Working With the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge | Subhankar Banerjee | Talks at Google

It's actually interesting for me to come to Google to give this lecture because I was in a very similar world. Seven years ago, I was working. I worked as a scientist at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, working on both physics as well as high performance computing. And then I worked as a research scientist at Boeing for about four years in Seattle. And so it's an interesting transition of life because art was with me all my life. And the passion for conservation kind of led me to eventually follow that passion, the combined art and conservation and indigenous culture. So what I'll share with you this afternoon is really all of America's Arctic. Lisa mentioned the book. The book is only a part of what I'll be talking about. Six years ago, when I started looking into this project, I had already quit my job at Boeing, did a little bit of consulting, but I knew that, well, here is where I wanted to go, hope to go. And I wanted to go to a place that has not been impacted by tourism or industry, so called the place untouched by man. The last frontier. Six years later. And that was six years ago, late 2000. And that was the region, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, you see in the far northeastern corner of Alaska. Six years later, I look at the Arctic very differently because I have been involved practically every minute of my waking hour, either on the field photographing, or across the country and part of the world giving lectures or museum exhibits. And all of this I've come to now look at the Arctic very differently. My mind is filled with contradictions and conflicts, and both joy and sorrow are dancing in a deep embrace. And I'll explain what I mean by that. And I have been struggling to figure out, how do I frame the American Arctic in the American mind? Six years later, I do not think of the Arctic as last frontier anymore. I look at the Arctic as the most connected land on the planet. And that connection is both celebratory and tragic. I look at the Arctic more as a mirror on which our human cultures are reflected. Reflected. And it's very interesting that. And this is something this year, because this year, actually after that book was published and everything happened, I went back to the Arctic in 2006 and spent three months again. And the way I look at it is to study the American culture, perhaps all one has to do is study the American Arctic very deeply. And that's an interesting thought that I had started having. What I'll do is I'll describe each of these region, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which my book was about, but also the entire part of the Western Arctic, which you see, the National Petroleum Reserve. But I'll also share at the same time my thoughts. So it's not really just description and sharing of images, but thoughts about culture and how we relate to nature. Nobel laureate novelist James Coetzee wrote in his essay the Picturesque, the Sublime and the South African Landscape, first published by the Yale University Press in 1988. I'll do a little bit of reading then, little bit of narrative, so kind of go back and forth between the two. The wilds, the wilderness are resonant words in the Judeo Christian tradition. In one sense, the wilderness is a world where the law of nature reigns, a world over which the first act of culture, Adam's act of naming, has not been performed. The origins of this conception of the wilderness lie in pre Israeli demonology, where the wilderness, including the ocean, was a realm over which God's sway did not extend. But a second sense of the wilderness grew up in Judeo Christian theology. The wilderness as a place of safe retreat into contemplation and purification, a place where the true ground of one's being could be discovered even as a place as yet incorrupt in a fallen world. Both of these potentially conflicting conceptions of the wilderness have played a part in the South African landscape or the history of South Africa, is what he said. And both of those conceptions play a critical role as we talk about the American Arctic. Because the land that I'll be talking to you is the most debated public land ever in the United States history. And the debate has been raging in the halls of US Congress for over 30 years. And the debate is about whether to protect that land and actually that area. What we see, the 1002 area and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, protect it or open it up for oil drilling. And that debate is going on for 30 years. And as we look into the history of that debate, both of those conceptions played a critical role. The pro development proponents frame the Arctic in terms of a God for second place. And it has been described as empty, ugly wasteland, so we ought to develop it or exploit it for what it's worth. Oil, coal and natural gas. On the other hand, conservationists of the dominant culture, because I'll make a distinction between dominant culture and indigenous culture, frame the Arctic as a place untouched by man, a place for spiritual retreat, romantic nostalgia for land lost elsewhere, because we have developed most of the lower 48. Unfortunately, both these notions reinforce one another and place the Arctic as a place unconnected from the contradictions of our human Culture. Romans called the Arctic terra incognita means the unknown land. Today, the Arctic has become the most connected land on the planet, and there is very little knowledge in the public about it. And that connection comes both celebratory and tragic. Celebratory is there are hundreds of millions of bird species. Birds go from all over the world, six continents, and all 50 states of the United States, just in that Little region, that 1002 area, and all over the Arctic for nesting during springtime, where they're young and through their migrations. I thought of the Arctic as. Which connected the Arctic to, oops, did I do something wrong? To the rest of the planet. And there are two species which surprised me the most, because this debate is going on for so long, and we talk about polar