 The
voyage with Arctic Quest artists was my seventh excursion
into Arctic Territory.
Each expedition had its moments of wonder
and visual excitement. Over a period of some 27 years, I have
experienced changing ice patterns and most notably warming
trends, affecting wildlife sustainment and indigenous native
population’s frustrations in harvesting declining species.
On my last venture with Arctic Quest, a scene
I observed from the deck of the Akedemik Ioffe vessel brought
this aspect of environmental change to the ecology of the
Arctic, forcefully into view. Here was a lone mature polar
bear squatting on a fragment of ice surrounded by an open
sea devoid of pack ice. In order to survive, the bear needs
access to ice, to hunt their seal quarry. We need to draw
attention to environmentalists, government officials and the
general public, that we are indeed experiencing global warming
on a scale that is directly influencing the ecology of this
fragile planet.
Future generations will suffer the consequences
of our ineptitude in dealing with what is now a crisis of
a monumental continuum of events.
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