From Svalbard to Standing Rock: The Idea of the Sublime in a Time of Climate Change, Iowa City, Iowa, February 22, 2017

- I want to acknowledge our university and community supporters. The University of Iowa's International Programs, the University of Iowa's Honors Program, both contribute vital time, talent, and logistics to our organization. I also want to thank the Stanley UI Foundation Support Organization for their financial support. And, I thank today's special sponsors, Mike Margolin and Karen and Wally Chappell. So, it is my pleasure now to introduce Tama Baldwin. Tama is a writer and photographer with degrees from Johns Hopkins University, Salisbury State University, the State University of New York, and Ohio University. She received an Illinois Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright. And has had residencies at Yaddo, McDowell, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Tama has traveled extensively. She is a prolific writer and a most creative photographer and a committed conservationist. She will be sharing with us today some of her recent experiences sailing in the High Arctic and a recent trip to Standing Rock. So please join me in welcoming Tama. - I want to say thank you to Wally and Karen Chappell for inviting me. And thank you, Joel, for the technical support. I really appreciate it. So, I'm gonna give you an overview of what I'm doing here because I'm not a swashbuckler. So, I didn't just come to show sexy pictures and tell sexy stories. Sorry. It's a little more academic than that, but not totally. So I should show you this map. So, in the center is the North Pole, and around it are the Arctic regions. And as you can see, Russia, Denmark, Norway, Canada, and the United States all hold territory, in one manner or another, within that region. And it is my ludicrous ambition to visit them all in the Arctic, one wayor another. Hell or high water, and I now know what that means. I just made that up. So I've been working for ten years on projects in the Arctic. And as I have this goal in mind, you know, I sort of dig in. I got a residency with the National Parks in Arctic Alaska and went back five times and really learned part of that landscape and dug in there, and now Svalbard and some work in Canada. And so, it's very difficult to get to these places, and so I've had more time to process some than others. But one of the reasons I warned you I wasn't just going to tell you a straight narrative was that what I'm trying to do is synthesize all my photographic projects 'cause I think they're all interconnected under the rubric of the Anthropocene. And I'll talk a little bit more about that. I'm not really a documentary photographer explicitly, but obliquely. And yet, somehow the political nature of a lot of my work has come sort of crashing down on me in the last 12 months. So, it seems like I'm becoming more documentary, but I don't do that either, so I thought you might feel a little strange because my talk is not persuasive. I'm not showing you sad pictures and then try to get your money. And it's not entirely expressive either. I'm not just showing you really subjective images, although I have a lot of those. I want to inform. I want to tell people about this region that I care about. So, it's sort of a hybrid of persuasion and expression and just information. So that's why part of it is sort of written. Some of it I will do extemporaneously. It is sequential. I'm beginning in Alaska, talking about work I did with archeologists who worked for the Western Arctic National Park Service in a location that the Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks had determined was the most remote location in, not North America, but in the mainland United States. So, the first section is about that Arctic location, which is technically defined as the most remote location. The second section is about my trip last October sailing to about 80 degrees north in Svalbard and what we observed there. And then the third section is about how when I came home and a million fires broke out all around the nation in a million different ways. And all the research from Svalbard and Svalbard climate change scientists that sort of put everything we saw in context, came rolling in. Which it might seem strange that I end up in Standing Rock, but it's totally connected. It was like the most logical conclusion. Before I begin, it will seem strange that I say this to you, but I'm gonna stick with my schedule and I'm gonna run through, probably a little fast, but please just write down any questions you have. If you want me to go back to an image later I can do that, you just make a note of what you want. In the third section when I talk about going to Standing Rock, I mention my friend Shelly Buffalo, who went with me to Standing Rock and she's a water activist. And she is sponsoring a community celebration, Iowa City Round Dance, in April, and if you're interested in participating in a community building celebratory event, you can go to the Facebook page called "Round Dance Iowa City" and all the details are there. Okay, so, I think we should probably begin. My notesfrom Svalbard, just the raw, like, typing out everythingI remembered were 25,00 words, but I thought "Uh-Oh, "I better cut that back." So, that's another reason this will seem a little fragmented, is I'm still sort of working through what my ideas are. A pre-cursor, too. "Sublime" as a term, I'm not using