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- [00:01]
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- [01:01]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. As the ice retreats at the top of the world, a new geopolitical frontier is emerging. From renewed Russian militarisation in the Arctic to China's ambitions as a near Arctic power. And even talk in Washington of strategic control of Greenland. Who will shape the future of the North Pole and what is really at stake? On today's episode, journalist and author Neil Shea joins us to discuss how the Arctic is becoming both an ecological frontline and a geopolitical battleground, drawing global superpowers northwards even as the region's wildlife and indigenous communities face unprecedented change. Let's join our host, Helen Chersky, now with more.
- [01:47]
Professor Helen Czersky
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Professor Helen Cherisky, and today our guest is Neil Shea. He has had a very exciting career for 20 years. He's written for National Geographic, he's reported from around the world on a huge range of topics on conflict, climate change and cultural change. And we are here to talk about his first book, which is Frost Lines. That gathers a lot of storytelling from lots of different trips to the Arctic into a narrative around the top of the world. It's an imaginative book, it's beautifully written, it's full of unusual encounters. And Neil, you've done a brilliant job and so thank you very much for joining us.
- [02:25]
Neil Shea
Thanks very much, Helen. It's my pleasure to be here.
- [02:27]
Professor Helen Czersky
And for those watching on the podcast, here's the COVID of the book, which is a very a big view with lots of very, very small caribou across a huge landscape which is kind of a classic view of the Arctic. But before we get to the Arctic, the details of the Arctic, I wanted to start with the contrast between the Arctic and the rest of the world. Because for many people the Arctic is already a strange, faraway place and a huge contrast to our busy, often city based lives. But in your reporting, you've been to almost the opposite extreme. Some of the sort of busiest, most human touched, you know, really difficult and unpleasant places in your war reporting around the world. And so you've got all of that background and then you come to the Arctic and I'm kind of interested. When you see these extremes, what's that like for you? Is the Arctic a refuge or do you just see all the problems that the Arctic has? Like, how do you come at that?
- [03:32]
Neil Shea
That's a really interesting question. I think one of the first ways that I was able to put it into perspective was through the work of another writer, Barry Lopez, who said that he was attracted to what he called classical landscapes, deserts and polar regions. And I think what he meant was regions that are sort of aesthetically uncluttered, or at least regions that were different from where he had grown up, which was on the east coast and then the west coast of the United States. So for me, when I go to the north or to a desert, say in Iraq or somewhere else, they seem uncluttered to me. So there's a lot less visually to be distracted by. There's, you know, no trees, there's no billboards, there's very little infrastructure. So that was sort of, that's what I think of when I'm entering one of these places. It feels like sort of dropping off the excess clutter. And I know that's not the way it is for people who live there, but for me, coming from the south, this treed and heavily developed landscape, going into something like that feels like you've, I don't know, maybe lost 20 pounds, 20 sort of mental pounds. And you're sort of free to see things in a very different way. So that's why I'm drawn to deserts, I think, and polar regions.
- [04:43]
Professor Helen Czersky
It is true that you don't notice all the clutter in life until it goes away. And actually, from my work in the Arctic, I've often noticed I come back and people say, oh, it must be so hard to go away from civilization. And actually I feel the hard bit is coming back because of that, that you come back into all of this clutter and it's kind of annoying. I do you find that as well, how is it when you come back, then into your normal life?
- [05:07]
Neil Shea
Yeah, it used to be different, I think, over many years I worked for National Geographic, that I would have a period of like a week or even more where I'd come back and I'd have to figure out how to live again in sort of the clutter of the United States. And I mean that in all kinds of ways. The material stuff, the political stuff, the social stuff. Now I have three small sons who don't give me any time to sort of come back down. So it's just immediate re entry. So there's no sort of grace period between going away and coming home.
- [05:37]
Professor Helen Czersky
Right. So already we've used this phrase. Well, I've used it. The Arctic, you said the north, I think, and there's an important. There's a subtlety there. Right. Which is that the Arctic is sometimes a useful phrase, but it's not always helpful. Just talk to us a little bit about that.
