My journey to the Arctic (see images in the below post!) began with hopelessness and has ended with a very still and certain optimism. For the first time in my life I think this good mood and energy might be sustainable too! As my friend EJW wisely says: “all we can do is keep positive and try our hardest.”

I won’t exhaust myself and I won’t hurt others and myself by pointing a blaming finger their way. There are so many more pressing concerns and it’s difficult to believe that any one thing is ‘the thing’ to fight for with so many competing priorities. But I will fight. I’ll fight furiously for the future that Andrew Tobert wrote without a moment’s thought: “devoid of landfill, clean air, rainforests, diverse oceans, people working less because they don’t feel the need to fill their homes with useless tat” Why not fight too?

First some perspective, which I rarely have and I take as a gift. Last week I stood on an island where the rocks contain no fossils because the island was there before life began. It is an arrogance to think that
we’ll destroy the world, though we might destroy each other, which is a hell of a lot easier to campaign against.

The Arctic will melt, oceans will rise and I hope – and will use activism as my commitment to this hope – that we will live well in the world that follows. I won’t give up on that hope. Until the world holds
sustainability rather than growth and acquisition at its heart (eventually inevitable) I’ll be an irritating and unstoppable reminder of that hope

Now the trick is to work out how to capture and keep people’s attention. I don’t think it’s about pretending there is a glorious alternative waiting in the wings. I think that’s a disingenuous assertion – treating
people like idiots for wanting all of the extraordinary things our society has made possible for all (well not quite all – but the majority).

There’s no alternative, not yet, because we haven’t built it yet. Now that’s an exhausting (AND EXCITING) thought. People are starting to – I’d love people to post examples they’ve seen or heard about below. Whether it’s a sustainable communications company that exists to sell de-growth, an economic think-tank based on making people happy rather than obese, an artist pondering about a ‘new environmental conceptualism’ and committing half her time to sustainable transport campaigns or an activist group inspired by the Suffragettes and trying hard to be accessible to all.

The beginnings of an alternative are definitely out there, and the most exciting thing is that these radical voices are more convincing by the day.

Get involved folks – there’s a whole world of sustainable solutions to be built, and if some days you want to cry and give up – then do but remember that dawn is just around the corner.

Below are some photos from the Arctic…

Today I woke up in a cargo ship on my way to the High Arctic and shoved my face into the crack between the mattress and the wall. When I did turn my body round the sad fact of bright September sunshine and 14 degrees Arctic temperature was too much so I reverted to the edge of the mattress. When nature called I finally got up and sat heavy on the loo. I knew that around me stranger sailors were getting on with their jobs and further – some hundred miles north – a Greenpeace boat was measuring the lowest volume of Arctic ice since records began. I cried for the first time in months with my elbows on my bare knees and my temples in my hands and tears being squeezed out desperate to make some sort of physical sign acknowledge that this moment had happened.

A friend of mine once bought a book about living in this society whilst being hyper aware of its contradictions – that there are 9bn people on one shrinking planet and we all want – and are told it’s right to want – more. I wish I could remember what the book was called.

I’m out of bed now and writing because every day of this trip the number one item on my to do list has been:

write a ‘what are you doing?!’ inspiring and condemning call to arms, or manifesto, or letter or anything that people will read and will motivate them to risk everything to push our leaders, communities, families into preparing for climate change.

And I hadn’t managed it, but I hadn’t yet woken up in tears about climate change, so perhaps today’s the day. Problem is I don’t know what to say. In a way since I left university there’s been a lot of attempts to ‘raise awareness’ and ‘motivate change’. There have been small inspiring moments when my involvement in the ‘green movement’ has been a good thing (and moments where my ambitious careerism has made me, and others, question my motivations for caring at all) and then there’s the general fact that fewer people care about climate change than did when I began, that people I met along the way who inspired me have now given up their public fight and that many of those who do continue to campaign are feeling exhausted – and here I am on the trip of a lifetime weeping at my computer.

