We’ve spent the morning popping in and out of the restaurant for a read through of Paradise Lost – everyone read a few lines. Not looked at the text for more than a decade but feels the natural thing to do here and now as we sail south back to port.

KT Tunstall and Emily Venables follow our route south on a map.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

A couple of my posts have referred to people’s anxieties about the Baffin-Boot-sized carbon footprint that coming on this trip entails. Sin and redemption are so woven into western culture that we shouldn’t be surprised that we frame these questions about individual responsibility in terms of sin and the pursuit of redemption. A few years ago Patriarch Bartholemew (leader of the orthodox church) announced that environmental harm was a sin (the Pope followed suit soon after). Of course they have a natural advantage over science and policy people when it comes to finding a language that seems to have the right kind of scale: they’ve been phrasemaking on the big questions for centuries.

But we might yet work towards a secular language, a set of references, that help us make sense of the moment we’re in. This expedition is an experiment, a model society, a mad throw together of very different personalities and talents. And we’ve been busy, creative and above all happy.

This afternoon a session on positivity in response to climate change. Marcus Brigstocke ran the session and asked me to talk about the book I edited with Andrew Simms from new economics foundation: Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth. My vanity satisfied by finding that the essays have made a big impact on his work and he’s been pushing it on friends.

I’m hoping that some of the people here on the boat will contribute to another product of the Interdependence Day project - the Encyclopedia of Interdependence that I’ll be working on over the next couple of years with my wife Renata Tyszczuk.

To sign off I’m going to borrow a quote from Ian McEwan’s brilliant essay written in the wake of an earlier Cape Farewell voyage A Boot Room in The Frozen North.The piece plays off the gradual collapse of civilised behaviour in the wet, cold, cramped boot room of the ship. He concludes thus:

We must not be too hard on ourselves. If you were banished to another galaxy tomorrow, you would soon be fatally homesick for your brothers and sisters and all their flaws: somewhat co- operative, somewhat selfish, and very funny. But we will not rescue the earth from our own depredations until we understand ourselves a little more, even if we accept that we can never really change our natures. All boot rooms need good systems so that flawed creatures can use them well. Good science will serve us well, but only good rules will save the boot room. Leave nothing to idealism or outrage, or even good art. (We know in our hearts that the very best art is entirely and splendidly useless). On our last morning, when all the packing has been done and the last reluctant skidoo had been started up, and as the pure northern air is rent by the howls and stink of our machines, our tirelessly tolerant hosts (as forgiving as God has not yet learned to be ) come down the gang plank and set down on the ice a vast plastic sack with all the recovered gear found in every corner of the ship. A few of us gather around this treasure, and poke about in it, not ashamed or even faintly embarrassed, but innocently amazed. Here's our stuff! Where's it been hiding all this time? We barely know ourselves, and our collective nature is still a source of wonder - why else write fiction? We haven't stopped surprising ourselves yet, and the fate of all our boot rooms hangs in the balance.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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Hello Joe, Good question. Yes, the sealing and whaling issues are intense in the Canadian Arctic. Whether it is even sharper than in Greenland, I am not sure. That’s a tough question.

Sustainability is a grave concern in the communities in both parts of the Arctic. But in Greenland, the relative independence of the government (called ‘Home Rule’) means they don’t have as much pressure from Denmark when worrying about the future of their communities. And they do follow the rules and regulations of the International Whaling Commission. Nonetheless, Greenlanders face immense pressures from environmental and animal-rights activist groups from the industrialized world, who are not only worried about the whale population and sustainability, but also – from a very different cultural perspective – whether the communities have the right to hunt the whales at all.

Unloading a whaling vessel.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

I don’t think communities in the Canadian Arctic have not had to face such pressures – at least not in regard to whaling (seal harvests are another matter). But I think Inuit people in Canada do face more federal government involvement in matters of marine mammal management, on top of their own concerns about the local whale population and the sustainability of a human-animal relationship that has been so central to their community. So, how would one compare the intensity of the problem in the coastal communities of Greenland vs the Canadian Arctic? I really don’t know.

Yet the Canadian side of the question brings up an interesting story about the use of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). You and I have talked about TEK, Joe, while working on material for that new Open University environment course.

It seems that, in March of 1990, Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans based here in Ottawa (where I live) drastically cut the quota of beluga whales that could be harvested in three small arctic communities on Baffin Island. They said each village could only take five animals annually. They did so in response to a study, by federal scientists in Canada, that found the beluga whale population in the area had declined drastically and risked extinction. The Inuit communities protested vigorously, and the federal scientists agreed to work with them to conduct a new survey of the beluga whales. The collaboration of science and TEK revealed some interesting things.

Everyone agreed that there were fewer beluga whales in the area. But the scientists and the Inuit hunters gave different reasons. Biologists said the prior history of commercial whaling had reduced the beluga population; the Inuit argued the whales had dispersed to other areas. That was partly because of increased boat traffic in recent years, but also because of the disappearance of one particular whale who led the rest into the area. They had named that whale “Luuq” and deliberately left it alone.

