To love without knowing how to love wounds the ones we love - Thich Nhat Hanh
Vignettes / snippets / meditations
Topophilia
Back in 2018 I spent a couple of weeks working in South Georgia, a subantarctic island in the Scotia Sea. The season of sex was in full swing and the bays were seething with fur seals, densely packed and bellicose with breeding fervour. Big males humped down to meet us indignantly on the shoreline, teeth bared and bleating. Get gone, they whimpered. You’re messing with my mojo. They were like a wall, a great wall of writhing seals guarding the fields of king penguins beyond, which we were so eager to visit. But the seals were more eager to see us gone, and so forceful in their flippered farewells that, on more than one occasion, we couldn’t make landfall. We’d drive the Zodiacs up to the beach and nose around a while, looking for a peaceful place to nudge onto the sand before finally admitting defeat.
South Georgia. So many seals! It was wonderful. It was intense. It was too much.
From South Georgia it’s around two days of motoring to the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. We arrived just after nine a.m.
Stillness.
Silence.
The assurance of the cold.
The ice-scattered sea was like a star-strewn sky.
After the excesses of South Georgia, Antarctica offered a blissful kind of sedation. This was my third year working on the Peninsula, and it was starting to feel like home.
Environmental psychologists call this sense of geographical connection place attachment or topophilia. It’s common for people to feel this way about significant locations in their lives, like their hometown or childhood holiday destinations. After three years of summer visits, Antarctica was beginning to occupy a similar place in my life: a point of stability in a rapidly changing world.
2. The sublime and the beautiful
Antarctica is girdled by a savage sea and buried under a mantle of ice capable of submerging us all, yet it exerts an almost cosmic allure. It is impossible to regard this icebound land without an existential shudder and yet, bathed in ethereal light and gazing across a field of penguin chicks, there are few who can resist its charms.
Many have sought to describe the surge of emotions humans feel in the presence of a place like Antarctica, both awesome and terrible. It’s like a cliff edge between ecstasy and annihilation.
Irish philosopher and political theorist Edmund Burke wrote a lot about ‘the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror’. The sublime, he went on, is ‘the strongest passion . . . much greater in [its] effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures.’
Beauty is nice, he contended, but the sublime endures. It cuts through to our deepest selves.
It’s not unusual for humans to feel love towards the natural world. In 1984, American naturalist, biologist and writer Edward Osborne Wilson coined the term biophilia to describe the human tendency to ‘affiliate’ with nature: to love the more-than-human.
My feeling for Antarctica seem to fall somewhere between this ‘affiliation’ and the transcendent emotions Edmund described in his seminal treatise on the sublime back in 1757.
3. Long distance
When the pandemic landed, polar work ended overnight. A strange truth dawned on me: without my job, Antarctica and I would be separated indefinitely. Underemployed and living alone, I spent days with my hands in the soil, rolling logs and building veggie beds, spreading mulch and planting seeds. When I wasn’t in the garden, I was thinking about Antarctica. I missed it, and with no end to our separation in sight, I took tentative steps towards a new kind of connection.
We moved online. I started a shop selling Antarctic-themed things, and built a website to match. I created a Twitter account, followed every Antarctic researcher I could find, and read voraciously. Over the next few months I landed an Antarctic writing job, and joined the Council for the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS). Most of my new Antarctic friends had never been to Antarctica, but they were dedicating their lives to knowing and understanding it from afar. They were kind enough to let me in.
Many months passed. My affection evolved from stalkerish obsession to the uneasy estrangement of long-distance lovers as memories of our last contact faded.
4. Grey continent
A few months into the pandemic I had a dream. It was late summer in Antarctica and everything was grey. Even the ocean, usually an unearthly obsidian, was softened by a slick of sea ice. Standing on deck as snow began to fall, I felt a sense of ease. Flakes landed on my lashes and the backs of my hands. I pressed one between my fingers, but it gave way to dust. I looked up and realised the world was not grey but glowing red, and the dust was ash falling from the burning sky.
This was not a cryptic dream. The previous summer I’d fled an Australia in flames and flown to Antarctica for work. But the fire’s electronic footprint followed me. On Christmas Day I received a flurry of messages. Fire engines lined my street. Friends and family had cocked my garden hoses towards the gutters and offered to collect valuables from my house. I flicked to the FiresNearMe app. A red flame icon filled the gully across the road. I could almost smell the gums, crisp with drought. I switched to flight mode and spent the day with the whales, revelling in their breaching displays as Australia’s eastern seaboard burned.
This wasn’t the first time I’d compartmentalised parts of myself to manage the tension of working in Antarctica. The previous season, my expedition leader gave a lecture on climate change and the environmental impacts of Antarctic tourism. Our industry, I learned, generates around eight times more carbon emissions than a regular international holiday. In only ten days, some sources say, a tourist on an Antarctic cruise ship is responsible for as much carbon as an average global citizen in a wealthy country burns in a year. This carbon contributes to the melting of the very place we’ve come to see, and the swelling of our seas. Ambivalence swirled inside me. I pushed it aside.
