Farthest North The End of Ice

Farthest North: The End of Ice is a circumpolar journey to be undertaken in the International Polar Year 2007-2008 to explore the changing climate of the high Arctic and its effects on the indigenous people who have survived and thrived at the top of the world for 5,000 to 20,000 years.

It will explore the ways in which the changing climate has already affected their icescapes and landscapes, their lives and traditions. Arctic ecosystems are in a state of collapse and the remaining subsistence traditions of these boreal cultures are vanishing with them. Gretel Ehrlich, who has been traveling by dogsled with subsistence Inuit hunters in northern Greenland for 13 years, will travel with reindeer herders and coastal hunters, and stay in the villages of Arctic Alaska, Sapmi (Lapland), the entire northern coast of Nunavut, North-Western Greenland, Western Siberia, and Chukotka.

We will see how and why Arctic people now function as the “early warning system” for a climate crisis that is global and will affect humans and animals at every latitude. We will travel by dogsled, snowmobile, reindeer, and fixed wing airplane.

The Arctic ecosystem is the most fragile in the world. The plants and animals are already pushed to the northernmost extreme, so when climate warms, there’s nowhere to go. When an entire ecosystem collapses, everyone in the world loses. Humans and animals, birds and fish, ice-age survival skills and ways of knowing and talking about internal and external realities vanish. Arctic people, polar bears, walrus, seals, birds, fish, foxes, and Arctic hares are facing extinction now. Seasonal and perennial sea ice is melting, glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking, permafrost is exhaling methane, pollution from the so-called “first world” is contaminating the largely subsistence world in the far north; the Arctic during spring runoff is toxic. This project will document these losses as they are happening and the adaptive and responses of the indigenous people for the far north.

It is predicted that the Artic Ocean will be ice-free by 2040, that the polar bear, walrus and ringed seal, and 80% of Arctic birds will become extinct within the next decade.

This project seeks to heighten awareness of the vanishing beauty of the Arctic, of the resilience, traditional knowledge, and enormous humor of indigenous Arctic people, of the cultural and biological value of diversity, of the exact nature of the climate crisis at the top of the world, and what we lose when the many treasures of the Arctic ecosystem is gone. We will learn from people who have thrived in the harshest environment in the world for 20,000 years; we will see how their qualities of patience, strength of mind under pressure, and group skills have allowed them to endure deep cold and starvation, and constant change. If the question is, “to adapt or die,” “to be or not to be,” what will their answer be? Or ours?