it this way. If you go to Instagram, you'll see images like that. Like, "That was sublime divine." That's sort of like "cool". It's like a cooler sounding word for cool. But that's not how I'm using it. How I'm using it in the beginning of what I'm talking about today is more in the tradition of the birth of landscape painting, serious landscape painting in Western culture. And I am working briefly with two of the most famous painters who were sometimes referred to as painters of the Romantic Sublime. This is an image by Turner, and this is an image by Caspar David Friedrich, "Moonrise Over the Sea". And interestingly, they were born one year apart. Friedrich was born in 1774, and Turner was born in 1775. And so, by the time they're 18 and out of their parents' house the Industrial Revolution is really cooking. I mean, I looked up the dates of all the engines that were released, the combustion engine, the steam engine. All of that happens under their witness as young people and their work is a response to that in part. I mean, that's oversimplifying it, but they went back to nature. But they didn't go back to a cozy nature or a pastoral nature, they went back to a nature that was both beautiful and terrifying. So, whenever I'm using the word "sublime", I'm talking about an aesthetic that also induces some kind of anxiety, terror, horror, and I sort of weave through this how landscape and the sublime have evolved to this time that we're living in. So, I thought you might feel better if you knew that's what I meant by that. Okay, so, I had to cut like 10,000 words about a defense of science. I'm just gonna skip that and say, "Climate change is real". 97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming. This is a website called SkepticalScience.com which sounds really hoaxy, but it was recommended by the NASA Climate Change Blog, which is also a wonderful site for reliable information. So, I thought, "Well, if they recommend it, "I'll check it out." And the wonderful thing on SkepticalScience.com is they take the top ten common denials of climate change deniers and dismantle them in a way that literally a junior high kid could figure it out, and I found it super useful. So, if you wanted to put some talking points in your head it's a really lovely resource. And you can assess the reliability of it for yourself. Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone, "If people come to understand the cold mathematical truth - that the fossil-fuel industry is systematically undermining the planet's physical systems - it might weaken it enough to matter politically. Exxon and their ilk might drop their opposition to a fee-and-dividend solution; they might even decide to become true energy companies, for the first time for real." I love this quote. "Give me a wilderness whose glance no civilization could endure." Sorry, Thoreau makes me teary. When have you ever heard that? I know you all know this, but I put this slide in here because of what I'm putting next. The age of the Earth has been certifiably determined to be 4.5 billion years. Or to use a metaphor, from 5 billion years of solitude to put human history in the context of that, if you stretched your arms out the Precambrian, which is like the first complex life, starts, okay, if zero was here, Precambrian starts in the palm of my right hand. So, the rest of it has nothing to do with us. And most of the palm of the hand, actually, has nothing to do with us. The metaphor that he and John McPhee uses, they said if you wanted to remove human time on the planet from this image, take a really fine grain nail file and just rub it lightly over the tip of the middle finger andwe're gone. Just keep that in mind. One in three Americans believe the Earth is 6,000 years old. Between 40 and 47% of adult Americans believe that all human beings were created all at once within the last 10,000 years. Just so you didn't go home and pull the covers over your head, I took the literacy slides off. 'Cause I don't, I am not a purveyor of despair. But I'm also not a purveyor of false hope. That red dot is where Svalbard is. Can you see my cursor when I do that? - [Audience] Yes. - [Tama] Oh good. So this is Alaska, right here. Not the cruise ship Alaska, that's down here. This is Arctic Alaska beginning right about there. And a lot of my work with the park service was done up in these mountains here. And the remote location is up in these mountains here. So, you can see, Svalbard is a lot farther north latitudinally. What is in Alaska and a lot of Canada, although not all of Canada, is what we call "Low Arctic". It's primarily tundra. In the summers, actually most of the ice clears away. You could fall asleep on a hillside on the right day in July or August, preferably after the mosquitoes are done. 