BOOKS | The Ends of the Earth

The Ends of the Earth
Edited by Elizabeth Kolbert and Francis Spufford

I couldn't resist it; the moment I found it on the library shelves, it HAD to be borrowed and read.

The Ends of the Earth collects Arctic and Antarctic related writings from a variety of writers, many of them known names in the field: Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott, Knud Rasmussen, Barry Lopez, Gretel Ehrlich, Diane Ackerman – and get this – H.P. Lovecraft. Elizabeth Kolbert selects and introduces the Arctic writings, Francis Spufford is responsible for the Antarctic writings.

I started with the Arctic writings; the North Pole is the top of the world, and I eat my ice-cream on the cone straight from the top. In the introduction, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote of her own fascination with the Arctic – and how almost all of the selections are by "outsiders to the region – explorers, adventurers, anthropologist, novelists."

The predominance of non-natives reflects the fact that Arctic people have, traditionally, transmitted their narratives orally, and also the fact that those who have been drawn to the area have, to an astonishing degree, felt compelled to record their impressions.

This anthology is inspired by the 2007-2008 International Polar Year (IPY), which will last until March 2009 to accommodate the researched in Antarctica. This is the 4th IPY – with a difference: this current IPY will focus on the pending disappearance of its subject, as a result of global warming. Temperatures have increased by about 6 degrees on average around the globe, but in the Arctic, the temperature has risen about twice as high.

Over the years, Kolbert has made several trips to the Arctic to report on how the region is changing. Most of the trips were made in the company of scientists, but she also spoke to many native people on the changes.

An Inuit hunter named John Keogak, who lives on Banks land, in the Inuvik Region of Canada's Northwest Territories, told me that he and his fellow-hunters had started to notice that the climate was changing in the mid-1980s. Then a few yars ago, people on the island began to see robins, a bird for which the Inuit in his region have no word.

The image of robins in the Arctic is a pretty one, but here they herald the arrival of something unnamed.

The arrival of robins in the Arctic reminds me of something in The Wild Places. It is about the climate changes, and how life – in this instance, the beechwoods – adapt, migrate.

The beech will be among the first tree species to die out in southern Britain if the climate continues to warm. Studies of beechwoods show that big old beeches are already beginning to lose their vigour long before their usual time, and trees of fifty years' growth are showing decline more usually associated with trees three times that age. Unlike the elm, however, the beech will not vanish; it will migrate. Beechwoods will follow the isotherms, searching for the cooler land, as the snow hares did after the Pleistocene. The beeches will fnd fresh habitats and ranges in the newly warmed north. Not the death of a species, then, but its displacement. The loss would still be great, though, and it could happen in my lifetime: the beechwood might die before my eyes.

The world is changing. Birds and trees are migrating, adapting to the changes on the planet.

BOOKS | The Wild Places as Self-Willed Places

As my reading goes, 2008 started pretty well. I finished The Wild Places recently, where author Robert Macfarlane goes in search of the wild places in Britain and Ireland. It was a nicely described journey, full of erudtion, mixing anecdotes, history and memories. It is the sort of writing I associate with Rebecca Solnit -- her books goes in a general direction, along the way she picks up on any associative idea that comes up.

I am a city-dweller born and bred, but there are times when I feel the oppressiveness of the city. I am easily awed by wide open spaces. I am the sort that stares for hours at the open sea. I believe geography impinges on the mind. This may explain why I was drawn to Macfarlane's book. The purpose behind his search for the wild places is a challenge of a sort, a refusal to accept what is believed to be the inevitable:

I did not believe, or did not want to believe, the obituaries for the wild. They seemed premature, even dangerous. Like mourning for someone who was not yet dead, they suggested an unseemly longing for the end, or an acknowledgement of helplessness.

It sounds utterly romantic, and I like it.

But first: What are the wild places?

