When My Arctic Backyard (Finally) Gave Up

The Arctic — once our ally— is under a new, carbon-emitting regime

A friend of mine in reflection during last summer, when we realized our Arctic backyard was turning against us (photo by author)

I know the weight of winter. Growing up near the Arctic Circle, I learned early that the tundra isn’t just a landscape — it’s a force that shapes everything: the way snow settles in heavy silence, the way the cold carves into your lungs, the way the ground, frozen for thousands of years, feels solid beneath your feet.

I have stood, and roamed, and fought against the elements on the Arctic tundra and felt the silence — a silence so vast it presses against your ribs.

But in recent years, that silence has changed.

It has been disturbed by an unease you can hear, see, even smell — the air now thick with an unfamiliar scent, not the sharp bite of frost, but a damp smell of things long buried coming loose, with mosquitoes swarming where there should have been none; the land underfoot no longer solid but with sagging and unstable patches as the ice that held it together vanishes; where they once roamed freely, their ancient migratory paths disrupted by a landscape shifting beneath them.

This is the Arctic I know, the one I return to, and the one that is disappearing in real-time.