- [05:56]
Neil Shea
Yeah, I think that the Arctic is, as a term, it confuses people a lot because they think that just the. The very north of the globe. But when you look in more fine detail at what that means, the Arctic is difficult to sort of wrap your head around. You know, it can mean different types of north, where the trees run out, it can mean where the sea is mostly frozen for most of the year. It can mean where tundra or permafrost begins. I think one of the only sort of solid definitions of it is where winter darkness lasts for a certain amount of time. That doesn't change no matter what the climate is doing or which way the Earth is tilting. Well, it would change if the Earth tilted away, but it's a measurement that doesn't really. It isn't influenced by human activity. Whereas these other ways of measuring the Arctic are sort of circumscribed by what people believe, what they think they're going to find in the north. So I find north or far north is an easier way to wrap in all the many different types of Arctic existence that I found in my work.
- [07:01]
Professor Helen Czersky
And you've got this beautiful line in the book that goes something like that. Cold is the glue that binds this world together. And you're talking about this world of the north. And it seems that it's cold, but it's also ice. That ice is also, in a messy, cluttered world, ice is almost unreasonably pure and white. It's like a blank slate. And it makes, you know. So ice is the defining feature of that region still at the moment. But does it make it too easy for us to simplify, to think of it as a blank white slate? Because I have a feeling that when most people think of the north or the Arctic, there's still the very almost old fashioned feeling that it's a sort of far away void. You know, it's over there, but it's also not got anything interesting in it. There's this sort of, you know, it's a blank sheet of paper, which is of course offensive to all the many people who live there. Do you encounter that a lot, that assumption?
- [08:02]
Neil Shea
I do. I find that one of the first things often when I'm talking about the top of the globe, people think that I'm talking about the bottom. They think Antarctica, they think Shackleton and his expedition down there and many others. So they can sort of confuse the poles and one, there's very, very little life down at the South Pole and then in the north it can actually be teeming with life and many, many people live there. So I think that thinking of it as blank and far away, certainly while common, it doesn't do justice to the richness and sort of the dimensionality that exists in the far North. It's certainly not a blank sort of void the way that we're often tempted to think of it. People live there. Many, many animals live there. They're constantly moving, coming and going. The seasons are moving and coming, going as well. So it's a very dynamic place that's sort of looks blank, like a blank page to us because we're both far away and it is huge. It's just enormous.
- [09:05]
Professor Helen Czersky
So let's get to the book then. It's called Frost Lines and that is a term with a scientific definition. But I'm curious about why you picked it to describe your book.
- [09:15]
Neil Shea
I think the scientific definition was certainly part of it. That's like the. What is it again? It's the depth at which the ground freezes during certain parts of the year.
- [09:24]
Professor Helen Czersky
That's right.
- [09:24]
Neil Shea
But it's also sort of an allusion to what Bruce Chapman one did, I think many years ago in his book Song Lines. And also the idea that many different lines sort of circumscribe what the Arctic is in our minds, whether it's the tree line or the Arctic Circle itself, which is really just a line dotted around the top of the map. And then there are all sorts of political lines that sort of sort of divide it. Now, whether it's Canada and the United States, Greenland, Russia, Norway. So this was a boundary. This seemed like Both a boundary and a thread that could be drawn through the many different places I visited.
- [10:02]
Professor Helen Czersky
That's really interesting because when I think of lines, certainly in the high Arctic, as you know, if you're a scientist working at the North Pole, the problem is you're crossing lines of longitude very, very quickly. Right. Because all those lines come together at the poles. And so GPS sort of, I mean, it sort of works, but it's kind of, it's complicated because it's like you're whizzing across the globe from the sector that has Russia to the sector that has Canada just crossing a few kilometers and it's really. So it's also a place where lines come together, but there's a sort of merging there as well, I guess.
- [10:35]
Neil Shea
Yeah.
- [10:36]
Professor Helen Czersky
And the book right at the beginning, I mean, I do like a map. You've got a top down map of the Arctic. So from above the North Pole, looking downwards, which is very different. You know, the standard maps of the world that we see on the wall in offices and schools and so on use the Mercator projection, which is the one that kind of stretches out Greenland. So Greenland looks really big, but then it sort of leaves out the poles because it can't. There's no, there's no real way to fit them in. And I just. What, what, what do you think the most important things are about seeing that map? From what do you see differently when you see a map of the north from the top down that you don't see from the standard map of the world?
