Now a discussion on Global Warming with an author who has spent the past 20 years observing the lives of residents in greenland. This is just over an hour. If you have been following Gretel Ehrlichs writing over the years you know her perhaps from her stunning collection of essays, the solace of open spaces, about the american west, or her astonishing memoir of being struck by lightning, match to the heart. Among various awards and honors, ehrlich won the inaugural 2010 penn thorough, literary excellence in nature writing. Her journeys many places around the world are physical and philosophical. Her recent book, facing the wave, chronicles of japan a country which she has the deep relationship in the aftermath of 2011 earthquake and tsunami and meltdowns at the Fukushima Nuclear power plant. She is here to talk about green land, about Climate Change and about rotten ice. Noted today on npr, if you think today is hot, youre right. If you think this year is hot, youre right. Latest temperature numbers from nasa and National OceanicAtmospheric Administration say the First Six Months of 2016 were the hottest on record around the planet. Beginning in 1993, Gretel Ehrlich traveled to the greenland the northernmost country of the world. Every season the four months of perpetual dark, average temperature is 25 degrees below zero, constant daylight and twilight seasons in between. Traveling up the west coast often by dogsled and befriending the generous in. Its along the way and observing changes in their traditional hunting. The letters from greenland, published in the april 2015 issue of harpers, what happens at the top of the world affects all of us. Were honored to welcome back gretel to allowed. With her someone she knows well, her husband. Someones voice you no doubt heard over the 36 years he spent with National Public radio. Neal conan worked in a correspondent based in new york and lon done and washington. Covered wars in the middle east and Northern Ireland and Olympic Games in lake placid and sarajevo and a president ial impeachment. He is executive producer of all things considered. I for one certainly miss him. I miss him and you do too as longtime host of talk of the nation. Lucky for hawaii radio to have him as news analyst and macadamia nut farmer. Please welcome Gretel Ehrlich and neal conan. Thank you. [applause] when you first went to greenland in 1993, you brought a couple of books with you. What were they . They were two of the 13 volumes of the knute roth who traveled in the 1920s, 1924 from dogsled from greenland to point hope, alaska. If it wasnt for him we would know very little about arctic culture. What did we learn from him . Everything. We learned that, so, inuit people originally came across the bearing land bridge from northeastern siberia and they have year by year, perhaps 20,000 years ago, first to alaska, then through the archipelago, what we call the Northwest Passage was really the traditional passageway east for them, and they ended up in greenland about roughly 5000 years ago. Its one language with a lot of dialects. One lifeway with some variations according to where they were and what they needed to do to get food but its the only single culture that spans 6,000 miles, just across the top. And these people said, oh, were not going to move to at that monica. I dont really like the beach. They didnt know there was anything else except ice. And we, i got to go with you to greenland a couple years ago and one of the things i was astonished by, we went to a city somewhat less than halfway up the west coast of greenland and you think youre pretty far north but youre not. There is a long way left to go. Right. Lilysat in West Greenland that is halfway down. The island of greenland is huge and long but i began, because of rothmanson i began going to northernmost villages, two of them. Theyre at a about 77 degrees, 77, 78 degrees latitude north. And i went there because because of rasmussen. Because of rasmussen. And there were, there was a youngish inuit Marine Mammal hunter there, named from the jan danielson, for get he has danish name he is inuit. He done the same trip as rasmussen only in the 1970s, from the 1920s. I get him to take me on the trip all the way to point hope alaska. He met him and asked him, he laughed at me. No, that trip was very, very hard. You dont want to stay, you dont want to do that. You stay here with us, you travel with us, meaning his family and you will see plenty which i did. Could you, if you can, bring up slide 11. So i will tell you while were waiting for slight 11. Yeah, that is me. That is my favorite picture of myself ever. It was about 20 below that day. We had been on a long trip, coldness which was 59 below zero traveling outside. So 20 below felt really good. We decided to stop and sunbathe. What were the villages like when you first saw them . Well, greenland is, it doesnt have a lot of villages but they were, but they were vibrant. These are subsistence villages of between 20 people and maybe 75. Or maybe a few more. Konak is sort of a town. The Dog Population was way larger than the human populations. If you can see there, we travel on big freight shreds, not like the alaskan basket shreds. Theyre about 10 or 12 feet long, four feet across, that we carry and theyre pulled by fifteen to 20 dogs. In a fan, not a line. In a fan hitch that is why theyre hitched two by. Theyre wild. Not taken into the house as they are in alaska. So the k9 pop in these village was the most, it was the symphony every night. It was howling and howling. In alusa they were all, theyre all kind of chained up on long chains when theyre not, because they did eat a few babies in the old days when they were loose. So they, they were right against a big rock wall. And it echoed the sound of them howling and talking to each other was just delicious. You just, it was never something you tried to get away from. It was part of the music of greenland. I was astonished when i was there to realize how little of life is on land and how much is at sea. Yeah. So what most people dont quite understand because