bear and caribou, and I'll be talking about them as well, but there was really no knowledge, no talk about the birds. And what surprised me the most, that there are two species that go from India to that area every year for nesting. Yellow wagtail and blue throat. So that's. I consider that as a epic celebration that's happening on the planet. Every land on the planet is in this way connected to the Arctic. And then there is that tragic connection. The most intense impact of global warming are happening in the Arctic. And there is knowledge coming out both in terms of literature, journalism, art, films and other means. But where there is really almost no knowledge exist and very little does, is the Arctic is getting connected in a very tragic way. Through migrations of toxins, Arctic has become the toxic dump of the planet. And breast milk of high Arctic women today are scientifically regarded as hazardous waste. And the entire Arctic ecology, from smallest of animals to seals to polar bears and human beings who are eating these, have become polluted. So something even six years ago I thought of as a last frontier, perhaps the most pristine land on the planet, perhaps hosts some of the most polluted people and animals on the planet. And that much of that is in the high Arctic, in the Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. But it's coming to the Alaskan Arctic as well. So what we'll do is we'll start our journey first in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And I mentioned that it is really the most debated public land in the US and it is at the same time that crown jewel of not just America's Arctic, but it truly is crown jewel of the entire circumpolar Arctic, because that region, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, hosts the largest diversity of both plants and animal species anywhere in the entire circumpolar Arctic. Over a period of two years in 2001 and 2002, I traveled that region 4,000 miles with my Inupiat friend, Robert Thompson, whom you see there in the image. And Robert is Inupiat, and he lives with his wife, Jane Thompson, in Kaktowick, which is one of the Inupiat villages on the northern coast of Alaska. And we traveled in all seasons. So my work also is a study of seasonal life in the Arctic, including winter. And it's interestingly, nine months is winter and three months is summer. So spring, summer, fall is all compressed in three months and nine months you have winter. And it is very harsh during winter months because somebody coming from Calcutta, India, I survived. I had to survive 100 to 120 below zero wind chill, something that is impossible to describe in words. But because of Robert, I survived. And slowly that land became my home. Of course, if you talk about the Arctic, we talk about polar bears, naturally so. And the coastal area, which Congress wants to open up for drilling, is the only conservation area for denning polar bears in the American Arctic. And the largest landing habitat of polar bears happen there. But the interesting thing about polar bears, and I used to describe these images two years ago very differently than what I do now, is polar bears critically, that's a den. So the female go in the den in late fall, October, November, give birth in December, January nurse their cubs inside the den until about March and April, at which point they start coming out. But they critically depend on the condition of sea ice, both for denning as well as for feeding. Because when they come out in spring, the, the mothers have not eaten for five to seven months. So they need good sea ice condition to be able to hunt seal and feed their babies as well. And what is happening in the Arctic with global warming is sea ice is thinning and retreating at such a rapid pace. Now the scientific community is predicting by 2060, the entire sea ice cover of the entire Arctic will be gone. And it's going such rapid and which at the same time means that they are predicting that the species polar bear as a species most likely will go extinct, along with other species who depend on ice, like seals, walrus, certain species of seals that critically depend on sea ice and walrus. So those are some of the things about global warming. And I'll go into some of them. This is an image. It's not Africa, it's Arctic and it's not warm. This image was taken in minus 35 degrees. And it's. You're looking at Muskox, which is a high Arctic species with through ice fog. And I used to talk about this image with a lot of romanticism because the image evokes that kind of romanticism. And I used to talk about Aldo Leopold and how he reminisced about the Pleistocene era and so on and so forth. Since then I've come to understand that this image really has nothing to do with romanticism. It's a very serious kind of toxicity that a handful of scientists are studying in the Arctic and nearly no knowledge exists in the public domain called Arctic Haze. And this Arctic Haze doesn't happen in spring, summer, fall when people travel to the Arctic. It happens during winter months when the toxins are showing up in the Arctic and it blankets an area the size of North America and it contains all of the pollution elements. There is extensive scientific report on this, all of the pollution elements that you would find in mid latitudes. And the study has been done like where the source of these toxins are and so on. But not much is known about what does it mean, what kind of impact could it have on Arctic ecology? One of the little known fact is that it most likely will make the Arctic more acidic. The tundra and Arctic has almost no alkaline elements. So when it becomes acidic it becomes. It potentially could be very devastating for the ecology winter. Let me just read a quick thing. How has the American Arctic been described by our elected officials in Congress? In Washington D.C. in March 2002, then Senator Frank Murkowski, still Governor of Alaska now but leaving office, held up a flat white poster board on the Senate floor and said of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This is a picture of anwar. This. That's how he described the Arctic Refuge as it exists for about nine months