Seven years ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page article datelined Greenland, July 18th, celebrating the warming Arctic climate in terms of increased food production and a steadily lengthening growing season. Retreating glaciers were creating new reindeer pastures, dairy farms were expanding, potatoes were becoming more abundant and farmers were planting broccoli. The reporter suggested that Greenlanders might one day harvest strawberries and apples, weaning the island of dependence on food imports. What was next, I wondered, bananas?

At the halfway point of my Fulbright project, I must, out of fairness, ask myself: is there a good side to climate change? After two months of travel and reporting, I have discovered that climate change has improved the economic outlook for the once-moribund Arctic coast of extreme northern Norway. As the petroleum industry drills ever farther northward, towns like Hammerfest, Honningsvåg and Kirkenes are reviving.

Meanwhile, fishing villages have new hope as cod becomes more abundant due to warmer Atlantic currents drifting northward and bringing with them an upwelling of deep water nutrients. Ports like Longyearbyen are expanding to accommodate increased cruise line traffic as cargo vessels and tourists chase disappearing sea ice to higher latitudes. Foreign companies are scrambling for seabed mineral rights, once locked under the Arctic Ocean’s frozen surface.

Oil rig sits in open waters of Barents Sea in region of Bear Island; Svalbard, Norway. © Randall Hyman

It seems a rosy picture… unless you are a polar bear, or a ringed seal, or even a farmer. Humans pour 80 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air each day. The oceans absorb one-third of that astonishing figure, producing carbonic acid which acidifies the water and strangles marine life. The other two-thirds clog our air and warm our planet. And while shifting entire climate zones northward may help fishermen or farmers in the Arctic, what happens to fisheries and crops at the southern end of the range when rain and temperature patterns are disrupted?

Last month, on May 9, 2013, instruments atop Hawaii’s Mauna Loa recorded over 400ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, confirming similar readings in March at Svalbard’s Ny-Ålesund weather station. Scientists consider this a critical tipping point bound to raise global temps at least two degrees Celsius. Before the Industrial Age, levels were below 280ppm, and the last time they hit 400ppm was 3 million years ago when camels lived in the high Arctic and seas were 30 feet higher.

During a similar warming period in the 11th through 14th centuries, Norsemen thrived along Greenland’s southern shores, but bubbles of air trapped in glaciers from that time reveal that atmospheric carbon dioxide was far lower. Whatever caused warming back then does not exist now beside our man-made conditions, or New Yorkers would commute to work on jet skis instead of subway trains. While there’s no telling what caused last year’s historic drought in the US, Superstorm Sandy or this summer’s 400-year floods across Central Europe, one still wonders what’s so bad about cleaning up our air and water, and what’s so great about going bananas in Greenland.

WHO CARES ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE? (click below to find out):

Young Svalbard reindeer. © Randall Hyman

Just back in Norway from Austria, where I was invited by the Karl Franzens-University of Graz through the Fulbright Intercountry Lecturer Program as a speaker and panelist at a two-day symposium called, “Visual Cultures: From the Local to the Global.” Co-sponsored by the Departments of American Studies, Cultural Anthropology and History, the symposium explored the power of symbols and imagery in society. My topic was the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which I retraced several years ago from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean for American History Magazine, and my focus was the role of the photojournalist in shaping cultural mythologies.

Though the adventures of Lewis and Clark in the Great West are a far cry from my own travels in the Great North, my mission here is much the same as it was there. In both cases I was driven to give voice to the unheard. There I explored the Native American point of view, while here I hope to give wildlife, oceans, fishermen and native peoples a fair hearing.

The stakes are high here in the Arctic.  Just this week, the Financial Times front page (Monday, June 10th) announced a deal between Iceland and the Chinese to drill for oil near the island of Jan Mayen– Norwegian territory and a potential political time bomb.  In the words of Heiðar Már Guðjónsson, chairman of the Icelandic partner company, Eykon, “It’s not just oil and gas.  There are minerals, there are potential new shipping routes.”

If anyone doubts the Arctic is undergoing rapid change, think again. Temperature rise here is twice as fast as the global average, and with it grows industrial activity.  While a sizeable population experiences climate change on a daily basis in the Arctic counties of Finnmark and Troms, Norway also has more wealth and environmental fortitude than any other nation in the circumpolar north to deal with it.  The Norwegian Arctic may be the world’s best test case of how to manage climate change, from the local to the global.

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Graz, Austria. © Randall Hyman