A Polar Paradox by Cynthia Reeves – NORWAY

8th October 2024

TalkingLocationWith… Cynthia Reeves.

A Polar Paradox: Witnessing the Sublime as a Destructive Force by Cynthia Reeves, author of The Last Whaler

Over the past seven years, I’ve spent five months living on Svalbard, an archipelago located between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole. I’ve witnessed changes during that time and thought deeply about the dialectic presented by the polar regions—the tension between witnessing the sublime in the natural world and the damage wrought by our encroachment on this once-pristine landscape.

What first drew me to Svalbard was a lifelong interest in the polar regions. In childhood, I devoured tales of doomed polar explorers such as John Franklin and Robert Falson Scott. This curiosity continued into adulthood, with more recent books like Hampton Sides’s In the Kingdom of Ice, an account of the USS Jeannette’s tragic polar expedition, and the many books about the impact of climate change on the polar regions.

Pyramiden mines

Which brings me to the inspirations for my novel The Last Whaler. My first exposure to Svalbard was a June 2017 artist-scientist residency aboard the Antigua, which sailed the archipelago’s western coast. Every day, the ship anchored off remote beaches and Zodiacs motored us to shore. Each landing was like entering another world. Icebergs refracted light in ever-changing hues. Snow-capped mountains plunged into ice-pocked seas. Glaciers striated with deep blues and pure whites stretched across vast swaths of land. In contrast, the ghostly Russian mining town of Pyramiden revealed the devastation of decades of coal mining. Likewise, landing at an abandoned whaling station on Van Keulenfjorden, where piles and piles of beluga bones bleached in the sun, reminded us of the cruel slaughter of beluga whales there in the 1930s. But the singular event that most demonstrated the tension between witnessing the sublime and inflicting damage on these landscapes by our very presence was the massive calving of the Smeerenburg Glacier. In part, of course, calvings are a natural phenomenon; but in what ways are human actions accelerating this destruction?

Buy Now

Beluga skull

Upon my return home from this voyage, the beluga bones haunted me, called to me, but I hesitated because I knew little about what I’d need to know to write about them. Moreover, since my only exposure to the archipelago had been during the days of perpetual sun in June, I wanted to experience the four-month dark season and the thrill of the sun’s return in March. Thus I returned to Longyearbyen for several months in fall 2019 and in late winter 2020—despite my reservations about my very presence there—to grapple with the relentless cold and dark, albeit enjoying the comforts of modern heat and lighting. I translated my feelings into those of my characters—the beluga whaler Tor Handeland and his wife, the botanist Astrid—as they struggle through the winter of 1937-38 after being stranded at his remote whaling station.

Returning to Longyearbyen in August 2024 was unsettling. While I was excited to be launching The Last Whaler at the Longyearbyen Literature Festival, I was saddened by some of the changes I witnessed in the four short years I’d been away. There was no denying the visible impacts of Arctic warming. Glaciers that tongued the sea in June 2017 have been crumbling and calving, or have retreated fully to land. Southern mountain peaks that were once snow- and ice-covered in summer are now uniformly brown. The rain has been unusually persistent even though Svalbard’s is technically a desert climate. Permafrost is much less stable; the danger of landslides and avalanches haunts Longyearbyen residents after tragedies in 2015 and 2017. Since my last visit, the local government razed 150 houses in the shadow of the unstable mountain Sukkertoppen and constructed a wall to augment the steel fences already erected on its slope to prevent future catastrophes.

Buy Now

Not all is dire, however. Norway is abandoning Svalbard’s former lifeblood—coal mining—in favor of greener energy. The mines at Svea have been closed, the landscape “rewilded” as fertile hunting ground for polar bears. Longyearbyen’s last remaining coal mine #7 is scheduled to close in 2025. And new regulations that restrict tourism—such as limiting the size of cruise ships—should help reduce the human impact on Svalbard’s fragile environment.

As more than a casual tourist, I feel privileged to have been welcomed into this Arctic community. But I’m also cognizant that my very presence has in some small way been detrimental to the landscapes in which I’ve encountered the sublime and from which I’ve “extracted” something every bit as valuable as coal.

Cynthia Reeves

Join team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction) and BlueSky(tripfiction.bsky.social) and Threads (@tripfiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts