Finding footing on ice and snow, walking about in uncertain, diverse ground. In the end, it’s all about change: status, mind, uses, customs. Forget your gloves for a minute, and your fingers will stick to your binoculars. Look straight ahead of yourself, all the while keeping your emotions in check in the rearview mirror. Be far-sighted. Think of the consequences of your actions before they happen, or as they happen, according to experience. Test ice and snow carefully, don’t put your full weight on it too soon, as the polar bear knows, so you won’t fall in icy waters and die in minutes or slide into a crevice, risking your and your expedition partners’ lives. Be aware of what you’re doing, govern the present and you won’t suffer the future. Be cautious and reflective. Plan for what you don’t know, because just about anybody can plan for what they do know already…

Be far-sighted. Think of the consequences of your actions before they happen, or as they happen, according to experience.

Being an explorer is worth more than any picture you can take, because those who explore and investigate things before they appear know the sense of time and truth, and are masters of art. You’re not fighting others for a prize. Competitions with winners and losers are life’s defeat, indeed: winners delude themselves on fictitious, short-living recognition, losers end up disenchanted and bitter. Those who compete do so to the detriment of someone or something else. Those who do not compete affirm their mind, their opinion, their karma, their authentic abilities and aptitudes. This is my life, and right here, this Christmas note may just as well end. But it’s not enough. Any bad tradition must be changed. We cannot keep any alibis to mask the atrocities we do. Good traditions are to be preserved. If we keep playing and conning the world hiding behind traditions, it means we oppose change for one reason only: selfish interest.

Thick ice, loads of it, thick fog, icebergs. Any communities, small or large, know that they must be intentional about their actions, be aware, be cautious, or risk catastrophe. Navigating the issues of globalization and climate change is a responsibility that befalls on us all. The eyes press hard against the binoculars with every later sunset and earlier sunrise. They feel like the eyes of an inmate who shed his last tears, slept his last hours, and tries hard for atonement. Anything can happen, or nothing at all, and yet, we are here to imagine a future we pray will never come.

It’s cold. Arctic summer is a very peculiar summer. Cold penetrates the bones, or maybe the soul. I internalized the experience of catastrophe after the many years I spent in this ‘world within a world’.

Today, we stand close to Shannon Island. We all learned something important: we are surrounded by those who see us, observe us, and don’t want to be us, which is reason enough to take a step back every once in a while. They are shadows in the fog, mountains of living ice that suffers a slow, collapsing death, or a quick one under the force of a tsunami. Look: quick shadows of seal hunters pop up in the fog. They stay well clear of our boat. In this land, people killed and kill—they know little more. Bears don’t want to kill, they just want to live their majestic existence, even in the face of extinction, like all the large terrestrial mammals. Or maybe they are the greatest emperors of the planet, and like all emperors, sooner or later they’ll get exiled or killed, and end up in history books. Or maybe like wolves, bears are the last real rebels of earth: they ignore all human fairy tales and sensational news pieces, aware as they are of the plain dignity of existence.

It’s cold. Arctic summer is a very peculiar summer. Cold penetrates the bones, or maybe the soul. I internalized the experience of catastrophe after the many years I spent in this ‘world within a world’. Ice wears out more and more quickly, as quickly as water levels will rise, but looking for a passage through ice blocks is still an issue. It takes skill. We need to veer south, for right here the ice is just too thick. We cannot push through and stepping back is what is needed. We’ll look for a better, safer passage, a more respectful one. Since today, I’ll preface my public meetings with that very phrase, stepping back. We cannot behave like loud, pestering tourists with dyed hair and earphones writing graffiti on the walls of a millennia-old civilization anymore. People do not come here to enjoy a snow park, like day trippers from Milan do in the Alps. The time of false TV sagas is over.

Maybe only in very remote eras did anyone else stepp on the same ice, jumping off a Viking ship, though I don’t mind thinking I am among the first, or maybe the first ever.

I know I’m not too politically correct, it’s just that I prefer being a free thinker, an out-of-place illuminist. In the giant island I find myself in, nobody kills anything if not to sustain their family, cloth them, and protect them from the great Arctic winter. There are no questionable ‘presidents’ managing lives as great big patrons. There are no elections to win. Here, life and death are in natural relationship, there is no plausible revenge against nature to amplify the political hubbub or any need for lobbying and slogans. Here, the space for mankind is still a very limited affair. There are no human settlements for hundreds of miles. Maybe only in very remote eras did anyone else step on the same ice, jumping off a Viking ship, though I don’t mind thinking I am among the first, or maybe the first ever.

Once again, I am an explorer of places and thoughts. I learned, or am I learning, that exploring means having no presumption, only an upright behaviour. A few days back, we left Svalbard and, before reaching Greenland, we decided to spend a few days to scout the northern part of the coast. In this country, barely anyone kills anymore. The values of territorial and integrity of population – human and non-human – prevails over individual interests. Everybody understands that. In other words, it is not the ‘here and now’ that counts, a universe where any individual is convinced he owns everything around him, a sort of ius primae noctis with license to kill, sacrificing intellect to the historical failure that is human supremacy.

I found confirmation of what I once wrote on these pages: the last polar bear dying will be the harbinger of death for humanity. It is a metaphor, but it is very close, too close, to reality.

This environmental richness gave us a great gift over the course of our adventurous days. For those who have eyes in their soul, and not only in their head, polar bears are perfectly adapted to live wherever is cold, icy, and glacial. They didn’t choose, whether for decision or evolution, an easy life. They don’t run after tax credits and they never say ‘no’ aprioristically, even if they are not perfectly at ease in this changing world, where cubs die more often with every year. Mom’s milk is never enough. It helped the cub in its first year of life, but there’s so much more to learn before it can survive on its own. The first thing to learn from mom is to hunt fat-rich prey. Water is cold, and ice to hunt seals on grows smaller and smaller. They need to swim longer, and hair cannot insulate enough on its own without a thick fat padding.

The first few days of our expedition showed us a representation of polar bears that we had never seen before. They are smart animals, they can learn, count, and think. They can choose and plan ahead. Researchers at Oakland University found out that their intelligence is comparable to that of primates and only slightly less (or equal?) to that of humans. I found confirmation of what I once wrote on these pages: the last polar bear dying will be the harbinger of death for humanity. It is a metaphor, but it is very close, too close, to reality.

Four bears found a walrus carcass, a big one. An old male that died of natural causes, arguably, because walruses are bigger and stronger than bears, and it is almost impossible for a bear to pierce through the thick, hard skin of a big walrus. If acting swiftly, a bear can isolate a walrus cub from the pack and prey on it, but they don’t stand a chance against lethal walrus fangs. Four bears, two adults and two cubs, feast on the carcass. The fat they’ll get from it means surviving the winter. Nature is organized, nothing goes to waste, and death is often synonymous with life.

There’s an issue, though: only two of the four bears are related, a female and its cub. The others are a young adult male and an unaccompanied adolescent. The adult female is obviously bigger and stronger, and quite aggressive against the non-related bears. Its interest lies in itself and its cub. The other two realize their own inferiority. What we know is that this scene is a perfect ethological representation, whose purity is not muddied by the self-reference of religion, philosophy, and ethics. The two hungry males will wait for their turn, and mama bear, once the cub is satiated, will enjoy some cuddle time with it as a way of giving thanks. Humanity and eternity are obviously not built upon equality, but upon necessary inequalities. There no decision to be made: the bear is the stronger, larger terrestrial carnivore, and its right to life coincides with its birth.

For what unfathomable reason this would be the apanage of human animals, and not the birthright of every living creature?

At what moment did we appropriate the notion that we are better than bears? On what day someone, a human, came up with the idea that death does not exist, or that it is merely a passage towards another plane of existence, making human animals the only ones to claim eternity for themselves? And for a while, not even all humans: maybe not women, because someone just had to come up with the ideas of witches and torture. For what unfathomable reason would this be the apanage of human animals, and not the birthright of every living creature? While nobody ever found traces of human soul, ‘presumed’ as it is for deduction of scriptural interpretation, it certainly is the case we give animals the same benefit, an identical right, democratic souls for all!

I’m on the outer deck of the boat, trying to keep warm and thinking—my curse. Certainly, I will not be able to keep my mouth shut next time. I must say it: life is a right of everyone, and is subject only to death, which goes to the benefit of the planet. It is not the eternity of a delusional life that identifies good with the lives of each of us, but the certainty of death. It is for this reason that we cannot fathom the idea of being devoured, as once said David Quammen. It is for this reason that we, far from being the alpha predator, which are a much smaller group in the evolutional pyramid, we act as though we are, introducing a macroscopic anomaly. We are non-predators that are numerically superior. We turned into alpha consumers that throw off balance the vital equilibrium of the planet.

Leave these thoughts to me, anyway. A puffin comes close to me, looking for herrings and sardines. And again, in my head, I keep thinking about altered sea currents, altered fish patterns, countries that under the guise of scientific research kill and kill the largest, most profitable marine mammal, maybe the smartest living creature in this world. I wonder if I am made to live in this world, if my time must end or if I’m early, somehow. I can’t answer that. Surely, my time will end feeding a bear and its cub. Should the boat I’m in sink, it will be an unregretful, quick affair, given how much I had and how much I gave. Also, how much I enjoyed being a happy dweller of this earthly paradise.

The fog clears. It is the dead of night, but some glare in the distance suggests an early sunrise. It is two a.m., and a clear bright day is coming towards us with the speed of a giant iceberg. There is an actual iceberg not far from me, with beautiful blue nuances that seem to hide a crack. It does crack. The water boils around it. there is very little light still, but the camera succeeds in capturing some detail. I can see some haze around the towering mass as entropy is giving back the rightful crystalline structure to the molecular confusion unfolding before me. Icebergs are massive, and we’re so small. Noise grows louder, deafening even. This mountain, which a good illustrator may turn into a Tolkienesque character, collapses in a few eternal seconds. I barely have the time to shout tsunami! that everything bounces back to calm. We have been graced by a smaller iceberg emerging – which on its own, was still large enough to send us belly up.

This might happen someday. The planet is, in a way, similar to this boat. The icy mountain is the large peril we didn’t realize, the sum of errors and delusions of a cadet race that questionably, and shamelessly, elected itself as top ruler. Maybe we’ll survive. We are probably looking at a thousand Christmases ahead of us, which makes me think of a cute little lion cub, or tiger cub, or bear cub, as a present. To cuddle and to accompany us into an ark that will float endlessly. What would I like for this Christmas? That Christmas be a holiday for everyone, no labels attached. Call it what you want, but we need a holiday to celebrate life in all its forms. We need a feast of respect, of humility, of equality. Sure, lights and ornaments are fine, but even where there isn’t any, let’s try to make our ideas shine as bright as stars.

Text and photographs: Nico Zaramella © worldwide reserved