'Cause otherwise you'd be eaten alive. You'll wake up and there'll be these tiny little wildflowers going in every direction and you'll think you're in a very special place in Montana or Wyoming, but you are not. Because winter still lasts nine months. The High Arctic is different in that it is an environment that is largely supposed to be icy and snowy all year round. I wanted to put this in perspective for you. Didn't mean to do that. We're right in the middle of this. Just in case, for the geographically challenged. Some people I've loved have not had a clue, and so, I always do this 'cause I'm also addicted to maps. All maps, any maps. One of the scientists on our ship with us was a social researcher from Amsterdam, and her project was building subjective maps of climate change. Which means she interviews people wherever she is and creates this online map where you can poke on the dot and then the person tells you their climate change story. It's really interesting. Mine's somewhere over the east Greenland Sea. So, we're here, and to get to Svalbard, you have to fly to Norway and then you gotta go really far north 'cause it's really-- This is the Nova Zembla. You can't even see Norway on this. It's down here. Norway's way down here. So it's on a par with the top of Greenland. So it's pretty darn far. And as you can see in this map from NASA, that white is what should be the polar ice sheet, and it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. I think the yellow line is more, like, I don't remember what average is, I'm not going to say anything. So that would lead you to expect a lot of snow and ice. So, the most remote location in Alaska is in this, it's in a river valley, that requires so much planning and preparation to get to that I think we might have spent a week packing and repacking, weighing. Packing, repacking, weighing ourselves in front of a panel of people. Packing and reweighing, packing and reweighing. Remove, remove, remove, remove, remove, remove, remove. And we'd already done field work where we brought anything we wanted, and we were like, "What the heck?" Pilot said, "Gotta get it down. Gotta get it down. "Gotta get it down. Because we can't. "There's no room for error, it's too far." I didn't know what that meant until after we were all packed and approved. Then we had to wait another six days. Because the weather had to be absolutely perfect all the way out and all the way back because even though he'd cached gas part way through, he had to refill to get himself back. And if he'd had to circle for a storm or something like that, or if we had had to turn back, we wouldn't have had enough gas to get back. So that's what remoteness means in that regard. I'm gonna move to my text a little bit. I think one thing that people don't typically understand when they hear the word "Arctic", not only do they sort of think only of High Arctic and not Low Arctic, but the tundra biome is largely in the Low Arctic and it's an incredibly gorgeous place winter and summer. But the thing you need to know if you want to go there is that except for some oil industry roads, there are no roads. You'll have to fly, and on progressively smaller planes, until you're sitting next to the pilot who's eating potato chips and flying at the same time and seems really crazy. And a dog will be running loose, and balloons and a keg of beer, and God knows what else. I've seen all of these things. And somehow lived. And that particular pilot pretended to have a heart attack and pretended to fly us into the mountain. That was not fun. I don't think you could do that with American Airlines. So, I'm just gonna show a few pictures of this remote location, this was the site, archeological site, where we were investigating the thefts of artifacts in this remote location. And that already tells you something really special about it, which is that it's an archeological site. And we were set up on this, like, we had the hydrologist report which tells you, like, how to look at that and see the history of the river and how its shifted and moved and that tells you a lot about where to look for things people left 10,000 years ago instead of yesterday. So, I found all the tin cans, but we had to use our heads a different way to find the artifacts. But, man, once we knew how to see the landscape according to the hydrology, like, you just look down and you would just see blades that were-- one blade was 8,000 years old, was like by my tennis shoe, so. So, all these pictures are, you know, I don't do like the overt stuff, like a polar bear on a shrinking sheet of ice. I wish I could. I wish my subject were that obvious. But what you're looking at here is not pictures of wilderness, but pictures of a civilization that has left a very light trace for one thing. I'm not romanticizing it at all. But everywhere we go, so, you'd see a pile of rocks like that and that was a burial site. You looked down on this ridge, looked down at your feet everywhere you looked. There were stone pools. We did a lot of hiking through a lot of nasty country. A lot of measuring, a lot of digging, a lot of sifting, a lot of enduring wind that was insane. These petroglyphs, we have an argument about what that is. That's me looking at me feet, and I'm like, "What's that?" I just started randomly pointing my camera and was like, "Oh my God". So those were the things that we found. That is a line of that actually goes all the way down the hill. It's a half mile long, and we had a satellite device that told us all the other finds and we upload all our finds and then we leave everything where it is, we don't touch it. We just mark where it is and leave it alone and then make sure the other things are still there. And this is a half mile long and nobody had ever recorded it. So I'm just gonna read the end of this section. The Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute was one of our funders for our work in the field that summer. In exchange for their support, they only asked one thing of my two colleagues and I. They wanted us to Tweet from the field about the wilderness. By which I