Above the Arctic Circle by Jim Ball
April 29, 2008
After a six-day trip to a symposium and tour of Greenland, my wife Kara and I arrived home to discover that our travel destination, the Arctic Circle, had become hot news—with major stories on NBC Nightly News and ABC World News Tonight. The NBC correspondent was reporting from the exact place we had visited, the Ilulissat glacier, a stunningly beautiful World Heritage Site on the western side of Greenland, 155 miles above the Arctic Circle. Newspaper articles were reporting on what we had heard during the Arctic symposium: the Arctic sea ice has receded farther this year than any time since satellite measurements have been kept starting in 1979.
The reduction has made the famed Northwest passage navigable (saving 5,000 to 10,000 miles a trip when it becomes commercially viable), and the nations which have Arctic coastlines —the U.S., Canada, Russia, Norway, and Denmark (for Greenland) —are now racing to claim sovereignty over as much of the Arctic as they can get, because vast quantities of oil, gas, and minerals are thought to exist under what normally would be covered with ice. In fact, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that up to 25 percent of the world’s oil reserves could be stored below the Arctic ice. The cover story for the Spring 2007 Harper’s magazine reports that the U.S. could reap $1.3 trillion worth of resources.
I have often commented (as I did in June to a hostile question from Senator Inhofe during my testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee) that I hope companies will make lots of money solving global warming. I want them to do well by doing good. But in this instance we have a situation where global warming itself is unlocking the very resources fueling its rise. It feels perverse.
And because it feels perverse it would be quite easy to take cheap “prophetic” shots at those who want to capitalize on such opportunities. But it is probably enough to underscore at this point that global warming has and will bring death. Pristine areas will be scarred and exploited. All to put cheap gas in our cars. The symposium we attended was sponsored by Patriarch Bartholomew (called by some “the Green Patriarch”), spiritual leader to 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide. It was entitled “The Arctic: Mirror of Life.”
The Arctic, we learned, is indeed in trouble. Senior scientist Bob Correll, who chaired the recent Arctic Climate Impact Assessment and who has been studying the area for decades, told us that the Arctic sea ice is currently disappearing at a rate much faster than scientists projected only a few years ago. Bob told us that by 2040, plus or minus 10 years, the Arctic summer sea ice could be gone. Previously I had heard 2040—but possibly by 2030? Twenty-three years from now? Once it disappears in the summers, what then, besides the drilling? Human-induced global warming will have caused the disappearance of what we culturally understand as the North Pole. How could we do that?
Another shocker was learning how much of the pollution from industrial nations was ending up in the Arctic due to global circulation patterns, traveling up the food chainto bioaccumulate in massive quantities in polar bears, walruses, whales, and seals. When the Inuit, the peoples native to the Arctic regions, eat their traditional diet, they too are impacted. One of the findings presented at the symposium is that among the Inuit twice as many girls are being born than boys. The scientists suspect that PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls—industrial pollutants known to be endocrine disruptors) that have bioaccumulated in the animals that are part of the diet of Inuit mothers are causing their unborn male babies to abort. While not on the same geographic scale as the consequences of climate change, these largely unknown tragedies are nevertheless known by God. I don’t know what my own culpability is with regard to PCBs, but I do know that the Inuit are innocent victims. And it haunts me.
One of the purposes of the Arctic tour was to have religious leaders from around the world experience a brief time of silent prayer together on the deck of our ship. Those participating were arrayed in their finest traditional dress that clearly marked them as leaders from various faiths: Shia and Sunni Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and various branches of Christianity. They all looked quite impressive, whereas I, as a Baptist evangelical, was dressed in fairly typical low-Protestant garb for such an august occasion – grey slacks and a blue blazer covered by a purely functional blue windbreaker.
We prayed for two minutes in the Arctic silence. Afterward, I was asked by reporters whether I had had a spiritually meaningful experience and what I thought the real significance of the event was. I told them that the real power of the event would not be measured by its impact on the clergy who participated, but by its effect on those who saw such diverse religious leaders come together to pray for the people of the Arctic and what we are doing to them. Right after the time of silent prayer the Sunni Islamic representative asked me directly (and rather boldly, but in a friendly way) what I had prayed. I shared with him the Apostle Paul’s reassurance that when we don’t know what to pray, the Holy Spirit prays with us with sighs too deep for words. On the deck of that ship above the Arctic Circle, I found that most of the time I prayed only emotions instead of words. But when I did pray in words, they were these: “Help us, Lord Jesus.”
The Rev. Jim Ball, Ph.D., is an ordained Baptist minister, the President and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and the national spokesperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
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