- [11:18]
Neil Shea
I think the standard map of the world, like sort of these southern environments where I, and possibly you grew up. Helena, you know that Mercator projection and the wall map that we often think of, it just sort of is cluttered up with the borders of different countries, the size of different countries, the countries in relation to each other in a way. And I thought that the top down view would give, would sort of not strip those things away, but it would give a different appreciation of what the north is, what the Arctic is. And if you're, if you start from the Pole, you're really. Your eyes look at the point of the North Pole first and then they sort of flow down around the sides of that and see, see the, see the Arctic as a region of its own rather than one that is sort of just above these political entities that we all live in. So I was trying to sort of give a different view on it that didn't sort of preference Canada and the United States, let's say, or Europe and Russia, which has most of the Arctic territory there. So that's what it was. It was just a take that was trying to shake up the normal way we see the Arctic.
- [12:25]
Professor Helen Czersky
And of course, it really makes the point that the Arctic Ocean is an ocean surrounded by land, that it's, you know, that middle bit where there isn't land is kind of hemmed in by all these countries on all sides. So the book sort of starts with animals and as it goes through people get, you know, sort of transitions to people, and there are some really dramatic animals encounters in there. And I'm going to do the mean thing and ask you, because of course, you write about these things and they're all brilliant and different in their own way, but which one of those encounters was most striking to you, has most stuck with you and why?
- [13:04]
Neil Shea
I think if we're asking for the superlative, it'd have to be the wolves. You know, I think I begin the book with narwhals, but that was 20 years ago now. So they're. I still think of them almost every day, but it's certainly moved backwards away from the present. The wolves were the animals that sort of really shook me in a way that I did not expect, because we're so used to animals fleeing at our presence, fleeing in our footsteps, withdrawing to the edges of where we live. But these wolves, they didn't do that. They held their ground. Even holding their ground is the wrong way to say it. They were on their ground and they met me as if not an equal, then something slightly less so they knew it was their territory. They weren't afraid of me. And contrary to the way that dogs sort of avert their eyes, when we look at them or gaze at them, the wolves would stand and steadily gaze into my face, asking questions of their own. I couldn't tell what they were, but they were fully in possession of both the territory and their own lives and were so unfamiliar with that kind of experience with animals that it just. It shook up everything I thought I knew.
- [14:16]
Professor Helen Czersky
It's a really striking piece of writing, partly because you describe, you know, not only the. The huge open space that they're. They're roaming through, but just sort of walking alongside them. Was it really like that? Were you really just, you know, sort of ambling along as they. As they went on their way? Because it sounds like they, you know, you were just all going for a
- [14:34]
Neil Shea
walk together almost, in a way. It was, it was. It was like that. I mean, sometimes we could walk with them. And then when I spent some Many hours alone with them. I could walk around with the wolves. Most of the time they were too fast for us. Wolves, four legged, fleet footed, they can move over the tundra even at a leisurely pace like two or three times faster than a human can walk. So we had to keep up with them on all terrain vehicles, these four wheelers and that was sort of the mode that we, we would employ to follow them around. So at times it felt like we were flying along the tundra with them and at other times it felt like we were just at the mercy of this very loud, smelly machine that was sort of pumping CO2 into the very atmosphere that we had come to experience. So it was a mixed, mixed bag that way. But yeah, sometimes we would be literally walking with the wolves over the landscape that they knew so well but that the pups, their four pups did not know. So this was interesting because at certain times I felt like I was learning things at the rate of a wolf pup. Which isn't to say that I'm anything close to as effective as the wolf pups are living in that environment. But they would stop to learn something because they were only a few months old. And then I would have to learn the same thing. Why did they just go sniff this? Why did they spend so much time, you know, tumbling around on this piece of old bone? So it was really, it was amazing to be in company with them that way.
- [16:03]
Professor Helen Czersky
And I guess it strikes me as you say that, that traveling very, very quickly over land like that, there's also presumably. And of course we can't know what's in an animal's mind, but their lives are built around the sort of freedom that gives them enormous spaces to roam in. That, that is a feature of what they do is they, they, they need an enormous spaces in order to live in that way. Does that, is that. I don't know, it feels like, it seems like there's something very profound there. So much of our lives very hemmed in. You know, we go and see an animal in the zoo and it's got a little. We know we sort of, we sort of chop up land and yeah. Fit things into places. And then there's these wolves that are just, they can just go.
- [16:50]
Neil Shea
It's really, it's amazing, isn't it? When I think about Ellesmere island, where this is where all of this took place at the wolves. It's the northernmost island in Canada. Have you been there, Helen? Have you studied, worked there?