of the year. This is what it looks like. It's flat, it's unattractive. Don't be misinformed. Secretary of the Interior, former Secretary of the Interior Gail norton, during a 3-12-2003 congressional testimony famously described the Arctic Refuge coastal plain as an object of conceptual art. She called it a flat white nothingness. In 10-02-2005, major front page story in the Chicago Tribune said a Ted Stevens of Alaska was quoted saying and they are the American public not susceptible anymore to misrepresentations that ANWAR is some kind of pristine wilderness. It's empty, it's ugly. On November 5th last year, Senator Stevens said on PBS NewsHour with where some of these images were being shown at the same program, this is the area in winter time. And I defy Anyone to say that is a beautiful place that has to be preserved for the future. It is a barren wasteland, frozen wasteland. So there was that kind of rhetoric, like I mentioned what Coetzee was talking about, that the Arctic, this area has been described by our elected officials as a frozen wasteland. So these images have educated the American public. The book came out in 2003. The exhibit opened in Smithsonian. Since then it has traveled to more than 20 museums across the country, reaching over 10 million estimated people. The work has been published in over 100 magazines internationally and constantly I have given talks. So I became brain dead end of last year. So finally I was really happy to be able to go back to the Arctic because it's art and education at the same time. This is the south side of the Brooks Range Mountain where the first biological expedition happened. Olaus and Mardi Muri and their effort really in 1956 helped create this area in 1960. This is an image of this region is symbolized and I'll talk about different regions of the Arctic. American Arctic is symbolized with one species or a group of species. Arctic refuge is symbolized with this species, caribou, like reindeer. And this herd of caribou is numbering around 130,000 and they migrate throughout the refuge. They winter in the southern side of the Brooks Range. Then the pregnant females. This image is all pregnant females migrating over ice. Because they have to start the journey early, the males and the non pregnant females will come much later. And they have to get to the coastal area in time for calving. If they don't make it to the coastal area, they lose a lot of calves. And that's one thing that is happening with this herd, is that they are losing a lot of calves in recent times because of global warming. With global warming in the Arctic, more snow is happening. Arctic is technically a desert, but when there is such deeper snow, they find it difficult to make it. Their journey slows down. And even though there are 184 caribou herds in all of the Arctic, entire circumpolar Arctic, this is the only herd that the scientific community selected because to describe in a extensive report, because they are seeing the most intense impact from global warming. But this herd has a different significance as well. And I'll get into that in more detail, is it's not just the animal. There is a whole culture that has existed and lived with this herd for over 10,000 years. The Gwichin Athabascan people of northwest Alaska and northeast Northeast Alaska, Northwest Canada still today depend on this herd for their subsistence food. And I'll go into that a little bit later. So they get to the coastal area and cave is exactly where the cave is where Congress wants to drill for oil. That's kind of the migration of the caribou sort of life cycle. So they winter more in the southern regions around Arctic Village, where I spent a lot of time, and the Canadian Arctic. And as spring comes, they have to get to the coastal area. And this is that purple bordered area is where the debate about oil drilling has been raging. I was talking about sea ice. This is sea ice which is really losing in the Arctic Ocean at a rapid pace. And that has many different implications on the Arctic, both the ecology as well as the culture of the High Arctic. A lagoon in the. In the Arctic Refuge. There are. The Arctic Refuge has all these rivers that has over 36 species of fish. And there are these birds and other life that depend on the fish as well. This image is in the current issue of Harper's Magazine. In the reading section is. It looks like a kind of a art study of color, blue and brown, but it's also an ecological image where all these blue circles and ovals you see are lakes where these nesting birds would come during summer and along the shores of which they would be nesting. So these delta areas are very sensitive and important for nesting birds. And these are the birds. And one of the things about my work in the Arctic was that I did not want to either dramatize or romanticize the Arctic, which is far too often done about any images of nature. And what I found most intriguing about the Arctic is its simplicity and its grandness at the same time. And that's what I was trying to capture in my work, with subdued lighting, simple compositions. These are snow geese. 300,000 come from the Canadian Banks island to the Arctic Refuge in autumn. And they come down south in three states. California, New Mexico and Texas, where they would be wintering. So those connections I was talking about. And that's a Pacific loon on a nest on the coastal plain. This is an image again of this connection that this bird comes from Argentina and they have a tiny population and their entire nesting habitat is in the Arctic Refuge, coastal plain and part of the Canadian High Arctic. And the bird is engaged in a mating display. And that's sort of the connections. And that connection is celebratory. Like I was saying, it's an epic connection that connects the Arctic to the rest of the planet. And here you see, this image is taken this year. Here you see two scientists Studying shorebirds for fat content. But the Arctic potentially could get connected in yet another tragic way. Is just waste of hair. Scientists are studying shorebirds for potential of the deadly avian influenza, what we call bird flu. And potentially if nothing has yet been found, but