Asgeir revisits Svalbard to see again how the polar bears are struggling to cope with the climate that we are changing under their feet. It's often said that climate change is most radical in the most extreme environments, such as the poles. By comparing older photos and videos with the current ones, it's undeniable. (Not that I ever doubted it.)
Then he follows a pair of young puffins through a whole season, from the time they meet and mate for life, until the migration. It's really amazing filmography, to be able to track the same birds for so long and see their lives in such detail. They lay one egg, one chance at reproduction for that year. They must guard it against predators for many weeks. At long last, the chick is hatched; then they need to keep it fed, from a variable supply of fish that is always under threat from human activities, from predators, and other aspects of nature that we don't fully understand. And there are other threats to this chick too. Will it survive to adulthood?
Along the way we see many other human impacts to nature during this season. All those little fish need to hide in seaweed, so that they can survive and be part of the food chain for puffins, other birds and fish and so on. What happens when we humans decide we might have a use for a bit of seaweed ourselves, and suddenly clear-cut all of it at once in a particular area?
Of course we know and manage to state abstractly and routinely that fisheries are in decline from overfishing. A typical headline or statistic. But there is more to it than that. Fishermen are so routinely discarding plastic rope in the sea, that many sea-birds are getting tangled in it and dying, and also pulling it out and draping it on the cliffs where they need to roost. The stuff is everywhere.
What about the forest? For some reason, even though clear-cutting is banned in many places, Norway is still doing it that way. Only 2% of the boreal forest remains and has so far not been subject to this sort of disruption, which actively and cruelly cuts off the diversity of life repeatedly on a regular basis. For what? To burn wood in our fireplaces and feel cozy for an hour? To build log cabins out in the woods, and then only spend a week or two per year, living in them? What about the wild reindeer that are being disturbed by the hyttefelt and the roads that divide up their free-roaming lands into smaller and smaller parcels every year?
When we watch nature documentaries from other sources, we might marvel at how cruel nature is fundamentally. Individual creatures take what they need to survive, and do not care about the suffering of their prey, on a one-to-one basis. But when we humans decide that we might have a use for something that we can find, we take it all. Many species in nature depend on a particular resource, so we decimate many species simultaneously when we take a bit of what we want and simultaneously destroy everything else in the vicinity. And the abstract, commoditized "resources" that we get out of this activity do not satisfy us. Often they do not even enrich our lives.
Eventually Asgeir shows us the place where Nordic Mining owns some land alongside a fjord, is busy doing what mining companies do, and has received permission from the Norwegian government to dump the inevitable toxic waste into the fjord. He shows us what's under the surface of the water, which we normally ignore because it's out of sight. How can we think it's ok to destroy life wholesale in any of our beautiful unique fjords, just to get a bit of titanium oxide for making paint and toothpaste white? As if fish-farming wasn't destructive enough. My heart bleeds for what is coming next. We do in fact live in a war zone. Norway is being destroyed just as surely as Ukraine is. Just a bit slower.
From one side, there is nothing new in this film. I have read all the facts before. But seeing it on the big screen is much more impactful. Repeatedly he puts the contrast right in our faces: how things were long ago, when we were not so powerful and lived in a bit better harmony with nature. A mere few decades ago, within the lifespan of a generation or two.
Norwegians need to see this film. And they need go out and become activists afterwards. Is this a functional democracy or not? Why are we letting such things happen right under our noses?
