'The Magnetic North': Sara Wheeler on the Arctic, a fragile, 'life-infested' landscape

'The Magnetic North:

Notes from the Arctic Circle'

by Sara Wheeler

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 315 pp., $26

In the late 1990s, British travel writer Sara Wheeler spent seven months in Antarctica, which led to her first book, the well-regarded "Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica." Wheeler was drawn to the icy continent's barrenness, where neither native people nor plants or animals had much of a presence on the land.

Antarctica was a metaphor for "an alternate and better world," in contrast to the Arctic, which she viewed with prejudice as "the complicated, life-infested North," she recalls in her new book. As politics and the climate changed, however, she was drawn to a place that she writes, "captures the spirit of the times." The wonderfully named "The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle" is her account of that change of heart.

Beginning and ending in Russia, Wheeler circumnavigates the polar landscape, dropping in for short stays with those who live and study the Arctic. In each location, we meet a few folks, learn about the history, and see the landscape through her eyes. She generally tells her stories well, particularly her longer pieces about the history of a place, and occasionally has a delightful turn of phrase, such as referring to Soviet urban infrastructure as 75 years of "centrally planned vandalism." In contrast, her time on the ground, visiting and interacting with the Arctic's current inhabitants, feels more cursory and slight. This feeling particularly stands out when she quotes previous visitors, who have deeply engaged with the polar landscape.

Judging from Wheelers's travels, two groups dominate the polar landscape: native peoples and scientists. Whether from Greenland, Alaska, or Siberia, these original inhabitants of the north have lived and survived in the harshest places inhabited by humans. Some maintain their historic connections to the land and its rhythms, but most natives have suffered from contact with traders, developers and explorers and now often live in dire situations of poverty and alcoholism. For example, the Chukchi of far eastern Siberia suffer from scurvy because of forgetting, or at least no longer consuming, local fruit and meat that had prevented the disease in centuries past.

The scientists have fared better, though they by no means live a life of luxury in an environment where winter temperatures drop to 40 below and the warm days of summer lead to biblical clouds of mosquitoes. Wheeler seems to have remarkable access to scientists, and we meet geologists, ecologists and physiologists whose work is exposing the dire straits of our widespread use of industrial contaminants.

One who stands out is Bella Bergeron, described as an elf with a Mississippi purr. Wheeler had traveled to a high-elevation camp in the middle of Greenland to see Bergeron's work drilling thousands-feet-deep ice cores. In 1993, one of those cores provided some of the earliest evidence for how rapidly modern temperatures were changing.

For Bergeron, the Arctic is "a beautiful route to knowledge." Climate change may be the best known of the environmental problems associated with the north, but recent work also shows that people and animals inhabiting the world's most isolated spots suffer from some of the highest levels of chemical pollution found on Earth.

Wheeler provides a broad and engaging introduction to the Arctic, laying out not only the harshness but also the fragility of the north. Ultimately, like the many other books that have come out in recent years on the Arctic, hers is a warning: "Just as the Arctic shows what we are good at — individual endurance, initiative, and dogged investigation; it also reveals what we are bad at, which is collective, preventive action. I do not think that one could stay long in the Arctic without concluding that the present way of the world in unsustainable."

Seattle writer David B. Williams is the author of "Stories in Stone" and "The Seattle Street-Smart Naturalist."