- [17:01]
Professor Helen Czersky
Not to Ellesmere island, no.
- [17:03]
Neil Shea
Well, I'm sure, you get the idea. It's enormous, obviously unforested. It's about the size of the UK, but only about 200 people live in all that space. So common definition, it's complete wilderness. The wolves and the other animals can do as they please. They can go. They're limited by things that we would not necessarily think of. So it was this vast sense of space and untetheredness. It was. That size of the freedom was almost frightening. And sometimes because especially when there were no other animals present, when I was somewhere completely by myself, I could do anything, but that didn't mean that I was sort of free to do what I wanted, if that makes sense. It's sort of an inversion of freedom, the way that we commonly think of it.
- [17:56]
Professor Helen Czersky
Right. Because we're constrained in space. So we think that space is the ultimate freedom. But actually you could define freedom as the freedom to choose, for example, how you live or what you eat. Whereas they have. They, you know, there's a limited set of prey, there's a limited. There's a limit to the ways they can live. And they're on the edge of that all the time. So we the sort of the. The animals merge into the people. Because, of course, it's not the case that the animals have just existed on the ice for centuries and there were no people until, you know, white Westerners came along in ships and started. Started trying to go through the Northwest Passage or whatever that animals and people have interacted. And you were fortunate to spend time with various communities who live on the ice with the animals. And I'm interested in. You talk about meeting Marvin in one of the chapters, and you describe him as a conduit between the past and the future. And I just wondered if you could unpack that a bit for us.
- [19:03]
Neil Shea
Yeah. Marvin lives in a town called Johaven, which is sort of in the middle, roughly the middle of what I would describe as the Canadian portion of the Arctic. So it's often called the Arctic Archipelago, this vast maze of something like 30,000 islands. And Johaven is close to the mainland, but it sort of sits at the confluence of the major routes of the Northwest Passage. So his town and his people have been a big part of the story of exploration in the north for a long time, but they've also been sort of so far removed from the development of Canada and the United States that they've very much been on the fringes of sort of the Western idea of nation state. Marvin. Marvin's parents were born in the. I believe it was the 40s the early 40s, to the south of Johaven on the mainland, in a community where English was not spoken, where people had sort of found Christianity through traveling missionaries and trappers and traders, but who did not live in a village the way that we would think of it. So his father and mother grew up hunting and fishing and moving with the seasons. And eventually in the 60s or 70s, they moved into a town, but they never really learned English. They. Marvin's father, Jacob, would use English to sort of tell, to make a joke. He knew a couple of cuss words and a couple of phrases, but it wasn't a serious language to him. If something needed to be discussed seriously, he would speak in Inuktut. And then he raised Marvin to speak in as well. And he only spoke to Marvin in Unktut. So Marvin grew up between sort of the English speaking Canadian world and the older world that his parents had grown up in, which was only a Nuktu Tut and a very nomadic way of life. So he became this conduit between the two generations between sort of people who had grown up on the land who were not fully sort of incorporated into the nation of Canada, and this younger, younger generations who had gone to English speaking schools, they'd learned all the Canadian history. They knew of the maple leaf flag as their own, that sort of thing. And in the chapter that you're talking about, Marvin is sort of a translator between the modern Western world and his parents, older nomadic one. And he moved between them with more ease than most people his age. He was about 27, I think, at the time. What that came to represent for me was sort of the world that his parents grew up in was fairly rapidly disappearing. There weren't too many older folks who could still remember living a nomadic lifestyle who had grown up that close to the land, following the caribou, fishing, hunting for seals on the ice. So as they passed away, that world was drifting further and further into the distance. Marvin was one of these rare people who was sort of able to keep one foot in that world while also dwelling in the English speaking, tax paying, sort of got to have a job, Western idea of what civilization is.
- [22:18]
Professor Helen Czersky
And did you feel that he. I mean, it's hard to say, but there's a. Is that. Is that past and future, or is that a choice between one or the other? Or is it a bit of both? Because it strikes, you know, there are plenty of cultures around the world where there's been cultural revivals where people have said, you know, we're gonna hold onto our past, and we're gonna make a real effort to maintain that and to grow that. And, you know, it was almost taken away, but we want it back. And then there have been cultures, you know, like China during the Cultural Revolution, where they said, you know, enough with the past. We're done. We're moving on with different people. Now, what sense did you get of how that plays out for these communities now?