if it does, it would mean deadly for these shorebirds that are coming from. And who knows what kind of public policy we will then institute because we live in a nation of fear. And when we hear that, oh, all those birds have bird flu, then who knows what we'll end up doing. I don't really like to show photographs of mountains because mountain driven ideology has in some ways done a lot of damage to places like the prairie and the desert. But the reason I show this when you see my exhibition prints and stuff, is all that left hand hillside is filled with tracks that are deeply etched in the rocks made by caribou and sheep, probably thousands of years old. You cannot really see it in the screen as much couple more images of global warming is. These are species. The orange is dwarf birch and yellow is willow. Moving north at a rapid pace not seen in the last 8,000 years. With the softening of the permafrost, tree line is moving north. And so is this image. This was published in the New York Times. The senior art critic did a large review. And back then I knew it as an image of aesthetic. But the that cross you see, which is one of the key focus of the image is actually what is called a drunken forest with the softening of the permafrost. Because in the Arctic the soil layer is only 6 inches to 12 inches maximum. And so with that softening, the permafrost is melting away. So this trees are now falling like that. So drunken forest. This is a recent phenomenon that the Inuit people in the high Arctic have not seen before. That there are freezing rain that is happening during fall and winter months in the Arctic, causing hard ice on the tundra, making it very difficult for the animals to forage. This image has to do with a herd of caribou. Similar fate happened to them and they died on the island. But what is important is that now scientists are predicting just that one phenomenon will wipe out the entire Pierre Carbuzzi. And they are in the northwest, Greenland and part of the Canadian High Arctic. This is very disturbing. Taken in the same land that I was there four years ago. But this image is taken this year. It is a difficult image to show clear sign of permafrost melting. Permafrost melting away. The coffin was exposed. And in this particular image, perhaps A grizzly came and expose the bones. And since I photographed this, my guide said there are three more coffins have come out. So is the melting of permafrost, coastal erosion. These are very common things that are happening out there. Like I mentioned, from the beginning of my work, I wanted to bring back more of a holistic story of that land. So it wasn't just the wildlife and the landscape and the other things I'm talking about, but the people who have lived there for thousands of years. And primarily in the American environmental movement and in the American consciousness. I just recently realized that the face of the Native Americans have completely disappeared from American consciousness and the American imagination. While the African Americans, Latin Americans and the Asian Americans have established their presence in the dominant culture, the Native Americans continue to retreat from our consciousness. So it's a thing that I've been thinking a lot. I live with them very extensively. But it wasn't until this year that I really seriously started photographing because I had to come up with how I deal with it. And I'll quickly read a very short segment and I call the series Blood in My Meat. And I'll just read a very small segment from my writing. When I was growing up as a child in India, my father used, he still does the same at age 72, to go every morning to the local market to get vegetables, fish and other groceries. We could afford meat only once a week. I used to go with him often, even though I used to be horrified when the chicken would be butchered right in front of me. Break the neck first. The rest is easy, I was told. Or I would find it grisly. Looking at the skinned goat hanging in front of me. Blood in my meat. I came to the United States and felt relieved. For the first time in my life. I could go to the grocery stores and buy my chicken or beef or lamb. Neatly packaged in Styrofoam, covered with plastic. No blood. And I never had to know where it came from. Years passed. Friends started telling me chickens are fed antibiotics, chickens are fed their own shit, and so on. I got a job in Seattle and escaped all that by buying my grocery at Whole Foods Market. Organic meat. No blood in my meat. And I still do not need to know where it came from. I saw valet parking outside of Whole Foods Market in Bellevue, and I knew my meat was sick. As always, the rich escapes while the poor continues to buy chicken that ate its own shed. I knew the bisons were killed off from the American plains. And the Native Americans now ate flour and sugar and Store bought meat which they do not know where it came from. I did not know where there are still people of the deer and hunters of the northern ice whose cultures are still existing in North America, whose primary food source is the land. I went to the Arctic, killing, butchering and eating of large animals. Caribou, moose, sheep, whale. I saw where the food came from and I again saw blood in my meat. I showed my images of bloody meat in New York City only to be received with August. My dear friend and renowned Guichin activist Sarah James said, we are the ones who have everything to lose. Maybe there are too few of us to matter. Maybe people think Indians are not important enough to consider in making their energy decisions. But it is my people who are threatened by this development. We are the ones who have everything to lose. We are the caribou people. Caribou are not just what we eat. They are who we are. They are in our stories and songs and the whole way we see the world. Caribou are our life. Without caribou we wouldn't exist. Indigenous people all across the Arctic feel seriously threatened by proposal to open up the entire Arctic land and sea recently this year and sea to oil development and more recently coal development. After years of spending time with my indigenous friends from the north, we finally started