DISPATCH FROM LONGYEARBYEN

It is –20 degrees outside and biting cold. At 78 degrees latitude North, Longyearbyen, from where I write this dispatch, is the world’s northernmost settlement, a frontier town whose economy once depended on whaling and coal mining, and is now sustained by oil-rich Norway, winter tourism, and the international project of scientific research on the arctic. My first meal in Longyearbyen was Thai food in a local cafe. This is in part because after Norwegians, the nationality that is most represented in this far away place is Thai, closely followed by Filipinos. This is because the world’s northernmost settlement is a visa-free zone under the terms of the 1920 Svalbard Treaty, which, while recognising Norway’s sovereignty over the territory, allows for all citizens of every nation to come and live here. Russia is the only other country that has had continuous presence in Svalbard. So, the entire territory is demilitarised, at least in theory. Something like the Svalbard Treaty should be extended to encompass the entire planet.

A few days ago, I was watching a taped programme about neocolonialism and the Green New Deal on Al-Jazeera. The show opened with Aja Barber, a sustainability writer posing the following question to Asad Rehman, who is the Director of War on Want: “So, Asad, tell me, a little bit about why you find the polar bear of the climate emergency so problematic, like we all have seen pictures of glaciers and polar bears, and people are like, oh no! Why do you find it problematic?” Rehman explained that he had had a realisation, that after his many years of anti-racist and anti-globalisation organising, and with movements of the Global South, it was the climate crisis that was making all those fights harder. The climate crisis was and continues to have a catastrophic impact on Black and Brown people around the world, including the country of his origin, he said. For Rehman, for too long, the image of a white polar bear on a white iceberg was sending the wrong message about climate change and the stark reality and inequality that it represents. For the record, Rehman was not opposing the whiteness of polar bears as such (I think we all agree that animals at least are not racist), rather he was rightly criticising the image of the polar bear, which became so commonplace in Western environmentalism as a lazy go-to image for representing climate change.

Coming from Bangladesh –– Rehman is British of Pakistani origin –– I could not agree with him more. The two countries share a complicated and unreconciled past, not to mention with the notion of empire. Also, we are two of the most climate vulnerable places in the world. Recently, in the summer of 2022, Pakistan suffered a devastating flood that submerged one-third of the country in water. Millions of people in Bangladesh, for all the hype around its economic miracles, are staring into a watery abyss as shorelines recede along with the looming threat of cyclones. Had I been literally anywhere else on earth, I would have wholeheartedly cheered Rehman on along with the cadre of online participants of the programme, among them many Black and Brown faces, who appeared in the square zoom-like windows of the large TV monitors of the Al Jazeera studios in what was then the modus operandi in a COVID-stricken world. Yet looking out from the comfort of my apartment window at the snow bound Hiorthfjellet, a tall mountain which rises directly across from Longyearbyen, I imagined the proximity of nonhuman presence beyond its snowy peaks. Still, there are more polar bears in the Svalbard archipelago and the Barents Sea region than there are humans. Like the tigers of Sundarbans, although encounters with a polar bear are exceedingly uncommon, death by mauling is a real possibility.

Svalbard is heating five to six times faster than the global average. It seems counterintuitive really. While it feels bitter cold outside, the temperatures here have been increasing by three to five degrees on average since the 1970s. The permafrost is melting. And in 2015, the most devastating avalanche in Longyearbyen’s history killed two people. The guilty mountain is now marked with avalanche protection structures. An avalanche is one thing. How can we make sense of longer chains of agency in evidentiary terms? The landscape here is dynamic, but not always in the timescales that we are used to, for example it takes years to register change in glaciers and polar ice caps. We spend a lot of our time at INTERPRT thinking about and working with evidentiary techniques to better understand and visually intervene into landscape and environmental change. As we are now based in Norway –– where we are also beginning to earnestly engage with the eco-political struggles of the Indigenous Sámi reindeer herders against Norway’s green colonisation, which takes the form of wind energy projects that encroach upon reindeer grazing territory –– I want to better understand how the sensing of snow and ice might help us tackle environmental destruction and human rights violations.

As I write this dispatch from the arctic, on March 29, 2023, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution seeking an International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion on climate change and the human rights obligations of governments. The resolution was put forward by Vanuatu, supported by a core group of 17 other climate frontline countries including Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, and Vietnam, but also rich countries like Germany and Singapore. Behind this initiative are the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change –– some of whom I met in Port Villa as a visiting scholar at the University of South Pacific Law School –– and other youth climate activists who first proposed the idea in 2019. Along with the campaign to make ecocide an international crime which also gained traction this week in the EU parliament, such initiatives provide a sense of hope to deal with the lack of accountability and redress for the many who are the impacted communities and against the few who are most responsible for their suffering. Quite possibly if we are to talk about artistic responses to environmental change, what is urgently needed are new narratives and social and political imaginaries –– about both human and nonhuman life –– to help turn legal expressions of causality into concrete action.