- [22:59]
Neil Shea
I think that many in Inuit, and that's in Canada, and Inupiat, that's in Alaska, those cultures are sort of. They're trying to figure out what to. Where they want to go next. And I think there has been a lot of that sort of a desire to reconnect with the. With an older sense of culture and a lot of these smaller communities, there's more interest in the indigenous languages. There's more classes available to people who want to speak them or want to learn them, and there's a desire to know the old techniques for surviving on the land, to know the old techniques for hunting. With that said, I think it's really hard to grow up as kids do these days, surrounded by. Or. Or let's say submerged in this Western culture that. That, you know, gives precedence to technology, to work, to money in a very Western way that is still very foreign to a lot of the cultures in the North. So you see people trying to hold on to it in different ways. But I think where it does become far more difficult is that if you think of Marvin's parents, this couple that had never learned to speak English and who had grown up in a nomadic lifestyle, I don't think anyone is trying to return to nomadism. I've never encountered that. I think that it's going to be some new form of hybridized culture between the very old ways and modern understanding. So I think Marvin is a good example of somebody who lives sort of between those things, because he still goes hunting quite often with his family and friends. But then he comes back and he has a job in town, and he has an apartment where he lives with two of his sons. So it's. I don't think it's a question of going back into the past. And when. When you mention this idea of choice, I think in Canada particularly seems like a choice to move into a village, let's say to stop being a nomad and to move into a village. But when I talk to elders of Jacob's generation, that's Marvin's father, most of them didn't. Their parents did not necessarily want to move into villages or towns, they were forced to do so because there was famine in the land and the Canadian government didn't really offer any assistance. So when the caribou hunts failed or the seals didn't come, that's when people sort of felt like they needed to move into a town so that their children wouldn't starve. So choice is a strange word. I think that if you asked a lot of young Inuit, particularly men, you'd find a great deal of nostalgia for a way of life that's much closer to nomadism.
- [25:44]
Professor Helen Czersky
Yes. No, I wasn't implying to. I wasn't meaning to imply in the past. I know you weren't, but it's a very fair point. But. So let's come on to the caribou, then, because hunting caribou is a huge part of the traditional way of life, but also as an identity. Right. You know, this is what we do, we hunt caribou. But the caribou are sort of, you know, coming, not returning as reliably as they used to. Right. So what's the big picture with the caribou as far as, you know, at the moment, and how. What happens to the people if they're the animal that kind of defines part of their identity just isn't there anymore?
- [26:27]
Neil Shea
That's a really important question, Helen. Thank you for that one. The idea that with the caribou is that all across the top of North America, you have these animals that are specifically called migratory caribou, and they make these enormous journeys each year. They can migrate hundreds of miles, up to a thousand miles or more, walking from the places where they spend the winter, often in the trees, boreal forest. Then they head north in the springtime into the Arctic and often end up near the Arctic coastline, where they give birth to the next generation of calves. Then they'll spend the summer up in the Arctic grazing and keeping away from mosquitoes. As you know, they're problematic up there, and then they'll come back down again in the fall. So these migrations of, you know, millions of animals across the top of the continent is almost like a circulatory system. It's bringing heat, blood, warmth, fur, bones up into these very sort of starved areas, delivering nutrients, their bodies, their stillborn calves, even the placentas to all of the other animals and people who live up there, and then their start sort of circulating back down into the south. So if you think about this happening seasonally, year after year after year, it's this slow pumping of blood and life into these very cold regions. So that said, caribou in North America and in Russia are declining very rapidly. 20 or 30 years ago, you used to see herds of caribou that had half a million animals or more. Now a lot of those herds are really dropping off. They're down to 100,000 animals or less in some cases. So you have to imagine the circulatory system kind of getting weaker and shutting down in some places. Many of the native people who live in those regions consider themselves to be caribou people because they've been in relationship with these animals for so long, for generations, for thousands of years. So if you decide, if you do sort of define yourself as a caribou people, what happens when the caribou start to disappear? And so I visited some communities where they're trying to figure this out now. In northern Canada, I spent time with the Klicho people who have been companions with a herd called the Bathurst that is down to perhaps less than 6,000 animals now. And then in Alaska, I spent time with the Nunamut people who their herd, the Western Arctic herd, is still fairly healthy. It's got more than 100,000 animals part of it. But that herd not too long ago was at half a million animals. So you see that they're aware that the animals are declining. They're not coming as regularly along these migratory paths. So it's a real big question for a lot of people in the north. What are we going to become? That's the one thing. And then what are we going to eat? What are we going to practice our skills with? Our language is also tied to these animals. So when this starts to change, what will we do?
