Transcript: The True Arctic

Hannah Stitfall  0:06  

So this morning, we arrived on Svalbard, which is a group of islands in between Norway and the North Pole, and it’s famous for wildlife, glaciers and the Northern Lights. It has a population of just two and a half 1000 people, which are all situated in one area, whereas the rest is completely wild. It’s pretty spectacular. You do I feel like I’m at the end of the world here. I think you cracked insane. The landscape was What does look like the end of the earth when we arrived earlier on today, my first impressions was just how expansive it is. I mean, when you arrive, you’re surrounded by water. You look up and there are these almost towering mountains. It looks like a scene out of the movies, like you can’t even describe it that. And at this time of year, they’re all green, luscious. The clouds are rolling over the top. You can see some snowy peaks in the background, and also the amount of bird life that’s here. The second you step off the plane, you look out, there were gulls, skewers, other birds swirling above, and just the noise. It’s absolutely stunning.

Now, of course, when we think of the Arctic, we assume that it’s going to be snowy and covered in ice and freezing all the time, but we’ve actually arrived off the back of the warmest month that it’s ever been recorded here in Svalbard. And I’m telling you, I’m looking around and it is green. It is lush. There are bits of snow high up. But really, I mean, you could be in the Outer Hebrides, or, you know, the Shetland Islands in Scotland. It’s not how you would imagine the Arctic to be, and it is. It’s, I mean, it’s warm. And when I say warm, I mean, we’re not sat here in, you know, T shirts and shorts. We’ve still got our layers on, but it is just not as cold as it should be. The only way I can describe it is, imagine Scotland temperatures in autumn, so you’ve still got to have a couple of layers on, but it’s still, you know, we’re not here shivering, and when we arrived earlier, it was actually drizzling, which somewhat it does dampen the experience, I mean. And this is uncharted territory for this part of the world, the fact it should be colder than it is, and to arrive in the Arctic and it’s raining, it does seem a little bit odd, I mean, but it is beautiful, but we are very aware that it shouldn’t be this warm at this time of the year. I

This is oceans, life underwater, the series exploring our oceans and the fascinating life within them. I’m Hannah stitfoll. I’m a zoologist, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster, and I’m bringing you along to one of the most remote locations in the world. This is our final episode of this season, and what a way to end it by taking you on an adventure to the Arctic. If you move to live in the world’s northernmost community, it’s generally not because of your love of the arts and museums. It’s because of your love of wilderness. I’ve been on solar now for 34 years, by chance, more than anything, I a friend of a friend, told me about soul bud, and I kind of connected through somebody who asked me to come up to help him actually just do some carpentry on a cabin that was meant to be a short journey, but I landed on Soul bud with a name of an island 90 kilometres to the south. And

Unknown Speaker  3:43  

no, I just never left this is Ocean’s life underwater.

Hannah Stitfall  3:56  

So that was my first impression of Svalbard. But to really get a sense of the place. I wanted to speak to some of the local residents. Maria filiperosi is a Norwegian freelance journalist, podcast host and author living in longubin Svalbard. I invited her to my BNB in Svalbard to learn more about life in such a remote location.

Maria Philippa Rossi  4:22  

I Hello. How are you very good? Thank you. I’m very good. Thank you for coming along here today. I mean, for our listeners, we’re we’re in our Airbnb at the moment, and Maria found her way here, so we it’s the first time we’ve ever been here. So we’re not used to all of the addresses, but it’s not a big place, is it? It’s not a big place, but I think it’s worth mentioning that the streets actually don’t have names, so they’re just numbers. That’s where we’ve been getting confused. So it’s all about numbers, and you you learn it eventually, but it’s it’s confusing the first few days, yeah. So what initially inspired you to move to Svalbard?

Hard that was basically the proximity to nature, like where we are now we’re in the middle of town, but we’re 1015, minute walk from from the mountains. So you can basically take your backpack after work and you can head up to one of the mountains in really no time. I’ve got two kids, two boys aged six and eight. And after having kids, sort of it’s it limits your your activities, or your ability to go out and have fun after work. But here it was a I was able to combine those two so so we have a good family life, and we also have a good outdoors life. So that’s that’s amazing, as someone who has travelled extensively, how would you compare life in Svalbard to other places you’ve lived. I wrote a book called The World’s Greatest hikes, and it was published in 2015

and it took a couple of years of travelling basically the world and hiking all these hikes and experiencing a lot of fantastic things. But then I came here in 2014 so just as we’re sort of supposed to finish the riding. We were here for 10 days skiing across Spitsbergen, so 150 kilometres of skis or something, something during a week. And after that trip, what I was left with was that Svalbard was the most exotic place I’d ever been, and it’s a part of Norway, and it’s just a direct flight away, and it’s so close in many ways, and still it is quite unique. So I’m I’m sort of thinking now in my head, like, do I manage to tell the listeners, or explain the listeners how weird this place really is? Because it is just surreal, but it’s all those tiny things with the like with the car, all the cars in the parking lot here, they’re not locked, and the keys are in. So you could basically go and take any one of them at the airport, all the cars are unlocked. Keys are in. My bike is just outside. It’s not locked. It will be there when I finish this chat with you. Do people take other people’s cars? Not on purpose?

