SEASON TWO | EXTRA ONE
Scenes from Svalbard
NICK: This season of Threshold is underwritten by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
CINDY: Do you see that thing right in front of us, that's just a rock, right?
AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and I'm on a boat floating around the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard – the same place where we walked in that big parade a few episodes ago.
CINDY: On the shore? That kind of long blob?
AMY: The dark thing?
AMY: These islands are way up in the arctic, halfway between Norway and the North Pole. It's a cold day and it’s so grey and foggy, and it's hard to tell where the sky ends and the sheets of white sea ice begin. But my friend Cindy Gilbert has spent years working as a wildlife biologist in the Arctic, and that might be why she's the first one on this boat to spot this...blob.
GUIDE: I think...it's a walrus!
CINDY and AMY: Yeah! Walrus! Walrus!
AMY: It's a big male walrus, hanging out on the lip of the sea ice. Our guide goes running for her camera, and Cindy and I go spread the news to our fellow passengers.
CINDY: I'm so excited! There's a walrus out there.
MAN: There's a walrus out there.
AMY: Walrus! Walrus! (laughter) Walrus alert!
AMY: Walruses live only in the polar north and they can be enormous – the biggest ones weigh more than 3,000 pounds. Our captain slows the boat down and takes us up a little closer, so we can get a better look. Everything in this landscape is a cool, blue, white or grey color except for this fleshy, reddish brown lump of a creature on the water's edge. The image of the walrus is reflected in the rippling water beneath it, and I can't help but wonder...is this walrus attractive to other walruses? Like, is it staring at itself in the water, thinking...yeah, I am looking good today.
AMY: So what do they come up above water for? Like, why is this one just hanging out on the ice?
GUIDE: Oh, they do that often, they just come up, just to relax.
AMY: That's our guide on this trip, and she says this is probably the same walrus she saw here the day before.
GUIDE: And it was here with a smaller one, one that didn't the tusk, we are guessing maybe it's a husband and wife, relaxing. And when we saw them yesterday they were just floating around on the ice flake, out in the fjord, so now they have wandered in here, and are just chilling on the ice.
MUSIC
AMY: Walruses need sea ice. It plays a role in almost every part of their life cycle – from mating, to giving birth, to the naps they need to take in between dives to the sea floor, which is where they find most of their food. We're going to learn more about sea ice in our next full episode – but this is a Threshold extra, kind of a bonus mini-episode made just for you, podcast listeners. I spent a week reporting in Svalbard, and I have all kinds of great stories from there, but we just couldn't fit very many of them into the show itself. So this is a little montage of a few scenes from Svalbard. Think of it kind of like a little intermission here in the middle of our second season.
AMBI: water
And we're releasing this extra today – November first – for a particular reason – we get to be part of something really exciting this fall. It's called NewsMatch, and it's basically a big ol' pot of money that has been collected to support non-profit journalism organizations like ours. It's pretty fabulous actually – during NewsMatch all donations up to $1,000 are doubled. So, if you give 50 dollars, we get 100. If you give 500, we get 1,000. If you choose to give monthly, they'll match that amount, too. And we get some bonuses for new donors. NewsMatch starts today and runs through the end of December. So if you've ever thought about donating to Threshold, now is the best time ever to do it.
You might have noticed that you pay nothing for Threshold, and we like it like that. It's the public radio model, where you work really hard to make quality content, and then you let your audience decide what the value is. So that's what I'm asking you to do right now – I want you to put a value on Threshold. Like, if you had to buy it, what would pay for it? What do you think it's worth, and what do you feel like you can afford? Maybe for you, that's fifteen dollars. Or maybe it's 150. Whatever that number is, if you choose to give that amount right now, NewsMatch will double it. Just go to thresholdpodcast.org and click donate. And, while you're doing that...meet Mary Grace Eula.
AMY: When you first arrived, what did you think of the place, what were your impressions?
MARY GRACE: Ahm, actually I'm a bit shock. 'Cause, ahm, I'm from Asia, it's a warm country, and I'm a bit shock, 'cause ah, oh, it's really really cold!
AMY: Mary Grace is 24 years old, she's from the Philippines, and she's come up here to Svalbard for four years in a row to cook, clean and serve drinks on this tourist boat.
AMY: When you heard about it, like, what made you interested in doing it?
MARY GRACE: Uhm, I really love the working at sea. I really love exotic places. And I really wanted to experience snow, cold places.
AMY: And, Mary Grace says, she wanted to make some money. Here in Svalbard, she can earn twice as much as she does in the Philippines. The conditions can be tough – she's often cold, and she lives and works on the boat with a crew of six other people. That's a lot of time in close quarters with her colleagues. But, she says, it's worth it.
MARY GRACE: I came from a poor family, and because of that poverty, I have this in my mind – that I want to be prosperous. I want to get out from that poverty, yeah.
AMY: What percentage of your salary are sending back home?
MARY GRACE: I...I send ninety percent actually.
AMY: Ninety percent!
