by Sara Wheeler
I haven't had a chance to do much actual travel reading for the past month as I have been, well, traveling. I was driving around the northern half of the state, showing off the sights to visitors. It was an odd experience, looking at familiar sights through their eyes and it gave me a new perspective on my home as well as on travel.
Despite all the fun and joy of this, I was eager to dive back into the pages of some travel literature. This weekend I jumped right into the deep end with Magnetic North: notes from the Arctic Circle by Sara Wheeler. I call this the deep end of travel literature because reading about extreme environments is never easy. They are gripping, though provoking, and often foreboding, featuring many reminders of the perils faced by the planet. I have read several books about the Arctic in the past, most enjoyably The Last Gentleman Adventurer by Edward Beau Maurice and An African in Greenland by Tete-michel Kpomassie, which is in fact referenced in Magnetic North, and is one of the great gems of travel literature. Also, I have read this author's previous book, Terra Incognita: travels in Antarctica. In all these books the environment takes center stage because everything single element of existence must adapt to it or die.
In Magnetic North, Sara Wheeler takes a clockwise journey around the Arctic circle. She illustrates how those living in the southern latitudes have done their utmost to ignore the adapt or die message shouted by the region. People have come North attempting to conquer the environment with mixed success and much failure. They have come to convert the "savages" and succeeded in destroying a way of life that was essential to survival. (This conversion from subsistence economy to cash has been done all the way around the Arctic circle. No one society is blameless.) They have brought wars and politics and thrown up boundaries on nomadic populations of people and animals. Now they look to exploit the wealth of resources trapped under the ice, possibly destroying all that is left of this delicately balanced ecosystem. But the Arctic is getting its revenge. Already, the concentration of pollutants is higher in the Arctic than anywhere else due to weather patterns. The ice is melting dramatically fast at both poles, something which will affect life on the entire planet. Though we don't live in the extremes of the polar regions, everyone on Earth must adapt to the needs of these environments or we will die.
So, yes, this was a difficult and depressing read at times, but it was also a joy to visit the remote places of the North, some of which I had never heard of (The Svalbard chain of islands), learn of explorers and their fatal hubris and of societies long since gone because they didn't adapt. There was a great deal of introspection in Terra Incognita, a portrait of a much more desolate environment. Magnetic North, however, is an external portrait of the societies that we all live in. Societies that touch on, even depend on the Arctic. It most definitely gives us all something to think about.