this series. And I am not interested in the representation of the romantic people of the North. Their life is just like our life. There is traditional ways and there are modern ways of life coexisting in a delicate balance. Hunting as well as basketball television showed a pop. Lack of jobs, depression, drugs, alcohol are all part of life in the north just as it is everywhere else. And yet some of the friendliest people I saw in the North. This is from a series of pictures from a Canadian High Arctic village Old Crow, which I showed in the first picture. That's my friend Joe Tetlicci and his 11 year old son Jamie and his cousin Shane. And we were 90 miles up river photographing. I mean they were hunting caribou. So I'll just go through the images. And that's Joe's wife Glenna back at home. And then that's the Gwich' in people, like I said, their relationship with the caribou. And I'll finish this up with this image is the Inupiat people on the North. They the primarily depend on sea mammals, whale primarily and seals. And you can see here a whale is brought in and prayer is given. And now the entire Arctic Sea of America's Arctic Congress is proposing to open it up for oil drilling entire 33 million acres of the Chukchi Sea coast and the entire Beaufort Sea coast. And no companies really have any experience yet to how to operate those things in in winter conditions of the Arctic culture and nature. This image has been widely published in magazines all over the world. Is there is no flower. So how do these people pay tribute to those who passed away? And that's a pair of bowhead whale jawbones. And what I'm going to do is quickly give you maybe five minutes just a quick background on the petroleum reserve. Because this area there is a lot of consciousness now with the work that we were able to do. But this area has nearly no knowledge and is as important and very different looking because of its nature of geology than here. But equally important both the land and the sea. But I won't really dwell on it. But I'll talk about couple of resource wars. This year I went back to this region called Etukak river uplands where the caribou herd is much larger, 500,000 strong. And there are 22 different native communities who depend on that caribou. And just take a quick look at the surface of these images because they look very different than the Arctic refuge. Because right where the caribou cave in the Arctic refuge it was oil. Here it's coal. Largest coal deposit of North America lies directly underneath the calving ground of the Western Arctic caribou herd. So yet another future resource war. 4 trillion ton of estimated bitumenous coalies in this region. And the tundra is filled with tracks caribou crossing different things. And that's the life cycle of those caribou's that you can see right where the CAV is where coal development is proposed. And one quickly two more minutes is dcr. The most debated land in the halls of US Congress was actually not exactly the Arctic Refuge, but this region called the Tashapak Lake. Which is really the most unique wetland area in the entire circumpolar Arctic. Because primarily for molting geese the habitat. But also there is caribou and people and all of the same kind of stories. The caribou Herd here is 45,000 strong. Not as large, but there are seven communities depend on this caribou. But it's mainly the geese that are coming from three continents. And now this year Congress really worked hard to open this up Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Interior. And this work was immediately shown and published. And we prevailed because of a decision by a district court judge in Alaska. And then entire ocean we are talking about opening up for offshore oil development. Now this is the Chakchi Sea. And of course the ocean has the whales. These are beluga whales. Thousands of them come along the shores of Kasigaluk Lagoon. At the same time, for the first time, the shale oil also arrived offshore of Alaskan Arctic. They already bought 4 Lee Shale outside of the Arctic Refuge. And next year Congress will offer lease sale on 33.5 million acres of the Chukchisee Coast. One quick. It's an image in your mind like the Brooks Range Mountain of the American Arctic. And this is all of the American Arctic. This is the Canadian border. The mountain sort of goes like this. There are 3/4 million caribou crossing this mountain range each year. Back and forth, something really large, epic scale. That used to happen in the American plains. Completely lost, but it is still happening in the American Arctic. And those are the shorebird nesting that are happening all over the American Arctic. And this is the scenario of already oil development. The red is already sold federal and state leases and all of this. So this is on the land. And all of that purple area is what is going to be offered next year. And all of these area, everywhere you see red. So we are fragmenting the American Arctic furiously. In the lower 48, we are talking about connecting up defragmented ecological habitat like Yellowstone to Yukon. In the Arctic, we are actually doing the reverse. We are fragmenting it furiously so and the ocean as well. So it is a disturbing thing. And again, the conservation community is not opposed to stopping oil development everywhere. No, there is going to be development all over the Arctic, but some of the sensitive areas, ecologically sensitive areas, hopefully we will preserve for future generations. So with that I will stop and then we will take questions. Just do you want to come up here or. And the microphone is in the middle of the room. So one thing I wanted to say. As an artist, all I can do is bring new thoughts to public to help create a discourse. But the conservation organizations, Alaska Wilderness League is whom I work with very closely. It's a small organization based in Washington D.C. they work extremely hard. And Laura DeBonis who helped put this event together, she's on the board of Alaska Wilderness League. If you go to alaskawild.org if you are interested in knowing more, you would find more information because they really are trying very hard to protect some of the key areas.