greenland is a little different than the other arctic nations, all the travel is done on sea ice. So, you know, these are kind of the davis strait and north of the Kennedy Channel are relatively narrow. I mean on a clear day you can see else mere island from greenland and, of course, nothing grows there. There are no berries. There is nothing. So they live on the flesh of Marine Mammals which they hunt with the odd rifle, rusty rifle and they where did they get rifles . They got them from Robert Bert Perry as a present helping him try to get to the north pole. Get near. Get near the north pole. They still hunt nor wall with harpoons from kayaks. They make everything themselves except the rifles. We wear polar bear pants. Seal skin hammocks and boots. The fox fur, arctic fox for anaracks. They make harnesses, they make the shreds. They make their own kayaks. They make the kayak paddles. These are industrious villages where there is something going on all the time. This is conscience decision. They could have snowmobiles . Yes. They ban snowmobiles, in that they live exactly the way they want. They chose to keep all the modern traditions and i asked them why. They said they work better. We have thrived for 5000 years in greenland. Why would we change something that works so well . Its a communal culture. The hunters who go out, theyre not hunting for themselves or their own families . Well, they are to, they hunt in extended family groups but its a food should have sharing society that so that everybody is fed. There is no wont in thousand villages. Widows. Hunters who are injured, orphans, everybody, everybody. The Danish School teacher, whoever. And anyone else like me who used to come in the springtime, we were all given food. It wasnt sold. It was given. You talked about the culture that unites these peoples across the top of the world. There is a concept i wanted you to talk about that you write about in some of your books. It is, i guess, in an odd way both a person and an idea, sela. Sila. It is spelled sila. It means both weather, not both. It means the weather, power of nature and consciousness. Not just human consciousness but the consciousness of all ascension beings, including the Marine Mammals they eat. Actually it goes beyond that. The souls of animals that appear in the masks that they make for dances that you will see one face t could be a wolf face. But with a seal coming out of the mouth which the wolf has eaten the soul of the seal so that in a way it is a completely, all holiestic, circular world in which you know, there is no domination of one to the other. Its, youre all there, out on the ice together. And, that first time that you went out hunting with them, what was it like . Were squeamish . No, not at all. There was a young woman who later became a Prime Minister of greenland but who had grown up in villages and i met her a few years before. She was supposed to come up as my translator, she speaks seven languages. She didnt show. It was kind of typical. I thought, well, i come a long way, i might as well just go. So i went out with two strange men who do not speak english and i did not, and still dont really speak greenlandic. And i asked the owner of the guest house if i was going to be okay. He said, he was sort of insulting, do you think i would send you out on the ice with people who wouldnt take absolute best care of you in the world . Im sorry, no, i dont. Yes i will go. Off we went, for a month. [laughter]. You know what the first question always is . Excuse me. Where does one go to the bathroom . You know. There are pieces of rough ice. One of them took my hand like a little girl and said, took me off to a little piece of rough ice, sort of he knew a few words. Right here would be good. Right here is good. Of course it was extraordinary. The trip of course was catered . Right. Boiled sale which is actually really good. Boiled, that trip we just had seal, yeah. Yeah. [laughter] one year, so ive been doing this for 20 years, with the same family group. One year yen brought an onion. After about the second week he pulls this onion out of, a danish onion out of his backpack. We all sort of stood around it like that. He takes out his big hunting knife, drops it in the boiling water with the boiling walrus. It was so exciting. We were just, you know, pulling out little pieces of onion. Of course the muktak, the skin with the little layer of fat underneath it, has all the vitamins and minerals that a human being needs, which is why they havent died off a long time ago. We just eat that. And then eat some meat and off we go. What do the dogs eat . Same thing. They get fed first. I have been on trips where there was only enough food for the dog. I always brought packages of instant soup, so we ate soup. You wont survive without the dogs so theyre your transportation. So theyre taken care of beautifully. So you are visiting this Thriving Society that is in large ways intact . Totally. Language intact. Life ways intact. Hunting tradition. When did you realize things were changing . Well it was 1996. This fellow and i were going across, there are two islands off of konak and two friends and his wife were out there. Everyone was going to join and hunt together. Everybody does things as a group. On our way out, there was some, it was spring. So there was about that much snow on top of the ice. But usually the dogs can smell if there is water or something, but they didnt. Suddenly i heard this crashing. You know were just going along. I heard this crashing like goblets being smashed and i didnt really know what was happening. Suddenly i saw dogs disappear. This is like 20 dogs pulling, just start disappearing and trying to get away. This hole in front of us. Around the guy, the other guy jumped off the back. They used this big steel pole to test the ice. And chunk off pieces of ice you will use for drinking. Anyway, he put it in the back and wrap ad seal skinned thong around it to hold the shred back. Stay where you are. Just hang on, this lash rope over your load, just hanging on like that, like a cowgirl taking a deep