BOOKPATHS

The Arctic

Sara Wheeler discusses The Magnetic North, “a tale of the people and landscapes contained within the Arctic Circle.”

[Sara Wheeler] ‘In contrast, I was very unnattracted to the Arctic because it was everything the Antarctic wasn't. It was owned, it was polluted, there was lots of oil and all sorts of miserable people, it was just not something that interested me. Years went by and I went to other places; I went to Africa and did this and that, and then I became middle aged – I'm almost 50 – and I started thinking about the Arctic. Of course, it is all those things, and that more suits the elegiac melancholy of middle age, where everything is fragmented. I'm not interested in idealism any more, I'm interested in reality.’ – from “Life in a Cold Climate: How Sara Wheeler is Shaking Up Arctic Exploration,” by Emily Dugan, The Independent

Arctic

Being Caribou : Five Months On Foot with an Arctic Herd, by Karsten Heuer (Toronto, Ontario, Canada : McClelland & Stewart Ltd., March 2006)

In 2003, Karsten Heuer and his wife, Leanne Allison, “accompanied the 123,000-strong Porcupine caribou for five months in an uncharted course over mountain ranges, through deep snow, and across semi-frozen rivers.” Being Caribou relates their adventure following the migrating caribou herd and warns of what will be lost if oil drilling takes place under its summer calving ground.

Leanne Allison’s film about their journey has “won 17 awards at international film festivals.”

Related Websites

Being Caribou : Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

“The purpose of this trip was not to go on a 1,500-3,000 km Arctic expedition. It was, and still is, an urgent quest to understand one of North America’s last great mammal migrations before it’s too late — and communicate what we found, to the rest of North America.” – from the Being Caribou Website