Thank you very much for coming. Can you address briefly some of your thoughts on the controversy in the Smithsonian regarding the display of Your work on.

March 19, 2003 Senate was debating this issue, and Senator Barbara Boxer, your home state senator, stood up on the Senate floor and she was the Arctic champion. She held up my book on the Senate floor and urged all her colleagues to take a look at my book and go see my upcoming exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution. And that day we won the vote by one vote, 51 to 49. So there were people in Washington D.C. who were not very happy with that perhaps. So Smithsonian called me up and said, I have good news and bad news. I have had the associate director that I've had enormous pressure to cancel your exhibit. But the exhibit is still on. But we had to marginalize it. So they moved the exhibit from a prominent location where it was to open to a downstairs gallery, took out all of the interpretive text completely, and pretty much the entire publicity of the museum totally hid my exhibit. But what that did is press and media took notice. And for a little while, I was even a little bit more popular than even our president, believe it or not, because New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Music magazine, all over the country there was outrage against that decision because Smithsonian was spinning the story every week. And this ended up being a Senate hearing on that issue and ended up being a Senate investigation on that issue. We still don't know who did it and where the pressure came from. But the good news was that California Academy of Sciences, again, your home state, right here in San Francisco, recreated the entire Smithsonian show. And Larrant foundation provided an extremely generous grant, half a million dollar, to help with the public outreach. So we had eight exhibits traveling simultaneously all across museums in the United States. So freedom of speech didn't quite get thwarted at that issue.

