This is the seawall that protects Shishmaref, Alaska from erosion caused by sea level rise, sea ice loss, and changing storm patterns. What will protect us now? Well, we’ll have to do make our own protections and our own agreements. And today’s absence of political leadership will make space for new leaders to arise, I…
In Iceland today, we were honoured by a visit from His Excellency Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations. “Don’t leave it to governments,” he said. “You are the voices of the world.” It made me think of the joy and community we witnessed in Iceland this summer, pictured here. I was so moved…
Portrait of Climate Change. Home grown potatoes in Ilulissat, Greenland. Ole Gamst-Pedersen, the curator of the art museum grew them himself. “This wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago.” Not quite the gorgeous pastels of @zarialynn that help us see how precious ice is, but I’ve never met a potato that gave me so much…
A couple of the smiling faces who showed up to for Ottawa’s Climate March this weekend and listened to Clyde River Mayor Jerry Natanine speak on changing ice conditions and life in the Arctic. “I’ve never spoken to this many people,” Natanine said, but he was eloquent and clear for this audience of 25,000. These…
(Part 1 of 2) “As you see, there is nothing here,” says Siggeir Stefánsson. “It is beautiful, but there is no special landscape you can’t see somewhere else.” In ten or twenty years time, this fjord in Iceland’s northeast corner could be transformed into an international container port with a wharf over six kilometers long….
(Post 2 of 2) Siggeir Stefánsson thinks about the future and the possibility of turning a nearby fjord into a deepwater container port when much of Iceland has turned toward tourism. Siggeir’s town was approached by a German engineering company with this large scale project in mind. “When this idea was starting, are you able…
Karl-Ole Kristensen grew up in a house that overlooked this bay and the masses of icebergs from the glacier next door: Jakobshavn Glacier. Here, aboard the Esle in Ilulissat, Greenland, Karl-Ole holds white ice in his right hand and black ice in his left. “Black ice is like crystal, like a window,” he says. Black…