- [29:35]
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- [31:35]
Neil Shea
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- [32:06]
Professor Helen Czersky
One of the things you touch on in the book is whether there are lessons from the past and you get to this. This great mystery of what happened to the Norse. You know, the story of Eric the Red, I think, and the Vikings who voyaged across to Greenland. Although I think in the case of Eric the Red, he possibly went with a bit of cloud over his head, I seem to remember. But he wasn't popular when he left Iceland, but he arrived at Greenland and, you know, they established colonies. They lived there for a few hundred years, I think, and then they vanished. And just talk a little bit about whether. I mean, it's clearly one of those great human mysteries that people are fascinated by. In any case, is there a direct comparison between what might have happened to the Norse and the way that these northern communities, the future that these northern communities face.
- [33:02]
Neil Shea
You know, I don't know if there's a. It's hard to say that there's a direct comparison. It's more like these ancient stories. You know this from your work. It's. They're not this. They're obviously not the same as what we're experiencing now, but they're. They're so thoroughly threaded through our lives, that we're connected to the past. And so the things that happened continue to reverberate through our lives. And I think that they. That if this is our opportunity to learn from whatever happened to the people who came before us. So it's like this. I think it's the British anthropologist Tim Ingold, who sort of describes life as a. A rope that is composed of many fibers that's sort of like tethered together. That's how I see our relationship to the Norse and to other people in the Arctic past. But so the Norse came to Greenland and they succeeded for a while there, hunting walruses, grazing animals in the southern fjords. But then, you know, not too long into their sort of sojourn in southern Greenland, climate change became a real issue for them. The climate changed is almost the opposite way to what we're experiencing today. For the Norse, it got very cold very quickly, but they still tried to do what we would do in their place, what we're doing now. They tried to adapt. They tried many different methods to sort of extend their farms, to save their farms, to keep hunting that the way that they had done. And they also tried very hard, it seems, to preserve their Norse culture. So they were very. Even though they lived in Greenland and lived there for almost 500 years, they're always looking back over their shoulder, sort of to Europe and to other Norse culture as sort of the reference point. So when things started to change in southern Greenland, one of the things the Norse did was try to maintain their Norseness against sort of this climatological storm that was coming at them. So that's, I think, where the lesson is. Ultimately, the Norse did not survive in southern Greenland. We're not sure whether or not they were able to flee. It's hard to flee from a place when you don't have timber to build boats. But it's also not clear that they all died either in conflict or from disease or freezing. So the science is not clear on that yet. But what they did do was they seem to have made a very clear choice not to change certain parts of their identity, even as the world changed around them. And what I mean is that by the time the Norse colony was collapsing, the Inuit had moved down from. They'd moved across from Canada into Greenland and they come south. They were well adapted Arctic people, and by the end of the Norse time, they were living essentially as neighbors with the Norse. The Norse could see these people who were doing well in the Arctic, but they did not become more like Them, they were like, okay, there are our neighbors, they're surviving, they're doing well, their culture seems to be okay, ours isn't. The Norse do not seem to have become more likely into it. And what this tells me is that there was some hang up there. There was something that there was a line they weren't willing to cross even as the world sort of seemed to close down around them. And I think the lesson for us now is what are we willing to do in the face of these great challenges that are barreling toward us with climate change, with political dissolution, with all these other things, Are we willing to change or are we going to sort of vanish like the Nor did?
- [36:31]
Professor Helen Czersky
It's such a fascinating point. And also, and I don't know anything about the anthropology of this, but it makes me wonder whether any of the Norse did join the Inuits and were sort of assimilated so completely that some of them did say, okay, well, I want to continue. I value continuing to exist over existing like this. And maybe some of them did sort of jump ship, except it wasn't a ship.
- [36:56]
Neil Shea
It's hard for me to think they didn't. Right. But the archaeologists, you know, archaeologists, they're sort of, you know, they don't want to venture a guess that might be interpreted the wrong way. So, so far, from what I understand, the DNA evidence isn't there and they haven't found the bones to sort of support that kind of suggestion. But I mean, if you just think in human terms, it's like what humans would do, right? So it's impossible to imagine that some at least didn't choose to survive that way, but we don't. It's sort of that murky part where science meets storytelling and we don't know what to say. That's true.
