BiblioVault - Books about Polar regions

By Airship to the North Pole

An Archaeology of Human Exploration

Capelotti, P. J

Rutgers University Press, 1999

By Airship to the North Pole chronicles the adventures of Swedish engineer Salomon August Andree, who made the first failed attempt to reach the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon in 1897, and of American journalist Walter Wellman who organized and led three unsuccessful air expeditions from 1907 to 1909. The book investigates the stories behind the quests to reach this remote and inhospitable outpost by air and examines how those stories were created and reported by the press. What he uncovers allows readers to reflect on the distortions of the written historical record, particularly unkind to Wellman, and what that may tell us about our own age of exploration as we look to the last frontiers in space.

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Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics

Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic

Lisa E. Bloom

Duke University Press, 2022

In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom engages feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. As opposed to mainstream media depictions of climate change that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears, artists such as Katja Aglert, Subhankar Banerjee, Joyce Campbell, Judit Hersko, Roni Horn, Isaac Julien, Zacharias Kunuk, Connie Samaras, and activist art collectives take a more complex poetic and political approach. In their films and visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism while challenging the suppression of information about environmental destruction and critiquing Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom’s examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.

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Cold Latitudes

Rosemary McGuire

University of Alaska Press, 2021

Cold Latitudes is a memoir in essay form based on years of working in the Alaska Arctic and Antarctica. The author was privileged to see first-hand worlds that few will ever know, while participating in cutting-edge research at high latitudes. From solo voyages down the Yukon and part of the Northwest Passage, to working with humpback whales in the Southern Ocean, to chilling encounters with polar bears, Rosemary McGuire’s stories are told in spare, graceful prose. It is her friendships with local people, and with scientific researchers, that form the core of her experiences. Through these local contacts and traditional knowledge, she learns humility and a sense of wonder at the natural world, while at the same time coming to appreciate the gritty determination of the field researchers whose work she shares. Throughout, she examines human relationships with wilderness, and our growing effects on a fragile planet. And so, as she writes, “In the end, this is a love story for a threatened place.”

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North by 2020

Perspectives on Alaska’s Changing Social-Ecological Systems

Edited by Amy Lauren Lovecraft and Hajo Eicken

University of Alaska Press, 2011

Originating from a series of workshops held at the Alaska Forum of the Fourth International Polar Year, this interdisciplinary volume addresses a host of current concerns regarding the ecology and rapid transformation of the arctic. Concentrating on the most important linked social-ecological systems, including fresh water, marine resources, and oil and gas development, this volume explores opportunities for sustainable development from a variety of perspectives, among them social sciences, natural and applied sciences, and the arts. Individual chapters highlight expressions of climate change in dance, music, and film, as well as from an indigenous knowledge–based perspective.

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The Whaling Season

An Inside Account Of The Struggle To Stop Commercial Whaling

Kieran Mulvaney

Island Press, 2003

Despite a decades-long international moratorium on commercial whaling, one fleet has continued to hunt and kill whales in the waters surrounding Antarctica. Refusing to let this defiance go unchallenged, the environmental organization Greenpeace began dispatching expeditions to the region in an effort to intercept the whalers and use nonviolent means to stop their lethal practice.

Over the past decade, Kieran Mulvaney led four such expeditions as a campaigner and coordinator. In The Whaling Season, he recounts those voyages in all their drama, disappointments, strain, and elation, giving readers a behind-the-scenes look at the hazards and triumphs of life as an environmental activist on the high seas. The author also explores the larger struggles underlying the expeditions, drawing on the history of commercial whaling and Antarctic exploration, the development of Greenpeace, and broader scientific and political efforts to conserve marine life. He presents a rich portrait of the current struggles and makes an impassioned plea for protection of some of the world’s most spectacular creatures.

For armchair adventurers, polar enthusiasts, and anyone concerned about marine conservation and continued hunting of the world’s whales, The Whaling Season is an engrossing and informative tale of adventure set in one of the Earth’s last great wilderness areas.

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