Greenland’s culture is steeped in its fishing and hunting traditions, sustainably practiced for hundreds of years. Seal and reindeer are essential staples, providing nourishment and materials for clothing and limited commerce, the hunting done by individuals as part of a subsistence lifestyle. The art, photography, literature, and inherited myths of its indigenous Inuit peoples quietly offer perspective on their home and traditional practices. But in the absence of any significant capitalized trade, few nonnative people have access to it, or can see how it is changing.
The ripple effect of distant decisions made by countries navigating the complex interactions of economics, morality, and the wild world extends even to a place as remote as Greenland. In 1983, in reaction to the attention given to the brutal commercial harvesting of baby seals in Canada, a ban on sealskin trading was imposed by the European Economic Community, followed in 2009 by a European Union ban on trade in seal products. The consequences were far-reaching, some of which were unintended. A loss of income from the sale of sealskins and other products devastated Greenland’s Inuit hunting culture. The extinction of the seal market diminished seal hunting, causing an explosive growth in seal populations. With a rapid expansion in the number of fish predators, fish populations consequently declined, impacting that component of their subsistence lifestyle, as well. Even with very recent modifications to the ban—those allowing Inuit cultures to pursue sustainable seal harvesting—the impact on income has been significant. Today, about 60 percent of Greenland’s economy is supported by an annual block grant from the Kingdom of Denmark, of which it is an independent member. Greenland remains a country struggling to return to a sustainable existence, but now with the added complexity of a rapidly changing climate, the challenge is formidable.
WHAT FOLLOWS ARE MY EXPERIENCES of Greenland’s surfaces from six expeditions. The story unfolds in three parts, each part containing the suite of formative sensory experiences that shifted my perception. “Fractionation” documents the deconstruction of expectations, relating experiences that exposed the depth of my ignorance about knowing place. “Consolidation” describes the process of coming to terms with the reality that, as a product of organic and physical evolution, my ignorance is an integral part of being aware. “Emergence” derives from small epiphanies about our place in existence, what we can know of the world and what we cannot.
That we have a place in this world implies responsibilities, but it does not signify meaning. The majestic power of wilderness is its ability to convey that seeming contradiction through the overwhelming beauty of evolution’s carelessness. That we have an impact on its unfolding is revealed in the reconstruction wilderness imposes upon itself when confronted by changes in climate that mankind has induced and to which wilderness must respond.
The book is not chronological. Experiences that change perception accumulate in odd ways that are personal and often not initially understood. The reconstruction of a new way of seeing is piecemeal. Each insight or shifted perception fills a space in a timeless tapestry that will never be completed.
Wilderness speaks with unmitigated honesty. Every belief and imagining that we bring with us as we enter such spaces also reflect back to us, but in a form that can be difficult to recognize. My hope in writing this book is that the value of truly pristine wilderness, as a place from which to sense how we each fit within the grand unfolding universe, will inspire its preservation. If we lose wilderness, finding our roots, personally and as a species, will be virtually impossible.
Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite.
—George Bancroft
ALL THAT WE SEE IS SURFACE. What we perceive as experience derives from light reflected, a product of events that have flowed to the present and become, in a moment, a shape seen. Life teaches us to extract texture and form, weight and warmth from that impression.
But what is it that silently rests below that cosmic skin, composing the thing we sense? We reach toward the stars to understand why the sun rises, why winter comes, why we must die. And yet, what we find in each answer and insight is a deeper question, an underlying complex of mysteries that serve only to feed our imagination. With these fragments, we construct a body of knowledge about the components of our world, each of us building a unique framework that becomes the context for our individual lives, the thing upon which we hang notions of meaning.
Through this process, we have come to realize that life is an unstoppable force that endlessly evolves, eventually achieving the emergence of mind from stardust and time. And yet, despite the stupefying significance of this revelation, we also see that, from a cosmic perspective, we are a trivial event. We are a speck on a flowing river of entropy that still gushes from an unfathomable beginning nearly fourteen billion years ago. We’re enthralled by a story we suspect the stars possess, but we remain unable to grasp its outline. We wander over landscapes, looking for histories the stones sequester, hoping there will be in them a flicker of an insight that will expose something worth cherishing.
One thing had impressed us deeply on this little voyage: the great world dropped away very quickly. We lost the fear and fierceness and contagion of war and economic uncertainty. The matters of great importance that we had left were not important. There must be an infective quality in these things. We had lost the virus, or it had been eaten by the anti-bodies of quiet. Our pace had slowed greatly; the hundred thousand small reactions of our daily world were reduced to very few.
—John Steinbeck
THE BOAT THAT BROUGHT US into the field was a fishing trawler chartered by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. It had a baby blue hull, a weathered, varnished wheelhouse that two people could cram into, and a worn wooden deck, onto which we had piled the backpacks, crates, tents, a few bags of fresh food, and other gear meant to sustain our little expedition. John, Kai, and I met the boat in Aasiaat, West Greenland, on the southern edge of Disko Bugt. Aasiaat is one of the largest towns in Greenland, with a population of just over 3,100 people. Walking through every street, passing every house, would take a few hours on a summer afternoon.
Under the watchful eye of Peter, the skipper, we had spent half an hour loading the trawler, securing the gear, and inventorying before setting off into the iceberg-studded waters. The trip would take many hours, so we took turns napping in the tiny forecastle, where two bunks were tightly bolted to the bulkhead. The sound of the sea swishing by could be heard through the hull’s three-inch-thick oak planks. I slept for about an hour, then went back on deck to watch the scenery.
The air was still and cool, the water like glass under an overcast sky. Whales occasionally breached in the distance, feeding on schools of small fish at the surface. We passed by skerries, some with packs of huskies that had been left there for the summer by their masters. The sled dogs were nearly feral.
I leaned against the peeling rail, mesmerized, the chug-chug-chug of the two-stroke diesel thumping in the background. I was warmly dressed in a field shirt, sweater, and fleece jacket, a woolen skullcap pulled down to my ears, my body braced against the forty-degree chill.
As the islands passed, the world I was leaving behind tugged with an unexpected angst. I had been anticipating the expedition for months, looking forward to sharing with old friends what I knew would be daily discoveries in a virtually unexplored terrain. But an aching sorrow overwhelmed that excitement—my wife and daughter would not be seen or heard for months, the sweet pleasures of family life erased, the known small comforts of cooking meals together, sharing movies, reading the newspaper, laughing with friends at parties, taking Nina to the bus for school—gone.
My