Erling Kagge - Philosophy for Polar Explorers

When I am feeling cold beneath the open sky, theres an easy way to warm up: I pull the hood of my anorak over my head, draw the zipper up to my throat, and pick up my pace. When my body heats up, first in my torso and then down my arms to my wrists, and finally underneath my fingernails, I can stop. Then I take out a mandarin, peel it, and slowly suck out the juice by pressing each section gently against the roof of my mouth with my tongue.

Suddenly I feel connected: connected with the person who planted the tree, with the water the tree has drunk through its roots, the earth that cushions these roots, the branch that has carried the mandarin from fertilization to fruition, and the sun that has helped to ripen it. And I feel grateful: grateful for being warm again and for the feeling of being in contact with the rhythms of nature.

At other times when Im out on a walk, its as if Im not thinking at all. I seldom notice any activity along the way. My mind goes into hibernation, and only very occasionally a solitary thought will cross it: how the snowflakes beneath my skis are created by a tiny drop of water, ten or twenty kilometres above the Earths surface, becoming, piece by piece, a six-sided prism, consisting of 90 per cent air. How it then floats down through the atmosphere and lands on the ground in front of me. No two snowflakes are alike, and none follow the same route. They are often, though not always, symmetrical. Until my skis compress them, that is.

Nature has its own language, experiences, and consciousness. It tells us where we come from and what we should do on the road ahead. I grew up without a television or a car (my father considered both to be dangerously unhealthy) and spent a lot of my free time in the forest, by the sea, and in the mountains, so I have been spoon-fed this knowledge. Today, when the modern world expects us to be available at all times, grounding yourself in nature can be hard. I forget about it sometimes, and when I look around, I get the feeling that many people forget about it all the time.

Nature is about diversity. The more I remove myself from nature and the more I increase my availability to the modern world, the more restless I become. The more unhappy too. I am no scientist, but my experience has been that, to a large extent, feelings of insecurity, loneliness, and depression stem from the flattening of the world that occurs when we are alienated from nature. There is, of course, much to be said in favour of man-made environments and new technology, but our eyes, nose, ears, tongue, skin, brain, hands, and feet were not created for choosing the road of least resistance. Mother Earth is 4.54 billion years old, so it seems arrogant to me when we dont listen to nature and instead blindly place our trust in human invention.

In 2010, my Norwegian friend Brge Ousland, the Icelandic polar explorer Haraldur rn lafsson, and I crossed Vatnajkull, Icelands largest glacier. We travelled light and carried all the food and equipment we needed on our respective small runnerless sleds, called pulks. By volume, Vatnajkull is the largest glacier in Europe. It is made up of 3,100 cubic kilometres of ice and covers 8,100 square kilometres of south-east Iceland. As is often the case with Icelandic glaciers, there are a number of volcanoes beneath the ice. While we were on our way across it, a volcanic eruption broke out in the neighbouring glacier, Eyjafjallajkull. Hundreds of people were immediately evacuated and the air traffic above a large part of Europe was suspended because of the clouds of volcanic ash. We were never in danger, but the experience showed me how a small volcano erupting in a remote region of Iceland can have huge consequences for an entire continent. Large volcanic eruptions can change the whole world. I sometimes wonder if we need natural disasters like these to remind us of the Earths rhythms and forces. Id like to think thats not the case, and that people can choose to reconnect with nature from time to time in a more peaceful way.

During the first twelve years of my life, my parents sent me outdoors in all kinds of weather. I believe that at first I liked it, but then I grew bored with it in my early teens. I began putting my energy into indoor activities and partying instead. Seven or eight years later, I started yearning for nature again. I missed the forest, the mountains, and the ocean, the feeling of physical exertion in the outdoors. It was a yearning that came from inside me, a deep-felt need for close contact with elements not made by machines. To feel the sun, rain, cold, wind, mud, and water on my body. To listen.