bigger: it’s about the “rights” of animals, plants, and all living things as well.

The warming of the earth is a death sentence for ice-adapted boreal peoples and for the fabled polar bear, the walrus, the ringed seal, Arctic hare, Arctic fox, and millions of birds that nest and fledge on Greenland’s rocky coasts. It is a terrible injustice perpetrated on a whole culture by what climatologist Johan Schellnhuber calls, “Our pool of carbon sins that circle the world.” It will also mean the demise of us all.

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Greenland - 17 February

Upcoming. The sun goes down for the last time for four months on October 24th at Latitude 79 N. We will travel with subsistence hunters by dogsled on the ice as they look for walrus. Will ice still be thick enough to travel on when the sun returns in February? Will they have enough food for both dogs and families?

As the hunters stop their sleds and stand facing the disappearing sun, we will ask what they will do when the ice is gone, when the polar bear, walrus, and ringed seal become extinct, and their 5000 year-old hunting traditions come to an end. They’ll climb back on their sleds and head for town. There will be the sound of dogs trotting, of ice breaking, of bearded seals singing as the screen goes black.