think they meant descriptions of a pristine land, by which I think they meant showed no traces of humankind. Within five minutes on the ground, it became clear that the valley had been inhabited for a long time. All you had to do is see the typography in terms of how a hunter-gatherer would position herself within the scene. And then once you took yourself to the right place, the evidence was everywhere. I could look at my feet and see stone blades and spear tips on the ground, looking as if the person who'd made them had just gotten up and walked away to get a drink of water and would be returning any minute. There were massive tundra fires in the distance and when the rains rolled in, the sky was transformed into a roiling black cauldron. There was barely enough light to keep the satellite phone sufficiently charged to make our morning call into the back country service that was recording our location and our condition. If we failed to make the call, they would initiate a search and rescue within two hours. The problem with the solar charger became our excuse and instead of thinking in Tweets, we pushed ourselves deeper into work. I spent an afternoon filtering aeolian sands searching for a grain of charcoal from a fire someone lit 10,000 years ago, perhaps to drive the mosquitoes away. And when I finally found it, I felt a bolt of "Awe" shoot through me. It was as if my hand had pushed through the hole of the and was touching almost the hand of someone who'd sat on the same hill ten millennia ago. In that moment, I was entirely certain that if I were pulled through time to stand in this landscape with those who had lived here at the very, very beginning of our geological era, with people for whom these mountains were not only home, but quite possibly the sum of the world as they knew it. I didn't think I could endure the disjuncture of philosophically. You can't un-know modernity within your own mind, which means we couldn't possibly come to a comprehensive understanding of the artifacts we were seeing. At an earlier site, photographing petroglyphs, I listened to an ethnographer saying no one knew how to interpret them. It seemed obvious to me that no one ever would. Too much time had elapsed since they were etched into stone. What was time? What was space? What was the world? What was meaning? Such translations across a vast expanse of time were surely impossible. Dear Aldo LeopoldWilderness Research Institute, Now that I've had some time to think about it, I think I could Tweet for myself should I ever wish to now that I've been so Svalbard and Standing Rock. It occurs to me now that I do have some observations on that valley in the Brooks Range that was deemed the most remote location in the United States. Wilderness? What wilderness? This country is the Iñupiat homeland and has been for thousands of years. In all the Arctic languages, there's no word for "wilderness". There is only the bush, the land, the tundra, the mountains, the rivers, the sky. Try using the word in a conversation with an indigenous person and if they like you, they will laugh at you with pity and give you a brief lecture on why that word is offensive. On the morning after our first night in camp, we find the electric fence we've set up to encircle our tents is itself ringed with prodigious piles of fresh wolf scat. Their excretions so shockingly similar in shape and volume to those of a healthy human crap, we consider accusing one another of being too lazy or too chicken to hike to the latrine in the middle of the night, but then someone notices the poop is laced with little bits of bone and fur and we drop the topic. I do not, however, not think about it for the remainder of my time in the field. It occurs to me now, given the high intelligence of wolves, this was probably something of a wolf joke. Ha-ha, good one, wolves. I saw a grizzly bear our first day on the river climbing the ridge opposite our camp. His blonde body in the low-angled sun flowing like honey up the mountain and then disappearing into the glare of the sky. He had stopped and turned and stood up to see us, but then went right on his way. He had no interest in who we were or what we were doing. We were interlopers in the civilization the bear had made for beings like himself and he was committed to taking himself away from whatever we were, whatever it was we might have wanted from him. In the Brooks Range, I experienced a landscape that was so quiet at times, the silence itself became a kind of presence. It was almost as if the landscape was listening to your listening, waiting for you to make the first sound. After a couple of days, your awareness of this fades and you don't think about it again until you hear a plane passing through a distant valley. This is when it hits you. The quiet of this landscape was the sound of the world as it must've been before the invention of the combustion engine. So, what I wanted to do was give you a feeling for what I felt in the most remote part of Arctic Alaska. Section two. Svalbard. Last October. So Svalbard. Okay, so Alaska, where I am here, I'm probably at 69, 70 degrees north. Which is pretty far north. Barrow is at 71 degrees north. The Arctic Circle's at 66, 33. So this is really far north. Barrow's farther. It's on the actual top of the United States. Canada goes farther north. And so, as you can see, this red circle is where Svalbard is. It's international territory under the Dominion of the