- [37:31]
Professor Helen Czersky
Well, let's come a little bit to the future. One of the things I always think about when talking about the Arctic and northern regions is that one of the hidden things is how accessible it already is. So the Northwest Passage is the sea route that goes through from the Atlantic to the Pacific, sort of through the islands of Canada. However you're going to get there. There's various routes and I think, and the number of ships that pass through that route, I mean, it doesn't go up every year. There's a bit of up and down, but basically it's going up all the time. That sea route is becoming more and more accessible. And actually the, the other one, the northern sea route, which is the one across the top of Russia, I think 103 ships went through that last year. A huge amount of cargo was carried that way. So even though it technically is still inaccessible by any objective measure, I mean, there's tens of thousands of cargo ships around the world going all sorts of places that aren't through either of those routes. But it does feel as though it's becoming a bit more accessible every year. Like the modern world is encroaching, partly because the ice is going away and partly because technology is getting better and humans will push any boundary you give them, basically. So if you, you know, someone's always going to try. And I just wondered what you saw of that. Not just technology pushing in, but you know, there's a lot more talk about mineral extraction. Of course, there's lots of drilling for oil on the Russian side. The world is kind of sneaking into these northern regions, kind of crawling in with time. What do you see of how that is changing what happens in the North?
- [39:05]
Neil Shea
You know, I think that one of the quickest ways to sum that up is though we go back to Marvin and his town of Johaven on King William Island. This is a place where cruise ships are now regularly stopping through. So this was not something that Marvin grew up experiencing. But now more and more tourists are sort of dropping into this tiny town. I forget how many people live there. Something like 1400, maybe 1200 people. And it's not a town that's really prepared to receive visitors. There's one tiny little hotel mostly for government workers who come through. There's a one museum. It's very nice, but it's not like, you know, it's not the Louvre, it's not anything else that we think of in a big city. So these places are being changed by the arrival of Western tourists. And when we say Western tourists, we sort of do a disservice to everybody. We're talking about people who can afford this, right? Like people who can afford to go on a cruise on an ice hardened vessel into a completely, what was until recently a completely inaccessible part of the planet. So they're dropping a lot of money to go there. That's going to change any system, no matter what kind of system it is. The arrival of people who spend money. And so you starting to see this in Arctic Canada as the cruise ships make greater and greater forays into this part of the world. It's changing economies, it's changing expectations, it's changing dynamics. Not always for the worse. Sometimes it's good, but then in other places, you know, I was in northern, let's say Northern Norway, you do see this struggle to. Norway wants to be a greener country, it wants to be a green leader. But at. At the same time, I think it is actually drilling more and wants to drill more. Certainly Russia has never made any secret that it's going to drill whatever it can drill. These are things that will affect the Arctic. And the increased amount of shipping is already starting to affect animals, the migration routes of certain animals, and I think that that's only going to increase. So we're sort of, I still think, on the leading edge of this type of change, this sort of human impact, but I do see it increasing if we're not very careful with what we allow to happen in the Arctic.
- [41:22]
Professor Helen Czersky
The one thing I didn't mention is that of The, I think 35 ships that went through the Northwest, the Northwest Passage in 2025, as you say, almost all of them were cruise ships. There were a tiny fraction of others, but on the Russian side, they're almost all commercial ships. So there's two very different things happening there. So, you know, one of the things that also comes from the map that we mentioned at the start is all of these countries are crowded around this area, which is sort of big and sort of small at the. You know, the distance from the top of the northern part of Russia to the northern part of Canada is not that far on the scale of the rest of the world. They are quite close. So there's this crowding in. And of course, the Arctic has become, you know, the geopolitics of the Arctic is another huge topic which we're not going to get into in any detail. But I just wondered what you thought of the place of the Arctic in the modern world. And before you answer, I just wanted to say that. So I'm an ocean scientist and I see the Arctic as a place of choice because it's the first time that our civilization has had a new open ocean, if you like, or it will have a new open ocean that is actually accessible. And we've never. Every other ocean, you know, things happen, civilizations past, you know, there are sort of traditions and history. And of course, there is in the Arctic. But in the very central bits, the ocean will become ice free. It will become accessible in a way that it's never been in human history. And so it feels like there's a turning point now in how we decide to deal with that. So I was just wondering what you thought about the place of the Arctic in the modern world more broadly, what's coming in the future.