MARY GRACE: Yes, yes, that is for tuition fee of my younger siblings. There are two. They are still schooling in college. And the rest is for our house. Because we don't have our own house in Philippines before. But now as I work here, I have enough money to buy a house, yeah.
AMY: For your whole family.
MARY GRACE: Yes.
AMY: Are you proud?
MARY GRACE: Yeah...yeah I am. It's my way of paying back what they've sacrificed for me before, yeah.
AMY: Working on this ship was Mary Grace's first job after college. In the off-season, she goes home and works in the Philippines. And she's got big plans for the future.
MARY GRACE: I wrote a business proposal to make a floating restaurant actually, yeah.
AMY: Oh, in the Philippines?
MARY GRACE: Yes.
AMY: Oh, neat, do you think it'll...it might happen?
MARY GRACE: Yes, I know (laughs). Yeah, I'm just saving money for it, yeah.
AMY: I want to come eat in your floating restaurant.
MARY GRACE: Yeah, yeah, I really love it. Actually I made a long-term plan for the business, so...
AMY: Yeah, so it's really, it's going to happen.
MARY GRACE: Yeah. I will make it.
MUSIC
AMY: Tourism is booming in Svalbard, and many other Arctic communities. And that's driven in part by climate change – it's kind of an odd side effect of global warming. There's a growing awareness about the importance and beauty of the Arctic, and at the same time, the warming climate is making more of the north accessible, so a growing number of companies are offering trips to watch polar bears, go dog-sledding, and view receding glaciers before they disappear. And all of that means there's a rising demand for people who are willing to work low-wage, seasonal jobs in hotels, restaurants, cruises. Like Mary Grace, many of those workers are from the Philippines, Indonesia and other south Asian countries – ironically, countries where climate change is already having dramatic and often deadly effects.
IVAN: We have a lot of tourists. It's quite a big amount for them to come. We don't need more. They will pollute.
AMY: I'm on land now, with...
IVAN: Ivan Velichenko. It's like...(spells it)
AMY: Ivan is 30 years old, and he lives in Barentsburg. It's a Russian settlement on Svalbard, centered on a coal mine that's been in operation here since the 1920s. About 500 people live in Barentsburg now, but it used to have more than twice that, so it feels kind of like a Soviet ghost town, with lots of abandoned buildings and dramatic murals celebrating workers and industry.
IVAN: Originally I was born in Soviet Union, the northernmost part of Ukraine, I was born near the border of Ukraine, Russia and Belorussia.
AMY: When he's not in Barentsburg, Ivan now calls St. Petersburg home. He's employed by the state tourism company. And yes, he works in the tourism industry and he thinks Svalbard doesn't need more tourists – he says his job is more about managing the tourists they already have. These islands are full of wildlife, and gorgeous, pristine mountain ranges, and he wants to keep it that way.
IVAN: And we are telling it to all of the tourists, to everybody, don't throw like, you know, the cigarettes over here, and so on and so on. Because if you like go through like the tundra over here and made just one step right by the car over there it takes 50 years to became once. So that's why you need to take care of it, like of a small child or something like that.
AMY: Ivan says he didn't always have that sense of carefulness about nature – he says living here in the Arctic has really changed him. He's a big guy with a beard and some piercings, and he says, back home in Russia he was a different kind of person. He says he was kind of wasting his life, getting into fights a lot..
IVAN: Going into the bars, pubs, clubs, just hanging around, you know. Just doing nothing. But when I came over here, I have much more free time to think over what have I done, what shall I do, what I have made right or wrong. So this is a perfect place to find not only the mistakes inside yourself but to think what you can do in the future. So I'm not like I was before, just fighting with everybody if someone just touches me or something like that..
AMY: Literally chilled you out.
IVAN: Yeah yeah, I became more calm, I became person that is much more interested in all the details in Arctic and so on, like before, I never get in touch more closely.
AMY: Do you think very much about climate change?
IVAN: Of course. From year to year the snow is melting terribly over here. And as well as the glaciers.
IVAN: It's all about those people who are ruling the world and earning the money on the world. They can change it. But they don't hear us.
MUSIC
AMY: Later this season, we’re going to spend an entire episode in Russia. Stay tuned.
MUSIC/AMBI
AMY: OK, so I've got one more bit of sound I just have to share with you from Svalbard:
AUKS
AMY: These are little auks – little black and white birds that breed on Arctic islands, and there were zillions of them on Svalbard when I was there, swirling around in the sky, and making this noise pretty much 24/7.
AUKS
AMY: That is cooky, isn’t it? It sounds like they're constantly angry – but they looked like they were having a really good time. They were swooping around way up high on these cliff faces. I want to send a shout-out to permafrost scientist Sarah Strand. She took me up to the top of a mountain where I was able to record this.
AUKS
AMY: Enough with the Auks, let’s switch to something a little...calmer.
GRIMSEY
AMY: Ah. We've left Svalbard now, this is Grimsey, the Icelandic island where that giant Arctic Circle sculpture lives. And before I say goodbye here, I just want to remind you that NewsMatch is on, and we really need you to vote with your dollars and say yes to more Threshold in the future.
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