I just wanted to ask you a little about your photography. So clearly you took pictures from airplanes as well as from traveling by landscape.

So the work is both from the land as well as lot of aerial work done up there.

And did you travel a lot when you traveled on? You showed a picture of a sled. Was that a dog travel?

No, the whole dog team culture is not there anymore in the Arctic, at least the American and Arctic. So it's all snowmobile travel. So during winter months we travel snowmobile, little bit snowshoes, but not really much because we had so much gear. And in summer it would be kayak along the coast, raft walk, combination of all of those things.

So when it's that cold, I mean, there are no digital cameras, right?

No, no, no. These are all larger medium format, old mechanical camera bodies. And in the book there is a whole page I wrote about all of the photo gear I use and what lenses, everything and the films and everything is there.

I've seen that.

I spent a little bit of time once in Denali trying to take pictures in the winter. And I remember, you know, I could. My gloves were too bulky to actually push a shutter with and I could only live without gloves for like a minute. You have similar experiences out here.

Like the cold is so intense in 30 seconds your skin would freeze. Exposed skin would freeze in 30 seconds. So it's like something we have to be constantly aware of. That's why Robert used to say, never say I'm feeling cold. That means it's too late, you already got the frostbite. Which I did get frostbite. I had frostbite on my cheek and nose and three fingers. It's hard to describe that kind of a cold, but human body is pretty amazing that it does get used to. Like I used to see robot operating metal parts in minus 40 degrees with simple cotton gloves. I thought it's humanely impossible. I would have two liner gloves and a heavy format next year I could do the same thing, not quite with the cotton gloves, but with polypro liner gloves. Human body is pretty amazing. And then I come back to Santa Fe, or back then it was Seattle. Now Santa Fe is home and I feel cold in 50 degrees. So did you have a question or. We still have five more minutes.

Just another one for you. What's next?