Norwegians. Norway is in red. And you can see, it's a long way from Norway. I mean, it is, like, practically the end of land. It is the end of land at that particular longitudinal line heading toward the North Pole. A lot of the early polar expeditions were based in Svalbard. They began there. There were no indigenous people that there's no record of. And that would make sense, it's still 60% glaciated. And the part that is not glaciated, there's some tundra, but it's mostly polar barrens, which means, like, nothing grows. So there are five towns. No, four legally. The Norwegians are really intent upon keeping their dominion. And those towns are, let's see. There's a total of 2,667 people living there in one of four communities. Barentsburg which is Russian. Anysignatory to the Treaty of Svalbard can extract minerals, do whatever they want there. There's the mining town of Sveagruva, The International Polar Research Station, Ny-Ålesund, and the Norwegian port of Longyearbyen, which is where you would have to fly in and you have to fly in through Norway. But once you get there, there are no work permits required, no visas, because it's not exactly Norway. It's kinda weird. The law, and the lack of law, was a little bit scary. Pyramiden used to be a huge mining community, but in the late 90s in a 48-hour period, they shut it down and moved the 170 families, or people, that were still there, out, like, overnight. Gone. Left everything sitting as it was. It was a ghost town. Kinda became vandalized. We went there, and I met the three people who are living there right now for this winter. I think I'm gonna show you... These are images of Pyramiden, the abandoned Russian mining town. Some of it still is in pretty good shape, but those mine shafts are just, like, blown up inside. The building behind that sign is filled with birds. It didn't feel safe to breathe the air, actually, in a lot of places. I mean, they just left 'cause they were broke, but. And also there was a plane crash and half the people in the town died. That wasn't good. There's a school and a playground. But a lot of its been scrapped and hauled away. But there are these little weird, eerie segments of, like, what looks like a nice neighborhood with nobody living there. Which is also creepy. I was thinking you could make the most amazing horror movie there. so many treasures. That is the northern most bust of Lenin. And he looks really lonely. And I am pleased to say I also played the northern most piano. So that's what remains in the library. Okay. I'll tell you just a little teeny thing here. I happen to meet the three people living in Pyramiden as we were wondering the wreckage of the mines. Ivan invited us to see the Soviet-era hotel he was working to restore along with his friend Tom Cruise and Tom Cruise's mother. Tom Cruise spoke no English, but he was the spitting image of the young Tom Cruise of "Risky Business". For half a second, I wondered if the Scientologist had set up a secret cloning facility underneath that ghost town, but decided it was probably too cold there for movie stars or their reproductive doubles. Ivan the endlesslyentrepreneur was selling flights of shots of his home-brewed horseradish andginger and gooseberry vodkas. The cold and isolation, on the other hand, are precisely why the Global Seed Vault is located on Spitsbergen, which is the largest island in Svalbard. It's tucked in the mountains outside Longyearbyen. Also known as a "doomsday vault", it contains copies of crop seeds from countries around the world. The goal is to preserve as much genetic diversity as possible in the event that catastrophe were to wipe out one plant species or all plant species or to threaten its continuance. Svalbard was thought to be just far enough away from the center of civilization to avoid mass destruction, but it is easy enough to reach so that it can be accessed when the time comes to attempt to restore life on Earth entirely, or just some portion of it. I was picked up at the airport in Longyearbyen by a man who has become the star of our BBC reality show about life in the High Arctic, which I never would've known had not one of my fellow artists shown me his picture on the website for the show. Later in the day he took us on a tour of the town, and after sharing a short, not so sweet history of life in the coal mines in a place where sun doesn't clear the mountains to the east for four months all winter. He resorted to pontificating into his onboard microphone about whatever he happened to be feeling in the moment. It had begun to rain, washing all traces of the snow from the mountains, transforming the roads into muddy washes, and I could no longer see out the window. I took out my camera and began recording him, as both a defense and a proof for myself later when I doubted my own account of what happened. It didn't take long for it to become clear that he was a woman-hating, racist climate-denier, who strategically waited until we were outside of the limits of the village to begin heaping scorn upon scientists working on the islands research sites. No one in the van said a word. We'd all been in country for three hours. I considered getting out and walking back to the village, but I didn't because our driver had the only gun and in Svalbard it is against the law to walk anywhere outside the settlement limits without a rifle. You will be charged for walking weaponless. It occurred to me that's because there