Today I don’t much want to go to the Arctic. After two weeks on various boats I’m just 5 hours away. In the seas around Svalbard it’s warmer and calmer than the Captain has ever known it to be so late in the year – and I’m getting sadder by the mile. Visiting the Arctic which is disappearing because of climate change – no not climate change – but because still we do nothing to limit our impact – turns out to be the most depressing thing I’ve ever done. It isn’t helping me ‘accept’ that we’ve changed the climate, nor is it wowing me in any way that isn’t sorrowful. It’s just scary and fucking sad that people with power and influence have flown here and seen this and still climate change is bottom of their agenda; that Greenpeace have a ship here and a dedicated comms team pushing messages to global media and yet it’s unreported.

I don’t know what it will take, or what all those people who graduated with me – and since – and before – are doing? What’s anyone doing who wants to grow up with comfort? I don’t know where to fling myself to make a difference, but there’s no way I could stop flinging. Since I was taught about the very simple facts of climate change (go to NASA’s climate website), and worked out their significance to now and the future, I’ve taken opportunities where they’ve opened. I’ve reacted to public and political debate. I’ve tried to coax people into an ‘exciting world’ where we don’t need fossil fuels – where something other than money, things and economic growth has value.  I go for coaxing because somewhere along the way I was told that fear doesn’t motivate change and that speaking apocalyptically turns people off.

Arctic ice is melting, the Greenland icesheet is retreating – all of it – all of the global glaciers that have been there for hundreds of thousands of years are turning to water. And what where it’s hot, or where low-lying states are susceptible to flooding?

We know the things we do that make climate change irreversible (it involves burning fossil fuels). We know the things we do which use up limited resources (it involves free market consumerism). We can predict what will happen if we have increased natural disasters and fewer natural resources. It’s such a big turnaround that’s needed – heroic really – and instead all of the nations who make the problem are refusing to acknowledge that the decisions they make are the only solution. The people in charge put off the difficult debates and painful decisions so that our parents – their voters – can continue to live well, our parents who will not live to see the consequences of this neglect.

We need to build resilience. We need to consider how our society will cope with immigration when we make Africa uninhabitable, when Pakistan is under water (with current UK debates about immigration and international aid this is my most depressing thought). But instead international negotiations have stalled and climate change is not a mainstream problem or debate.

I’m in the Arctic and I will keep trying to see it with the enchantment it deserves – especially as so few are going to be able to see what I will. And yet – even that – is just another reason to mourn. 

Can I make the ‘call to arms’ when I get home? It hurts too much here and I don’t know how to write with hope. Promise to be upbeat again soon, probably when I see Svalbard and remember how natural it is to be part of something. 

The Noordelicht is scheduled to leave Longyearbyen Port (in Svalbard) on Monday 12th September – the same date that the Green Frost is scheduled to arrive… The slightest disruption (in the weather, the mechanics, the cargo) and I will have no choice but to turn tail and return to England having missed (ouch!) the expedition of a life time (see the schedule below). So please – friends – pray to whichever power gives you faith. Pray that the weather is fine, the mechanics in exemplary condition and the cargo everso well coordinated. Really really do – because I need every little piece of help to get me to Svalbard on time.

Anyhow – not at all assuming that I will get there – but in the hope and optimism that I might – below is the schedule of what we would be up to:

Monday 12 September and Tuesday 13 September
Leave Longyearbyen (17:00; 12/8/2011)
Sail along the west coast of Spitsbergen

Wednesday 14 September – Friday 16 September
Arrive at Nyskjaeret (the island Alex discovered in 2004) near Negribreen. The team will spend three days here and begin the process of collecting the island territory.

Saturday 17 September – Tuesday 20 September
Leave Nyskjaeret and begin the journey to international waters – 200 nautical miles from Svalbard. Travel through Heleysundet, a narrow sound between Kükenthaløya and Spitsbergen, then The Hinlopen Strait, between Spitsbergen and Nordaustlandet and passing Moffen Island, a small island north of the mouth of Wijdefjorden, on the northern coast of Spitsbergen.

Wednesday 21 September
West of Spitsbergen, 200 nautical miles north of Svalbard, the expedition team reach international waters and Nowhereisland is declared as a micronation. The expedition team embarks on the return journey to the port Longyearbyen.

