Not quite the photo op you’d expect from this location, but Christian slund’s shot from the North Pole is the April 2013 Greenpeace USA Photo of the Month.
Team Aurora lowers a titanium time capsule with the names of 2.7 million people who want to save the Arctic from the impacts of climate change and pollution of oil production.
Here Team Aurora prepares to lower a titanium time capsule through a hole in the ice and down to a permanent resting place on the seabed. On top is the “flag for the future” a design selected in a global competition. The orb holds the names of 2.7 million people from around the world who signed on to support protecting the Arctic.
This globe is a marker that stakes a claim for all people on the earth that the Arctic should remain as it is, unspoiled and undeveloped. Team Aurora represents people already impacted by climate change. Josefina Skerk, a Swedish-Sami student and member of the Sami Parliament; Renny Bijoux from Seychelles a nation under grave threat from climate change; 20-year-old musician and Hollywood actor Ezra Miller and Kiera Dawn Kolson of the TsoTine-Gwichin nations in Northern Canada.
Their journey to the top of the world in April 2013 highlights the urgency of stopping the rush to industrialize this wild and stormy region. For a million years, ice prevented fishing, mining and oil drilling. Now as we endure an unpredictable climate with carbon in the atmosphere measured at 400 ppm, a dire situation brought about by the uncontrolled runaway burning of fossil fuels, we should pause before allowing the destruction of the last great wilderness on the ends of the earth.
The future of the Arctic is the future of the Earth.
