The Arctic gets in your blood

John Crump

By GRID-Arendal

January 16^th, 2017

When discussing Arctic climate change there’s a saying that goes: What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. This means that the rapid environmental changes now underway in the circumpolar region have consequences for the rest of the planet. It’s the perspective we take at GRID-Arendal in all of our polar work.

I started working on Arctic issues by accident. After my undergraduate degree, I travelled for over a year and wound up back in Canada in the Yukon Territory (next to Alaska) where I got a job as a reporter for a local newspaper. I wrote about everything from politics to oil and gas development to people’s small dogs being eaten by wolves one hungry winter.

To understand the pull of the north, and the power of the Arctic, you really have to spend time there. No amount of reading or documentary viewing can match the sensation of standing beneath the massive Kluane Mountains on the Alaska/Canada border, or gazing at the northern lights as your plane comes in for a landing at a tiny village on the tundra, or standing at the edge of the massive Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland watching icebergs being born.

I met my wife and started a family in the Yukon, so you could say the North is in our family’s blood now. At this moment, I have a daughter working in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, another in Nuuk, Greenland and another planning a return to Inuvik, where she lived and worked before returning to school.

My own career has revolved around talking, writing and communicating about Arctic challenges and how they are connected to the global environmental issues we all face. At its most fundamental, in one way or another, all my work has been about helping people to tell their stories.

One of the most successful and most absorbing projects I’ve worked on at GRID-Arendal is Many Strong Voices which links the Arctic and Small Island Developing States in the Pacific and Caribbean – regions where people really are at the front lines of climate change. At first glance, you might not think there’s much in common between these remote regions. They are different in climate, history, culture, and geographically separated by vast distances. However, you only have to bring people from these regions together to tell their stories, to each other and to the world, to realize the connections. People in both regions are intimately connected to their environments and rely on the resources of the land and sea for their food, well-being and cultural survival. Their worlds are changing and as they try to adapt they have much to teach us.

A lot of the work I’ve done at GRID-Arendal, and in other jobs, involves bringing people together and giving them the space to develop their own ideas and strategies for dealing with the challenges they face. Another project in this vein is the Arctic NGO Forum, which provided civil society organizations working in the circumpolar region with an opportunity to work together to influence decision-makers.

I have a new role now at GRID-Arendal and will be using my communications and other experience to work with my colleagues on ways to increase the reach and impact of our work. After all, it’s all about the stories – Arctic or South Pacific or Africa. Stories make the connections that lead to change.