sea before you get bucked off. The shred was inching towards this hole. The sled. He put his feet over there, leaned over the trace lines and one hand at a time started pulling dogs, out of water. One hand, throwing them like that. These are strong guys and incredibly brilliant and efficient in these kinds of emergencies. You just cant believe your eye what is they do. Then he got most of them out. Then he stepped off of the shred on a piece of ice that already had kind of broken off and he is big man. When he stepped on it the ice started going down like a elevator. I thought, okay, byebye, yensi. He lept from that back on to the shred, and got the dogs to turn a hard left and yelled at them. And off we went. No one ever said a word. And later we traveled for a few hours. So far so good. So i asked him in my almost nonexistent greenlandic, if we were going to die . And he said, imoka, which means maybe. But then there was a little smile at the end. You know, i didnt really, i just thought, you know, im in the presence of these Extraordinary People and there is nobody left like them in the whole world. If i die here after they have done everything they can do to save all of our lives, i happily surrender. The ice was weak because warming had started to chronically mean there was less and less ice every year . Right. Yes. And that is what we didnt understand. I mean there were scientists of course who knew that the ice was thinning, but we didnt. Even, you know, you couldnt, i asked, i just didnt know. But after that event i knew something was wrong. And they knew it too. They sort of said, well, find out what is going on. So i did. I started a long process of educating myself about sea ice and the Greenland Ice sheet which is whole another story and then about the feedback systems that create more and more warming. You know, a learning cycle which is ongoing actually every day because it is so exponential. Now just not sea ice but the entire, as you may have noticed the entire world is becoming a hot place. There are even days, you describe one, where it was 59 below zero but the waters are stormy, so ice is breaking up from underneath. Yeah. You think that cold it would be okay. So yeah, that first incident was in 97. By 2004 it was basically all over, in terms of sea ice in greenland. It was yes, when we took off it, was going on for a monthlong walrus hunt. It was 35 below zero when we left kan u. K. And it got colder and colder and colder. The ice is okay. The first camp we made, the ice was so thin it went like that under our feet. So we were told to walk single file and very carefully otherwise it might break. During the night yenis and his brotherinlaw harpoon ad walrus and brought back to camp. But the big haunch, we were staying in a little hut. Sometimes they bring little huts out. We were staying in this hut. 58 dogs, eight people, to feed and this hauge watches dripping blood. I, thought of it as a metro no, maam marking what i thought as be a bore original time. This is time without days, without schedule. You were going between one meal before the next. Hoping you find enough food for 58 dogs and eight people in the next place you go. It lulled us into a sense of, the ice is bad. It is breaking up from underneath because it is now much stormier place than it used to be but maybe it will be okay and then it wasnt. Then we went on to a village called moriy u. K. And we were supposed to go on to Saunders Island and there was no ice at all in the next village, none. The look on their face, i just knew they understood it was basically not only the end of ice but the end of their lives as they had known it for thousand of years. You mentioned morisako. What was that . What kind of village was it like . Small. The wife was great granddaughter of robert perry. Wonderful young woman. She was School Teacher in town. When i asked her how many students she had. She said, hmmm, well, two. Sometimes just one. She did speak the language. Im proud to be part american. But, you know it was north, tiny, tiny vibrant village. Then should i tell the rest of the story . This isnt really, i cant believe the questions he is asking me. [laughter] this isnt how it was supposed to go at all. It is going very well. Okay. Well get to the rest of the story later. Okay. I, you went on this trip with this big group of people. And just that one walrus . Yeah. So, thats all the food we got. So the rest of the trip, well, as we were moving down the coast of greenland everything behind us was breaking up, all the ice. So, when we turned around, because there was no eyes in front and very little ice in the back, we had to to go up and over part of the ice sheet which is really dangerous. It is kind of exciting. The big crevasses. Dogs are going, looking at the crevasse. We sort of got to the top. We took air going off a corn necessary down the other side. We went down this streambed. It was frozen. There were big boulders and there is no brakes on the shreds. They put a little rope under the runners to slow it down but it was not enough. Yenis would put the knee down to slow the shred down. His foot was hitting boulders. I was like this. Anyway we got to the bottom and we did find a place where previous hunters left food on a drying rack. So this would have been dog food. They were at least relieved the dogs had something to eat because we had consumed the walrus. Then we made, we spent the rest of the month just trying to get home. It took weeks. It was at end of that, the previous slide where you see me and yens sunbathing. We finally made it out to the islands and back into the northernmost village in the world where that gentleman was from. You know, it was, it was a disaster. And the families came down to the ice and we got back and they, and they saw that there was no food for them. You know theyre very cool people. There was no outward display of disappointment or anything. Okay. Helped us unpack the shreds and everyone went home and it was kind of quiet. What happens to a food sharing culture fed by subsistence hunters when there is no food and whe