Macfarlane traces the etymology of the word, 'wild' to the Old High German wildi and the Old Norse willr, as well as the pre-Teutonic ghweltijos. All three of these terms imply disorder and irregularity, describing something wilful, uncontrollable.

Wildness, according to this etymology, is an expression of independence from human direction, and wild land is self-willed land. Land that proceeds according to its own laws and principles ... Land that, as the contemporary definition of wild continue, 'acts or moves freely without restraint; is unconfined, unrestricted.'

Wild places as "self-willed" land -- the idea interest me. It always seems to me one of our most idiotic assumption is our right of might. We believe, because we have access to power and technology, we have the power to master the land. The idea of a self-willed land -- a powerful, independent entity that rebels against our idea of modernisation by its very existence, is comforting.

Macfarlane tells the story of how between 1946-1948, George Orwell spent 6 months of each year living and working in Barnhill, an exceptionally isolated stone-built cottage set on the tawny moors of the northern tip of the Scottish island of Jura. It was during those years that Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It was clear that Orwell needed to be in that wild landscape to create his novel; that there was a reciprocality between the self-willed land in which he was living and the autonomy of spirit which he was writing.

The domination of human will always has a connotation of mechanisation to me. If we believe in our power and authority to dominate nature, it is only a small step to our belief that we have the power and authority to dominate human will. We need to learn to respect the wild places, because it is about us learning to value something different, yet powerful and vibrant. And maybe, by learning to respect and appreciate these self-willed places, we might learn something about ourselves, if we allow it.

If you're interested, come June 2008, Penguin will release a paperback edition of The Wild Places in the US.

BOOKS | This Cold Heaven

I'm in the middle of This Cold Heaven, a chronicle of a sort of Gretel Ehrlich's experiences in the Arctic. It is ironic, because while I absolutely abhor cold weathers, I find myself transported by tales of ice and cold.

This Cold Heaven is the kind of book that should be read somewhere warm and cozy, because the landscape Ehrlich writes about is chilling and brutal, yet resplendent in its stark beauty. There is a sense of much laughter and joy among the habitants of Arctic Greenland, but always there is the reminder of famine and starvation, of horrific deaths and even cannibalism. It's a difficult life, and one has to admire Ehrlich for her undertaking.

The reason Ehrlich came to her Arctic journey is also interesting. One day while she was near her Wyoming ranch, Gretel Ehrlich was literally struck by lightning. She survived the accident, and she wrote A Match to the Heart as a chronicle of that experience. It left her with a heart condition where she found it difficult to go to an altitude where she felt comfortable. So she went to Greenland, because she learned that treeline "can be a factor of latitude, not just altitude".

Greenland seems like an extraordinary place, with 95% of its surface just ice. Time seems unreal too, divided into 4 months of dark, 4 months of light, and 2 seasons of twilight ― "when the sun hangs at the horizon as though stuck between two thoughts."

Imagine watching the last sunset in October. The next time you see the sun again will be in February. That's how is it in the Arctic. Time is not measured by hours and seconds, and our biological clock is not programmed for the extended light and darkness.

The Greenlanders know of Perleroneq ― Arctic hysteria. It sometimes break out as the darkness came on and dogs as well as people might foam at the mouth and try to kill bystanders or themselves. Some reports that simply petting the dogs relieved them of their anxiety. How does one treat the afflicted humans though?

And so it is amazing that Gretel Ehrlich could spend 7 years (back and forth) on her Arctic peregrinations. While she traveled she also read the writings of other Arctic vagabonds and travelers. Among them is the Danish-Inuit explorer, Knud Rasmussen, who is something of a national hero. As she wrote: "Somewhere in my wanderings the present-day narrative spilt open to include his notes as well as my own." Rasmussen is the father of Eskimology, and his expedition notes led to a better understanding of the world of the Inuits unimaginable to us.

Ehrlich declares the Inuits (the world itself means "human being") the real heroes of Greenland. They were the first explorers and inhabitants, and they had the savvy and intelligence to adapt and thrive in the harsh climate.