Another problem was that the scientists thought there were too few breeding females in the local beluga population. The Inuit hunters reminded them that the sample data they had been providing to the scientists simply did not include any adults with calves. The hunters always made a point of avoiding them in their hunt. The scientists also said there used to be 5000 animals in the area, but local historic records supported the Inuit claim that the number had always been much less than that, even before commercial harvests began decades earlier.

That collaboration in the early 1990s, Joe, is a good example of how environmental scientists can generate better results when they work with Inuit TEK. Better knowledge is always important, but especially so in cases like this.

About the author

Dr Matthew Kurtz is a geographer in Ottawa, Ontario. He has served as an academic at The Open University and University of Alaska Anchorage, and much of his research concerns the cultures of colonialism in arctic Alaska.

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Is it too late to do anything about climate change? Absolutely not – our actions now will make a big difference in the next decades! Is it too late to save the Greenland ice sheet from melting very significantly? Perhaps – we don’t know. We do know that it is going to get significantly warmer before it starts to stabilize and even cool again, but our knowledge about ice sheet dynamics is too poor to predict even roughly right now what is going to happen. Indeed, even if we had a crystal ball and knew definitely what future regional temperatures where going to be 200 years from now, we still wouldn’t be able to predict the future accurately.

Polar scientists want to know more about the physics of basal lubrication, so they can build better ice sheet models to investigate the potential impacts of different amounts of global and regional warming that may occur in the next 1-200 years. It would be handy to have a better handle on the regional warming we might expect – but that’s another very complex story that integrated climate models are trying to address.

There’s no doubt among scientists that observed regional climatic change and impacts in the Arctic are very significant: the region is warming twice as fast as the global average; summer sea ice, vegetation zones, and animal species diversity and ranges, are all changing rapidly consistent with significant regional warming; and indigenous communities are feeling and facing major economic and cultural changes.

Iceberg.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

The Arctic is both a beautiful and isolated place. Travellers enjoying its unique beauty experience many different psychological responses: from the spiritual to vulnerable - from “oh my god, it’s so beautiful, there must be a god”, to “give me a hug, we need to stick together” and lots more in between. Imagining the dramatic change and loss of our current Arctic comes as a shock. Hope and despair are part of the same psychological chain reaction of emotions that can happen when we are confronted with bad news such as the loss of something or someone that we treasure.

Environmentalists have made the link between the knowledge that our behaviours, lifestyles, activities, are causing rapid climate change and psychological theories of how we react and cope in such situations. One such theory is Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ grief cycle that proceeds from bad news (such as losing the Arctic ice sheet). Faced with bad news we begin an emotional journey that may consist of some or all of the following stages:

1. Shock at hearing the bad news.
2. Denial to avoid the inevitable.
3. Anger as the outpouring of bottled-up emotion.
4. Bargaining such as seeking in vain for a way out.
5. Depression with the realization of the inevitable.
6. Testing more realistic solutions.
7. Acceptance and finally finding the way forward.

How can we walk the line between hope and despair? One answer is that we need both emotions to move forward and it is quite normal to cycle through these and others in the course of coming to terms with the actions that we can do individually and collectively that will make a difference.

The Arctic is on the front line of global climate change impacts. That’s why this expedition and many like it happen. They are designed to focus the world’s attention on rapid climate change. The region is a harbinger of what is to come – a place to go to see something of the future – so we shouldn’t be too surprised if we come away shocked at its vulnerability as well as charmed by its beauty. Just as global warming is amplified considerably in the polar regions (warming at twice the average rate) our hope must be that through expeditions such as this we can amplify individual, community and governmental actions across the world on behalf of future generations. 

So it may be too late to prevent massive melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Is that any reason to give up? No, quite the opposite. Whatever actions we take today will not have immediate effects but will have significant effects in the future.

As well as teaching and communicating, one way in which I make sure I stay positive is that I volunteer for the Cambridge Carbon Footprint (CCF), usually talking to the public in homes, shopping malls or company offices to people and groups interested in making changes to lower their carbon footprints. CCF has what I think is a neat and positive “to do” list that should be a tonic for anyone feeling despair around the extent to which what an individual can do matters or indeed the extent to which is might be too late to avoid significant disruption and ecological, economic and social impacts. Here it is:

• Be informed
  • Know your carbon footprint
  • Find out about climate change
  • Understand the issues - Don't Panic!
• Communicate
  • Talk to your friends and colleagues about the issue
  •  Join with others - support each other in making changes
  • Ask your employer, councillor, MP what they are doing to help
• Act now!
  • Start today. Do the simple things first.
  • Be smart. Buy wisely. Keep the environment in mind.
  • Think ahead. Plan for next year's improvements

For detailed advice, look at our website or, if you're in the Cambridge area, the leaflets on the stall.

About the author

Dr Stephen Peake is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Technology at the Open University and Teaching Fellow at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He's an expert in global environmental change and has served as an official at the International Energy Agency in Paris.

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