- [42:54]
Neil Shea
That's so beautifully put, Helen. Thank you for that. I think you're really onto something with this idea of sort of a dimension opening to us that has not been opened before. And one of the ways that I've thought about it is that it's physically opening up, the ice is going away. But we're also able to measure it in the kinds of science that you do, let's say we're also able to think about it philosophically, we're able to think about it in political and social dimensions. So all of these different sort of human abilities that have never really been in concert before have now come together and can sort of take in this massive change that's happening at the top of the world. I should pause and say we could do this. I don't think we are. We have all the tools necessary to sort of appreciate the. This gothic transformation that's happening, but we're not doing that. So I think that. What place does the Arctic. It's drawing nearer to us in a very strange way. As more people travel there as tourists or sort of to see the last of the polar bears or whatever it is before they all go away. The Arctic is actually coming nearer to us. And even recently, with Donald Trump's sort of horrible fascination with Greenland, you see the Arctic brought into our living rooms, into our television screens, in a way that it really never happened as before. So that was sort of an unfortunate way for Greenland to come to the fore. But it did. And I think that that's going to happen more as we go forward in time, as things heat up politically and climatologically, like the Arctic is going to be something we're talking about much more. But does that mean that we're going to talk about the rich, joyous, wonderful ways that the animals and the people exist there? Or are we going to only talk about it in terms of what one crazy leader wants or what one mineral hungry company wants? So the terms of the discussion, I don't know which way it's going to go, but if we look at almost any other part of the globe, we see which way it is trended, right? It's toward the consumption of stuff. So I do worry about that, but I think that it's occupying a larger place in many people's minds now.
- [45:07]
Professor Helen Czersky
Okay, so we're almost at the end of our time. One final question. It's, you know, when you write a book, you obviously spend a lot of time doing it. You think about it, you have it, you basically live with this monster in your head. For months I've been there. So you. And, And. And that. And then you put it out and. And there is a sense in which I. At least I don't know about you, I find it cathartic because there's all these things in your inner head. And then you can just go to someone, just read the book, right, and you sort of. You sort of hand some of it over, but then some of it stays with you. And I just wondering if what are the bits that you feel, what's the message you feel you've been able to hand over or you want to hand over with this book? And what's the bit that is still sitting inside you somewhere that won't go away?
- [45:50]
Neil Shea
You know, I think if I've been able to do anything, I hope I've been able to show people the beauty and sort of the. There's a. I think the tradition originated in Britain, but this idea of the sublime, which can be both beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Barry Lopez, again, to go back to him, sort of the patron saint of Arctic writing, he got this idea that it is both beautiful and terrifying to be in a space that is so different from our everyday lives, where nothing seems to happen, but at the same time, anything might happen. I hope I've given people a little window onto the beauty and wonder of the Arctic, both in terms of animal and human lives. The parts that stay with me are the parts that I. I don't feel like I told very well. I mean, you've written a book, you know, that there's stories that don't make it in, or stories that you never quite felt like you did justice to. And just to take an easy example, the wolves feel like that to me. I feel like I was such a novice in trying to, you know, share any part of their story because I couldn't talk to them, I couldn't ask questions of them. I had to be still in their presence in a way that I'm not still when I live down in the United States in busy Brooklyn. So I wish I had been able to tell that story better. I feel like I'm going to be trying to tell the story of the wolves for the rest of my life, and then also the story of certain indigenous elders, like Jacob, Marvin's father. There's a scene in the book where he and I are stuck in a house together during a storm. He doesn't speak English, I do not speak in Nuktu To. So we have to find other ways of communicating with each other, and we do, but I still think about that and I'm sort of kicking myself, why didn't you know more Anuktitut? Why didn't you prepare better for that journey? And it's, you know, it's just not how it works. You go into the journey with what you have and what you can do, and then you try to share it. And anyway, those are two things that still stick with me.
- [47:55]
Professor Helen Czersky
Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. That was Neil Shea, the author of Frost Lines. And Frost Lines is available online or at a bookshop near you. I'm Professor Helen Czersky and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. And thank you so much for joining us.
- [48:11]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Margarita Volpatto and it was edited by Mark Roberts for ad free episodes and full length recordings. Become a member@intelligencesquared.com memberships and to join us at future live events. You can see our full program over on intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.