Journey to the Top of the World.

"I'm on top of the world, looking down on creation and the only explanation I can find is the love that I've found ever since you've been around" - Top of the World, The Carpenters.

I took a journey to the top of the world but I never even left my front room. Even in normal times I'd have only had to jump on the 63 bus and take a short walk into Bloomsbury to the British Museum to visit their Arctic:Culture & Climate exhibition. Something, as established in my most recent arts correspondence, I'd very much liked to have done.

I enjoy shows at the British Museum, I like to have a nose around their Egyptian section while there, have a coffee and cake in the Great Court, and maybe go for a pint in a nearby pub afterwards. The Arctic, however, is not somewhere I've ever been desperate to visit. I like warm weather. I'm not a fan of the cold - and the Arctic, if there's one thing everyone knows about, is fucking cold.

'Loons and Seal in Ocean Swell'

But what else do we know about the Arctic? I can't speak for you but I, personally, don't know an awful lot. I was keen to learn a little about the history of the area, the people who live there, their customs, and, hopefully, some of the wildlife there too. The 'climate' part of the exhibition's title informed me, from the off, that I'd also be learning about how climate change is affecting, and will continue to affect, these people, their customs, and, of course, their natural environment.

As it turned out, with the online tour at least, it would focus almost entirely on that. The beautiful artworks, clothing, artifacts, and even the walrus mask that decorate this blog were all in the exhibition but they weren't mentioned once in the virtual tour so they are just that - decoration. Which is a real shame as I believe more information on them would have bought some important context to what, as the curators mentioned, is a rare British Museum exhibition that is about the future rather than the past.

Decorated ivory plate

'Nunavut Qajanartuk (Our beautiful land)'

If I'd gone to the British Museum, I imagine I'd have spent between an hour and two hours there, maybe even more. The virtual tour was considerably shorter than that - which explains why it's free! There's a big map there that I'd have enjoyed standing on, imaging myself on top of the world looking down on creation, and there are sleds from Greenland made from driftwood and antlers, gut skin parkas, and photos of whale blubber sliced up into neat little cubes.

Safe to say, being an animal in the Arctic isn't much fun. As with, more so in fact, most of the world there's a good chance you'll end up either being worn or eaten. Alongside stories of reindeer domestication (and who doesn't want to learn about that?) there are detailed instructions as to how one may gut a duck to make duck soup.

Young girl's parka

Of course, it's easy for me. A vegetarian (not even a vegan) living in a large city in the 21st century to be sniffy about cruelty to animals and I still maintain that anyone who gets outraged about people in China and Korea eating dogs but still eat pigs and cows themselves are total hypocrites. But, I do understand that at many times in history, not least in remote, and let's face it unfavourable towards fruit and vegetable growing, locations people have needed to eat and wear animals.

People have lived in the Arctic for over 30,000 years (since before Britain was repopulated following the Ice Age, apparently) so they've needed to adapt and innovate to stay alive and they have done. Remarkably successfully. The exhibition has been curated with the help of members of indigenous groups like the Inuit, the Sakha, the Inupiat, and the Chukchi.

Hunters, reindeer herders, and scholars from these groups who live in the most Northern parts of Russia, Canada, and the US combined to tell the story of how the combination of tradition and innovation, the ability to use the stars and the skies and the behaviour of the local wildlife to predict changes in weather and survive, is facing an existential threat in the age of global climate change.

Pair of snow goggles

Wooden serving spoon

In the Arctic, climate change isn't a future, or distant, threat. It's the lived experience of the people there right now. Places are melting for the first time in history. Ice is melting that people who live in the Arctic need to be able to fish for food. If they can't eat, they can't live, and run the risk of becoming the first climate migrants. But almost certainly not the last.

The people who live in the Arctic, we're told a little heavy handedly I thought, are integrated into the ecosystem but powerful people elsewhere see valuable resources as something that can be exploited for profit. Even Arctic art, of which the virtual tour shows us nowhere near enough of, is made as an expression of gratitude and respect towards the environment and its beauty.

Waterproof whaling suit

Brass and copper mask

Sami hat

Generations upon generations worth of accumulated knowledge and wisdom is being rendered obsolete at a fairly rapid clip. Indigenous people, and others, are working hard to not become climate migrants but the rest of the world, Greta Thunberg will tell you, needs to be on board too.

As mentioned earlier, I would have loved to have attended the show in person so I could learn what the story was behind the rather lovely 'Loons and Seal in Ocean Swell', to see why the decorated ivory plate doesn't look like it's made from ivory at all, and to learn about the stone place markers known as Inuksuks that are believed to contain information from the elders that is passed down through the centuries.

The curators, certainly of the virtual tour, didn't want to tell those stories and I, to be honest, can't blame them. The people of the Arctic are fighting a losing battle. Whatever your take on the recent/current migrant crisis in the Mediterranean and the Channel you will surely understand that it's not really what anybody wants. That it's really sad and has resulted in way too many people dying long before their time.

A climate migrant crisis would dwarf that and who knows what political demons that would loose upon the world (likely the same ones, Farage and Trump, that immigration already has done). At the start of this piece I joked that I didn't want to visit the Arctic because it's fucking cold but the really important thing for the Arctic is that it stays fucking cold. Or it won't just be the people from these mysterious northern lands who will suffer. We all will.

Model of a reindeer camp

Walrus mask