The complexities of ice had taught the hunters to reconcile the imminence of famine and death with an irreverent joy at being alive. The landscape itself, with its shifting and melting ice, its mirages, glaciers, and drifting icebergs, is less a decription of desolation than an ode to the beauty of impermanence.

Beautiful, isn't it? The demands of survival meant fierce individualism is out of place among them. The group matters more. Inuit life works on a system of natural communalism. Ehrlich herself witnessed the generosity of such a life:

In Greenland I made it a practice to travel alone, never knowing quite how I would get from one place to another in a country of no roads, where solitude is thought to be a form of failure. I made my way alowly, with no common language and the usual Arctic weather-related delays, by dogsled, skiff, fishing boat, helicopter, and fixed-wing plane. The blessing of such awkward movements was that the locals took pity on me: I was passed from friend to friend, village to village, town to town, and slowly climbed the icy ladder up the west coast to Avannaarsua―the far north.

But the system of survival also has its flip-side. In time of famine, Darwinian rules of the fittest meant whoever was able to contribute to survival, not take from it. The group matters more. Rasmussen told the story of Miteq, a Inuit, who had encountered bad luck and his family was beginning to starve. Miteq and his wife sealed all but one of their children in a hut, and rolled a stone across the entrance. They then harnessed the dogs and drove away. But things did not improve and they soon were forced to abandon their final child. The couple soon made camp, but found that they could not live with themselves or other people, and they moved elsewhere. They eventually killed themselves.

There are plenty of these horror stories. Rasmussen collected their tales, and together they form a composition of a rich culture that lived with a constant awareness that death and starvation stood closely at behind, waiting.

But most of all, I am enthralled by the saying of a Caribou Eskimo, who once told Rasmussen:

All true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in the great solitudes; and it can only be attained through suffering. Suffering and privation are the only things that can open the mind of man to that which is hidden from his fellows.

Rasmussen took this to heart. I guess Gretel Erhlich did too, as she quoted this passage twice in the book.

One summer, on her way to an island 50 miles northwest of Uummannaq, the airline lost her luggage. With only the clothes on her back and her rucksack of books, she proceed anyway. She traveled several days from hot to cold climate, on planes, helicopters, benches and boats ― with nowhere to bathe, nothing to change into, and the clothes she was wearing souring. On the verge of sleep, she read something from the writings of artist Rockwell Kent:

See me liberated by the blessedness of the disaster from the confinement of the boat, shorn of property, stripped of clothes, wandering, an unknown alien-beachcomber in a generous land.

It is easy to go to places like Bali, Turkey or Italy these days and call it an adventure. It takes another kind of courage to throw yourself at the extreme edges of the world like the Arctic ― as Gretel Ehrlich did. I wondered at first if it was a kind of death-wish she had. She seems almost wilfully independent. At one point she was supposed to meet her interpreter, whose flight has been delayed and then was nowhere to be found. She loses her luggage, but she continues. In situations like hers, most people might have cancelled their trip, or waited. She went on ahead, a stranger in a brutal climate. (Later she was arrested, even suspected of being a Russian spy.)

There is an open fearlessness in her, though she appears unconscious of this characteristic of herself. Is it because things change when you survive a lightning strike? When you stand at the verge of death and return, the world becomes a little less scary? I wonder. Perhaps I would like to believe so. Ehrlich's peregrinations remind me of the wanderings of Zen monks through the ages, though I suspect none of them went so far to the Arctic North. She is remarkable, though quietly so.

Further Information: Gretel Ehrlich is currently travelling with the year-long Ukiivik Expedition, sponsored by the National Geographic Expeditions Council. They will travel across Arctic Alaska, Nunavut, Greenland, Sapmi (Lapland), as well as western and eastern Siberia. A book, Farthest North: The End of Ice, is supposed to be published by National Geographic. Their progress is also supposed to be updated at: http://www.point-hope.com/ ― but there hasn't been any updates since February 2007.