are 3,500 polar bears. But if you shoot one, it's investigated like a murder 'cause it probably is. You don't need to shoot them. Well, unless you wake up and they're in your tent. I had a lot of weird bear training from the park service. If you're ever really bored, call me. This is so weird. Watching videos of attacks to determine whether you're predatory or defensive. It occurred to me that this man does this every day to whomever is lured by his celebrity into his taxi. A celebrity that has been bestowed upon him because he's so excellent at being offensive. Badly behaved people are marketable. They were profitable. So, he had not only been given permission to be his worst self, he was encouraged, he was rewarded. Everybody around him was making money off of it, and it was not lost on me, too, that oil and gas are two of Norway's major exports. That's one of their rigs. He was a spokesmen for a dimension of the state. Twenty years of reality TV featuring the worst people in the world has surely helped give rise to the cultural moment we're all now suffering. This burgeoning hillbilly inquisition in which strong emotions function as fact. Because I feel something powerfully, therefore it must be true, and fuck you if you don't agree with me. After a year and a half of preparation and planning, I had finally made it all the way to Longyearbyen, one of the most geographically remote towns on the face of the planet. Almost 500 miles farther north than Barrow, Alaska, and there I was stuck in a van driven by Donald Trump's Norwegian cousin passing through a muddy rain-soaked swamp where there should have been a snowy desert. As I repacked my gear for boarding the boat, I discovered I needed to buy a screw, so I set out to shop in the village center. A very long walk down the mountain from the coal mining barracks, now turned guest house where I was staying. I found one fur boutique after another. Restaurants and bars and coffee houses and confectioners and grocery stores stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables that were reasonably priced, unlike anywhere else in the Arctic where food security is a very serious issue. I could've bought an Arctic fox fur coat or lingerie or a thousand bottles of duty-free liquor, but I couldn't find a screw. The mines of Longyearbyen were shutting down after a century and a tourist industry funded by the state was being shunted in its place. Because Svalbard is not part of Norway, but under Norwegian sovereignty, they have the burden of maintaining dominion by proving continuous occupation. Cheap flights subsidized by the state and duty-free booze lured people for long weekends of drinking off of the mainland. During which time, they may or may not head out into the wilderness. Longyearbyen is the Las Vegas of Norway, one of my friends said. And even though I laughed when he said it, I now know it's true. What happens in the High Arctic, stays in the High Arctic. Perhaps because there are so few people to witness it or at least until the BBC arrives to cash in on the worst behaved people they can find. Women are discouraged from baring children on the island unless it is absolutely unavoidable. If you die there, you may not be buried there. Your remains must be repatriated. By the time we let go Longyearbyen. I'll show you that one picture. That's by one of the photographers who traveled with me, who has a book on the polar regions. And that's what Longyearbyen looked like three years ago that exact same week. And that's my picture of what it was like, the same mountains. When we were there, it rained and rained and rained. But it started to snow when we set out. It snowed so hard it was drifting on the deck. I felt a surge of satisfaction that the landscape was finally forming itself according to my expectations. The High Arctic was starting to look and behave like the High Arctic should. The passage out of east and into the east Greenland Sea was rough and within minutes almost everyone was feeling sick. The snow had stopped and the skies had cleared, but it was impossible to work in a state of extreme nausea. I stood on deck attempting to film the waves, but it was icy and I kept slipping. Below deck it sounded as if the waves were beating the hull with clubs. The pitch and roll could throw you down or slam you from wall to wall as you made your way from table to table and it would flip you from your bunk if you didn't pull up the sideboard to secure yourself like a baby. In our first safety meeting, the Captain told us not to worry. This 115 foot bucket of a fishing boat, rebuilt to resemble a tall ship, could tolerate heeling over to 90 degrees. I closed my eyes at the thought of it, the mass laying parallel to the sea. "This is what you wanted," I lectured myself, "The High Arctic without the mediation of a screen "with your own body." After we put up the sails to dampen the brunt of the waves, for a few minutes we were coasting by wind only under the Aurora Borealis. The snow on the mountains made them visible. I thought perhaps that winter might finally be getting, a little late, but better than never. This is what it might have looked like for the sum of our trips where you see snow on the mountains. This is our first landing and the only time the entire sail I see snow. The rains returned. This is the same day and you can see, they're already working it off. That's a glacier called, which was calving so continuously that waves were rolling into the beach like surf. Except that there was no surf. It was just calving event after calving event. So that's There was a pod of belugas that just kept coming up to the shore and scratching themselves on the glacier. So, by the next couple days, where there would be white, it's black and the fog is coming off the glaciers. Now this is normal. Glacial ice kinda going out to the sea with the tides then it comes back in. Going out. It just didn't let up at all. And soon I found myself really, really working hard to just, like, get any pictures whatsoever of anything. And because we made landings twice a day, we were on land two hours each time, four hours on land, getting back and forth really complicated involving, you know, climbing down into the Zodiac. The four women who were shotgun-baring were our guards for polar bears and they would go to shore first, set up a perimeter, and my God, have I screwed up? Did I screw up? Okay, so, it rained. Oh darn. Okay. So what I did, is I set up a camera in my porthole for when I was vomiting, and then I thought, "Oh, wait, no I'll just leave it running." 'Cause who knows whether I'm ever gonna get outside or what I'm gonna take pictures of. And I also was curious to see what the machine would do without me, and I think it did a better job. It captured whales, multiple times. All kinds of crazy events. I have 120,000 images from my Sioux photographer, the camera, which I think is a much better photographer. So it rained, it rained, it rained. I had all kinds of stories to tell you, but I screwed up. This is the glacier where I found petrified wood from a forest 60 million years ago just showing up. And it just showed up 'cause this thing is retreating so fast and nobodies had time to study it. This is Carly, so one of my colleagues. We were collecting garbage from all the beaches. She was very happy 'cause she's a sculptor. I found four toothbrushes, and I couldn't bring myself to photograph them. I will probably end with this observation and then a quick little thing about Standing Rock. What I discovered, this is the ruins of a whaling station from the 16th century. That's where she collected all that garbage. A restoration ecologist talk about a concept called a Shifting Baseline Syndrome, where our nature is changing so fast that from generation to generation we don't share a common notion of what nature should be, what a habitat should be, what an ecology should be. And so, these people who are walking around in their shorts, for example, might, if they're young enough, might not know that this is not normal. And the problem with the Shifting Baseline Syndrome is that each generation successively then lowers its standards. And each generation is separated from the other generations because we're not speaking the same language. And so, restoration ecologists argue-- see, I couldn't photograph the toothbrushes, but Carly was filled with joy. Now, she knows what it means. The garbage that's going into the oceans every day will put five bags of plastic trash on every foot of coastline in the world. And we found it. It was everywhere. So, I'm gonna have to skip the whole thing about the painters and the shift to the post-modern sublime and the technological sublime. And this was the northern most fjord where, in doing a project with an artist from Norway, we were hit by a tsunami. 'Cause we were stupid enough to be on that rock, and I have it all on video, but I'm not gonna show you 'cause we're out of time. But I had my own experience of the sublime, which made me think about the wave a lot more and this very cool thing that has happened withwave, which is that its entered the art of the Anthropocene. This is called preparing for the Anthropocene. No, "Preparing for Global Warming". This is the trash wave. That's another trash wave. This is a trash wave made out of trash picked up on that beach in Huntington Beach. And this is the Fukushima is taking place of Mount Fuji. And, of course, I come home and I end up in Standing Rock and I realize that indigenous people are being brutalized to the point that Amnesty International is now investigating the Morton County Sheriff's Department and the North Dakota State Police for doing the most atrocious things. And while I was there, I was fascinated by the klieg lights that they put up as a form of psychological harassment to the Native Americans who have the Oceti Sakowin Camp of Peace and Prayer. And so I documented that particular form of harassment because, of course, this is all about the fossil fuel industry. And this is my last slide. And this shows the decline in polar ice. I think it's the last ten years. And when I got home, the news from Svalbard was bad. Climate change scientists sounded hysterical. They said the leaps in temperatures were happening at such a great rate it was unprecedented five years ago, they said it would never happen. And here's the reason why. See all that ocean? The Arctic is not a continent like Antarctica. Antarctica carries its ice 'cause it's land and it preserves it in a completely different way. But every time we lose ice from the poles, which is directly related to fossil fuels, it erodes and it erodes and it erodes and the ocean turns into a black mirror. Pulls the heat in, holds the heat in, and accelerates the rate of warming. Thank you so much. - The Romantic Sublime was the sublime in part because it was other than human-- - Yeah. Well that's one - As God and or nature, how does this change in the Anthropocene? - [Tama] See I would have talked about that if I had had better time management. - Well, now you've got time, so. - All right. Well, so, how does this change? It changes radically, and that's a fantastic question. And thank God, so much for asking it, 'cause that way I don't leave out a very important part of this talk. So, what happens is, I looked at the works of Turner, who was merely documenting the encroachment of the Industrial Revolution. You see a lighthouse here, a fence there, a factory in the sunset. But it doesn't seem to contain any kind of judgment, it's observation until you get to a painting-- Where'd it go? So weird. It's called "Slave Ships". I don't know if you know it. But "Slave Ships", this, is based on a news event where a whaling captain threw 133 ill and dying slaves overboard before a typhoon, because that way he could collect insurance money on them. And he threw them while they were still shackled. And my argument is that this guy looked ahead two centuries to understand all the awful things that came after. We got so good at science that we kinda got carried away and we end up with world wars, crisis in population. We end up with Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima. And there is no way that you can go into a landscape like Turner did. Well, there or there, and see just the raw power of nature, which in the case of Caspar Friedrich, every body says does allude to the supernatural. I don't see it so much in Turner myself. I just see more a documentation of what is there, but in a very expressive manner. But this painting is a moral cry, outcry against slavery and it puts you, the viewer, on shore dealing with the tilted horizon and the ship that used to be the subject of so many Romantic Sublime paintings to show the raw power of nature is fading away in the distance and now we're what we're supposed to be afraid of. And those bodies are coming right toward you. And when you look at the details in the painting, they're horrific 'cause you see shackled hands, people still alive, fish eating people, it's a gruesome cry. And that's in 1843. So, by the time you get to the middle of the-- and this is the answer, I think, 'cause there's a thousand answers. Landscape and the sublime, they disappear, they reappear, they disappear, and they come in and out of favor. But, man, after World War II, comes back with a vengeance although it is altered. Some people call it the Post-Modern sublime, that God-less sublime, like we've lost all ethical center. So, where do we go? Burtynsky, the Canadian landscape photographer whose work I love, does what he calls a "technological sublime". He looks at large scale industrial projects primarily. Andreas Gursky, this is the Chicago Board of Trade. He does these incredible, beautiful portraits of so many people that it's not comprehensible any longer. The Abstract Sublime, the paintings of Rothko, particularly his black paintings. This is Caspar Friedrich, and this is a contemporary painter. This is ice in the Arctic. This is garbage. And so, you see all kinds of permutations of the sublime, but all of them go right back to one of the original writers on the sublime in the late 18th century said the sublime is always about survival. And in the 18th century, for a lot of people the answer was in looking for faith. There was a belief that a spectacularly beautiful, but powerful relationship could help you feel the connection to the divine. But by the time you get to the mid-century, you're not finding much Romantic Sublime. Although it is there, and I would say that at times I am guilty of it. And that's a gross oversimplification because there are people who do the global capitalist sublime, there are people who do the sublime of the Anthropocene, specifically focusing on climate change. So it's kind of morphed into all of these things. But because survival and awe and terror and horror are all intermingled in that concept it's of particularly relevant for these times because when I stood in that camp in Standing Rock, I was terrified. And the ex-special forces guy standing next to me one night shaking his head, he was a veteran who'd come there to try to be a human shield. He said A, "This is the first time in my life as a soldier "I might have done a good thing." And B, he said "If we do not win this here, "this will be the future for all of us nationwide." - [Tama] And you won't find it on the news 'cause there's a big news blackout. It's tough to find. - All right. We are now going to conclude our program. And I want to give Tama a big hand. Thank you. Before we go, I once again want to thank our sponsors: the University of Iowa's International Programs, the University of Iowa's Honors Programs, and the Stanley UI Foundation Support Organization, as well as Mike Margolin and, of course, Karen and Wally Chappell. We thank Channel Four also for making our programs available and Tama, I come to the fun part now. - [Tama] I'm so relaxed now. I was so nervous. I was like, I was going to burst into tears. I haven't spoken publicly in years. - As a small token of our appreciation-- - [Tama] Yes. - If I can find this, yes. I would like to give you the coveted Iowa City Foreign-- - That's awesome. - Relations Council mug. - Thank you. I really love mugs. I never throw them away. Thank you so much. - So thank you again for coming and we are adjourned.