Arctic Dreams Revisited

A Well-Thumbed "Arctic Dreams"

My boss at the research institute where I used to work has a bumper sticker on the wall of his office.  It says "Nature Bats Last".  My thoughts exactly.  I finished Arctic Dreams several weeks ago, and have since left the Arctic far behind so re-visiting it has been a pleasure and has made me think about its future. Barry Lopez wrote his masterpiece nearly 30 years ago.  I wonder what he thinks about the Arctic now?

Does he remember the vast ice floes and "ivu's"?  Ivu is the Eskimo word for a strange phenomenon that occurs in the coastal ice. "Suddenly in the middle of winter and without warning a huge piece of sea ice surges hundreds of feet inland, like something alive."  Does he wonder how the ice is doing now as global warming takes its toll?  Could he "...stand at the edge of this four-foot-thick ice platform...to find yourself in a rich biological crease.  Species of algae grow on the bottom of sea ice, turning it golden brown with a patchwork of life. These tiny diatoms feed zooplankton moving through the upper layers of water in vast clouds -- underwater galaxies of copepods, amphipods, and mysids. These in turn feed the streaming schools of cod.  The cod feed the birds.  And the narwhals.  And the ringed seal, which feeds the polar bear, and eventually the fox...It is the ice...that holds this life together...For ice-associated seals, vulnerable on a beach, it is a place offshore to rest, directly over their feeding grounds.  It provides algae with a surface to grow on.  It shelters arctic cod from hunting seabirds and herds of narwhals, and it shelters the narwhal from the predatory orca.  It is the bear's highway over the sea.  And it gives me a place to stand on the ocean, and wonder."

Sea Ice

Does he wonder if many polar bears are having to do this as they travel their ice highway?

As I wonder about the Arctic, I cannot help but fear that with the melting of the sea ice, a cascade of calamities awaits the entire planet.  Without letting this post become too political, I will just say that science is science and opinion is opinion.  Let oil companies drill offshore in Arctic waters and we will see what happens.  The Arctic environment is rapidly changing due to global warming. We are drilling for more carbon-based energy resources in this pristine environment, an exercise fraught with its own dangers, AND the extraction of said resources contributing to more global warming.  Very, very disheartening. As an adult in the modern world, I use these extracted resources every day and cannot discount my own role in our dysfunctional relationship with nature. So, I hope with all my heart that alternative energy sources are made readily available as soon as possible!

Back to the book...Lopez has cast a spell on me.  I have fallen in love with narwhals, musk oxen, polar bears, ringed seals, dwarf willow and birch forests, more species of land and seabirds than I can remember, the aurora borealis, and the sea ice with all of its quirks and dangers.  I am fascinated by the indigenous people of the Arctic. Lopez refers to them as "Eskimos", the old generic term "...from the French Esquimaux, possibly from eskipot, an Algonquian word meaning 'an eater of raw flesh'.  Some Eskimos feel this attribution puts them in a poor light with modern audiences and so use other terms for themselves."  "Inuit" in the Canadian Arctic, "Yup'ik" in the Bering Sea region, "Inupiat" in the North Slope of Alaska area, and "Inuvialuit" in the Mackenzie Delta.

Eskimo

Before modern day "Eskimos" were the Thule peoples, thought to have had contact with the Vikings in the eastern Arctic.  Their scrimshaw carvings are sometimes beyond strange and are thought to reflect the tricks played on the mind by numbing cold and darkness.

The nature writer Robert Macfarlane writes "Arctic Dreams is filled with stories of people whose expectations are confounded by the polar environment, sometimes fatally.  A hunter, his perception of scale confused by the tundra's monotony, spends an hour stalking a grizzly, which turns out to be a marmot.  A polar bear grows wings and flies off as a party approaches:  they have been following a snowy owl.  Then there is the fata morgana, a mirage of ice and light that simulates a serrated mountainous coastline, and occasionally cost the lives of the 19th-century explorers who approached it, hoping for a landfall." He continues, "Science, for Lopez, finesses the real into a greater marvellousness. Arctic mirages were once thought to be the work of angels; they are now known to be the work of angles.  For Lopez, the two are never far apart. Throughout his writings, Lopez returns to the idea that natural landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them."

Grace.  Wonder.  Honor.  What we must, as human beings, remember when we are up to bat because "Nature Bats Last".

  

Musk Oxen

Narwhals

Ringed Seal

Aurora Borealis