Thursday 22 September
The expedition team continues their journey home to Longyearbyen, at sea west of Spitsbergen, passing Prins Karls Foreland, one of the islands that form the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

Sunday 25 September
Arrive in Longyearbyen and back on the cargo ships home.

Okay I’m off up a mountain and then to the cathedral – both good locations for some mighty loud beggings of the powers that be.

We were sad to lose each other – the Nordvik and I – it was a four day journey past extraordinary scenery (from Norwegian woods to stark lunar rocks jutting against the shoreline) and with a funny familial community – the kind that can be formed and held for a handful of days between strangers, before the initial interest in everything different fades and you have to actually come to terms with how you differ in what you think.

Anyway – I’m still very much in the adoring stage. These people gathered me, without a second thought, into their working days and nights, made time to talk to me and keep me ‘entertained’, used their provisions to cook pancakes, croissants and cakes for special high-teas, offering up the captain’s chair to ensure the best view of the fjords – and of course – joining me on shore and staying with me whilst I insisted on drinking until late with the Norwegian Tattoo Convention…

Here are three brief interviews with the crew (the cook, the chief engineer and the cap’n) in no particular order – but combined it will take you 6 minutes so why not watch them all):

Jansen – Captain of the Nordvik and sweet, gentle man!:

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Thania – the only woman on the ship. Unlike the men (who did 6 week stints) she would stay for three months on and then three months off:

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Torfinn – the Chief Engineer and ex-Goalkeeper for the Faroe Islands national football team!:

I’m too terrified of missing my boat to write anything of consequence here (though this little journey is the most ‘personal’ cargo ship experience I’ve ever had and I want to write A LOT – I’ve been invited into the captain’s cabin, smoked cigarettes in the engine room, practised English with Thalia – the Russian cook, served pancakes to the Captain’s parents – who happen to be travelling this stretch too, talked at length about the world and all its problems…) — I hope to get all of the crew on camera (so far not happening) and then you’ll be amazed by them too – so kind, so involving, so smart and honest, then also really taking the piss out of me with my camera and fancy laptop and ability to sleep way past the 6.30 breakfast. They’ve been crewing together for three years and they’re a family. Below are some hurriedly edited films of the boat – apologies for quality – but it will at least give you a sense of this cargo ship, the work it does and how close we live together.

On my second day here I went in search of the famous Bergen funicular. I missed it on the ascent so just kept on climbing. This is a one minute rendering of the best bits of that walk into the Norwegian woods:

So in case you couldn’t tell from my camera handiwork or were distracted by the aural improvised effects here’s the view from the top of that hill (mountain – in fact one of the mountains which surround the meadow of Bergen):

I also found this mushroom growing out of the base of an upturned tree (and then I found a lake, red ribbon tied round three trees and more places from which to see beautiful scenes but if I put all those photos in then I’m going to feel too much like my father so I’ll have to make do with this curious mushroom):

This is my packed lunch which I made yesterday and I have a very similar one for today. It comes courtesy of my mother’s money-saving wisdom and the generosity of the hotel’s breakfast buffet. Otherwise – because it’s Norway – and perhaps because this is a big Oil town with many a millionaire resident – lunch won’t be found for less than £10 even if it’s a humble couple of slices of bread, two tomatoes and some cheese. So crafty spending dodges must be used at every opportunity (this is not the same as stealing cause my mum would never encourage that):

And this is what a Norwegian McDonalds looks like:

Finally – this is the kind but mistaken man who, with his kindly friends, plied me with red wine whilst talking constantly about how they were all gay. I heard this with relief, told them that I was too and relaxed into enjoying expensive wine without having to worry about anyone’s expectation. On we drank – the third bottle in I decided it was time to wobble away from my new favourite entourage – and then came the exhortations ‘but such a beautiful boy, how can you leave us this way?!’. They’d been calling me boy all night but I took it as a language confusion. No. They’d just taken me for a boy (so many reasons why that’s lazy looking). And so with some gesturing and much embarrassment (all round) I extricated myself and left them to the final half bottle:

Will return to Bergen on my route back to England – when I will make time to visit the Munch exhibition – until then I leave you with a street and the promise of many a blog post once I hit land in Bodo in four days time: