Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality. Stephen Lazak is a PhD candidate in the Scott

Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.

His work focuses on the politics of climate change

in the context of communities and landscapes in the North American Arctic.

In this essay, Stephen explores the paradoxical human narratives

that overlay the Arctic landscape, a frontier,

a paradise, a marker of our destruction of the planet, as he bears witness to a place that

is teetering in an uneasy balance between eternity and loss.

1. The sun was still up at 10 p.m. when the passenger ferry departed for the archipelago of Lufiton,

along the northwestern coast of Arctic Norway.

Around midnight, I stepped out onto the foredeck and into a dimly lit world, devoid of color or shadow.

Shapeless gray clouds strung along the horizon.

The ferry swept over a dark sea below.

Even darker shapes, now black, emerged from the water, each bearing a luminous white oval.

Transiting through the twilight, a pod of Orcas swam ahead, keeping pace.

Here, in the middle of the Vestfjordin, a 50-mile-wide bite of the North Sea.

We shared a moment of mutual recognition,

beholding each other in the stillness of the Arctic night.

Earlier that afternoon, I stood in the checkout line of a grocery store with Ula Gunner,

...