5. Blackness. Dissonance.
The eastern Australian fires of 2019–20 sent a million metric tons of smoke into the stratosphere. Most of this was organic carbon and black carbon, the two main aerosols generated when things burn. These microscopic particles can travel through the atmosphere and settle on snow and glaciers, darkening their surface and making them melt more quickly, speeding up the process of sea level rise. The morning after my smoke and dust dream, I turned on my computer to see whether black carbon from the recent fires could end up in Antarctica.
In a study published in 2021, a team of scientists analysed black carbon deposits in ice cores. They found markers in ice from the Antarctic Peninsula, which they traced back to wildfires in New Zealand hundreds of years ago. So yes, carbon from the gums in my gully could settle on the ice that is my workplace, speeding up its melt.
Another black carbon study published in nature.com this February raises more immediate concerns about black carbon released by the ships I work on, and its deposition on snow and ice on the Antarctic Peninsula.
A provocative headline in The Conversation proclaimed: Each Antarctic tourist effectively melts 83 tonnes of snow. I raised my eyebrows.
After years of working in Antarctica I’ve gotten cosy with terms like ‘cognitive dissonance’ and ‘solastalgia’, a neologism coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005.
Solastalgia describes the particular brand of desolation you experience when a place you love is changing in ways you feel powerless to stop. I know it well.
It’s a sense I imagine many people experience these days. We need systemic change. Our individual acts are important but secondary.
I know travelling to Antarctica does harm. I can’t justify my presence in Antarctica, yet there I go. (There are reasons for this, which don’t belong here.)
Between offsetting my personal emissions and living quite simply back home, I’ve found a way to live with the dissonance. But the spate of fires, floods and pandemic lockdowns makes it harder to take.
6. Loving nature well
Love is the capacity to take care, to protect, to nourish.
Thich Nhat Hanh
When the pandemic hit, I finally started gardening. I bought half a cubic metre of soil from the garden shop on the highway, built up a bed of old pine rounds, and planted rows of seeds. Winter crop: radish, spinach, kale, beetroot, broccoli. Tender green shoots sprouted within days.
A few months later, the first furred leaves were dancing under the pitter patter of the hose. I doted on them, watering daily and sending a stream of proud pics to friends and family.
When the first radish was ready for picking, I was euphoric. It was a feeling akin to Antarctica-love. Nature love, but different. This feeling was gentler, tempered by tenderness and care. It was a wholesome love, untroubled by moral ambiguity or the terror of the sublime.
By comparison, my relationship with Antarctica felt somehow toxic, even borderline abusive.
There are people who write about the trouble of loving nature in our time. Alisa Aaltola is an environmental philosopher from Finland. ‘From the moral point of view’, she writes, ‘it may seem that love of . . . nature is always constructive. Yet . . . biological love has also morally troubling consequences.’
Love of the more-than-human, she contends, isn’t always altruistic as we might imagine. It can also find darker expressions.
This took me back to the summer of 2018. I was working as a Zodiac driver on a photographic charter to South Georgia. My job was to ferry passengers, most of them conservation photographers advocating for the protection of vulnerable species, to their shooting locations. I was stunned to watch one of them goad albatrosses, seals and penguins to elicit eye contact or an open-mouthed display of aggression. This goes against all the wildlife-viewing guidelines, but they were more interested in getting the shot. They may have loved the animals in some way, but this love was entangled with ego, ambition and self-aggrandisement.
Loving nature, Alisa writes, does not always result in loving acts towards nature.
On the contrary, love for a wild place can lead to its destruction through our efforts to be close to it.
For a frigid continent like Antarctica, resistant to such attempts to bond, our overtures have become increasingly grandiose: we sail luxury ships down the coastline to be by its side; erect camps on the edge of its icy skirt and immerse ourselves in its crevasses; take flights across the Southern Ocean just to wave hello. But each of these acts comes at a cost.
This, Alisa concludes, is the love paradox. In simpler terms: we’re loving the place to death. But what can we do? When it comes to Antarctica, there are only so many ways we can connect. We can’t move there and make a home. It’s not that kind of place. We can’t nourish the land - there’s virtually no land to till or tend. This is nobody’s land. It engenders love, but offers no guide for its expression. If there was such a guide I suspect it would say something simple. Like: go home.
Part 7: Love, love, love
There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be
All you need is love
The Beatles
Late last year I received an email from the Antarctic Science Foundation, an Australian not-for-profit supporting science down south, inviting me to share their work with passengers on a scenic flight over Antarctica. It had been two years. Two whole years of learning, absorbing the hard truths of Antarctic science. Two years of yearning. The decision was much easier than it should have been.
The engine buzzed as we approached Antarctica. Far below, translucent discs of sea ice floated on a strange blue sea. Rippled glacier tongues unfurled over the ocean like rumpled runways. Our tiny shadow crept across the ice, aerosols escaping the exhaust to join the net of gases slowly closing around the planet.
I closed my eyes against the blinding commotion.
The immensity of the ice.
The insanity of our flight.
As flight attendants served celebratory champagne, a motionless river flowed beneath us, vast beyond words, braided with ribbons of gray moraine. I understood that I would return to Antarctica. That I would continue to love this world imperfectly, even as we lose it. Aquamarine melt ponds twinkled gaily on cushions of voluptuous ice.
This is our inheritance: a tainted love.
Learning how to live with it is the task of our time.