Like I said, so I'm actually back in the Arctic now that that's why at the beginning of the talk I wanted to lay out the foundation of the larger body of work. So I'm now working on entire America's Arctic and I hope to go to Greenlandic Arctic as well as part of the high Canadian Arctic where these toxic issues are really intense. So if funding permitting, I would hope to do at least three more years of work in the Arctic. Can you tell a bit more about the toxic issues? I mean, what are the sources? The interesting thing is that there is a very amazing book, actually really the only book that exists by the Los Angeles Times journalist Marla Cohn. And she got a major Pew fellowship. So that's why she was able to do the work because Arctic is such an excellent expensive place to operate. And she wrote a book called Silent Snow the Slow poisoning of the Arctic. And the sources are all over the planet. Coal fired power plants is a primary source of lot of the mercury and sulfur oil refineries and then flame retardants we use in simple things like Mattresses and sofas. It's just about every form of toxin that. That can evaporate into the atmosphere. Then it goes like that with the wind. As soon as it gets cold, it drops and it does this jumping and hopping process until it ends its life cycle in the Arctic. So there are right now in the Arctic all these DDTs and PCBs that in the lower 48 states we used to use 40 years ago. So it's all sort of migrated up there and only the knowledge is coming out that this actually was happening even 40 years ago. It's happening more intense now. And I don't. It's hard to go into the science is that global warming and toxicity are playing a very. What's the right word? Intense. They are intensely intertwined. The toxicity won't be as intense if there was no global warming. So it is not even like a multiplicative. It has become like a feedback loop because of this warming. And again, I don't want to get into the science part of it, but global warming is only exacerbating the toxic issue in the because animals feed close to shore, that's where the water is. So if it was on the ice, the toxic would be different. But on the water it's all of that, but the sources are just about anything. Why did you pick the Arctic over other American sort of vast areas like the Great Basin or Badlands. That's a good point. Like I said, I was working at Boeing and I knew that I'm going to do something, but I didn't really know where and how do I start a project or even a project I really started. I didn't even have an idea of a project. I just started very simply just to go to a place, the Arctic. I guess one simple answer is opposites attract. So growing up in a tropical place, Arctic had always intrigued. But there was a specific moment of epiphany that happened for me because when I was doing traveling all over the lower 48, I went to a place called Churchill in Manitoba, Canada. So all these photographs of polar bears you see in books and magazines mostly come from that area. And I came back with photographs, but I came back with a very disappointing experience. I would see one polar bear and eight large vehicles surrounding the bear. So that's when the idea began to go to a place that's not impacted by man, untouched by man. So I started doing research and Alaskan Arctic seemed a possible place rather than Svalbard or Greenlandic Arctic. And immediately I started doing extensive communications with the Scientists as well as the indigenous communities.

One thing that tends to be a problem, like, in the political spectrum of this is actually getting people to, like, have something to care about. Because, you know, like, it's a very abstract notion, like caribou and the people surviving off the caribou up there and all. And to some degree, most of the people in the lower 48 basically can't care enough about that to really be active about it. So what kind of messages can you give that would actually, you know, even if it's. If it is long term, but have some sort of impact on maybe our grandchildren or something that could make more people in the lower 48 care about this kind of an issue?

I'm really glad you asked that question. And honestly, I do not have an exact answer for your question. Because as an artist, last six years, every minute of my waking hour, I keep thinking about that exact question you asked. How do I, with my work, make people care? Because I can give you all of the statistics about caribou and toxicity and blah, blah, blah. We really won't care. How do we care about a land that we perhaps may never go? So I guess that's where art comes in, that it's beyond journalism, that emotionally connecting somebody with a land or culture or people. And again, I do not have an exact answer for your question. It's an ongoing journey for me, but people seem to care, like, all across America. I'll share with you. Everywhere I have gone and given talks, hardcore people who were in favor of drilling would come to me and say. Would cry and come to me and say that, you know, I mean, you have brought something that I had not thought about before. So it's something. It's a question that keeps me awake at night, that how do you connect with people? And I guess literature does that, Art does that in some way. Films does that. So it's different modes of communication, hopefully. Thank you very much.