But say we have a we have a Toyota four, and there’s quite a few of them in town. This is great. Sometimes we have a Facebook group like in town where everything happens, and sometimes there will be a post, like, I put my groceries in the wrong car. Someone took off with them, or the other way around, like, I came to my car and there was lots of groceries in it. I haven’t bought them. You’re missing it. So you do have those kind of things, but it’s very it’s nothing dangerous, and people don’t do it out of because they want to be mean or anything. It just happens. And then we just have a good laugh. And another one that’s good as well, like we’re talking about how it’s difficult to find the houses. What there was one who posted a photo of, like, a completely cleaned apartment, and it goes, I came home from work and my apartment is clean. Why? No stop, and then the cleaner had taken the wrong apartment, so she cleaned the wrong

Unknown Speaker  7:53  

as well. So

Maria Philippa Rossi  7:55  

those kind of small things, and it’s the commute, close knit community, and it’s the wild, crazy nature, and then it’s the odd, very, very odd time a polar bear walks through each town. And all of that just adds up to this crazy, beautiful place, I guess. Yeah, would you say it is it is similar to anywhere that you’ve ever been before? Or is it just totally different? It is totally different. It just if I had to compare it with something it might have been like, say, Punta Arenas or something in Chile that are small places, but they’re close to great natural wonders, so you have more infrastructure than what the location should sort of have, yeah, and that’s the thing with with this town as well. Like we’re two and a half 1000 people. So if you’d been if you take any odd village in Norway with two and a half 1000 people, you will have a roundabout and a Tony’s takeaway, and that would be about it. And here you have you. We have a climbing wall, we have a fantastic swimming pool. We have 10 or 11 restaurants. Some of them are award winning. There are not like just one good wine cellar in town. There are several,

which is good information.

So and we do festivals like this week, it’s been literature festivals. Soon the dark season, blues will come. There’s a jazz festival, food festival marathon. It attracts so many people that just makes for the

Hannah Stitfall  9:24  

for the possibilities of the people who live here quite good as well. So so we we have a good life in your role as a journalist and podcast host. What are some of the most common misconceptions people have about life in Svalbard, and how do you address those through your work? 

Maria Philippa Rossi  9:43  

Well, for the podcast, it’s interviews with scientists at at unis, and we basically just try to talk about their different work, what they do. But as a journalist, and I’ve also briefly worked in the in the travel industry up here, and I guess it’s sort of.

Like, it’s easy to like, say the fact there are more polar bears than people, and that’s that that’s wrong, because you would think the polar bears are basically dancing outside the airport, and they are not. No, do you know what? And I’m disappointed that they’re not, because I bought my big camera and I haven’t seen one. No, the you I mean, I think on average, maybe 5% sees a polar bear. So So also that that’s a challenge for the for the travel industry, they need to play down the role of the polar bear in Svalbard, because it’s not something you see on a daily basis. And I think if you come here with that thought that you’re going to see a polar bear, you’re going to get the great shots for Instagram, then you will be disappointed. Yeah, and that’s where, that’s where I’m at today,

and that if you’ve take sort of into the climate change and the and what it actually costs to come here, then I would say that you’re not allowed to come to swell, but and be disappointed. Yes, your fault. You haven’t done your research. It is my fault. It is. It really is. I’m sorry. So I think maybe that, and that could be Instagram’s fault, where you have the beautiful northern light pictures and people come up for 48 hours and think they’re going to experience it, but all these natural wonders, it’s not something you can switch on and off. It’s not like we seven o’clock every night and we turn on the northern lights. You have to be here for a couple of days or a week and just experience it. And some are quite good at it, and maybe too many also, because of cheap flights. And now they’re a bit more expensive, but it’s super easy, accessible, and people fly up and fly down and fly up and fly down, and yeah, they should take their time and sort of Yeah, experience the landscape and the community and talk to locals, and yeah, eat at the restaurants. And yeah, we do have a lot of fantastic nature, but you can’t, you can’t expect it to

Hannah Stitfall  11:52  

just sort of to be there waiting for you be at the airport. It’s not gonna be okay.

Svalbard is home to a small, tight, knit community. As you just said, can you tell us a bit more about the people who live here and how the isolation affects community life? 

Maria Philippa Rossi  12:10  

Well, there are lots of people, lots of different people, living here, so it’s hard to sort of say that it’s one

 similar group. You have 50 nationalities and that, of course, you’ll have people from 50 different cultures, sort of adding their speciality into the to the mix. You have a lot of children’s families. There are about 250 kids at school and 8090 in the kindergartens. So, so a lot of, yeah, a lot of kids and families, basically. And then you have, you have the guides, young, single, free

who can live a whole different lifestyle again.

And you have maybe, like older couples who’ve stayed here, either for for the whole life, for some time, with kids moving, moving to the mainland or overseas, and they’ve just stayed because this is part of their their life. So so you have quite different people in town, for sure, and also with different interests. I mean, I’ve talked about the nature and why that. I like that, but a lot of people, maybe not a lot. But some people have never been in a snowmobile, like they couldn’t. They would nothing with the winter outdoor life attracts them. Like they would rather sit at the pub and have a beer, then that’s allowed as well, exactly. It sort of goes back to what I said earlier about this community and that you had to nurture it, because if you come here as a single person, you get a job. You wanted to work in Svalbard, but there’s not necessarily a network that looks after you immediately like you have to give something. You can’t just expect that everyone will luckily, a lot of workplaces are great, and they will start the your colleagues will invite you to go out to to trips on the weekends or something like that. But, but you, in one way, you are very alone, and if you don’t, if you don’t give anything back to the society, when weekend comes, no one will ask you anything, and you will sit in your apartment in a road without a name by yourself,

Unknown Speaker  14:08  

but,

Maria Philippa Rossi  14:08  

but it just means that it’s it’s not for everyone as well. And the dark season that come that’s coming up is long, so the networks and the and the social life that’s here, as I said, initially, is very vulnerable, and you play a big part of it yourself if you want to have a good time for you personally. How was your first full dark season here in Svalbard? That was, that was quite nice. I like the dark season, yeah. But I like photography, so, so I used dark season as a as a way to sort of go out and become a better Northern Lights photographer. My husband doesn’t like it so much, and he said for the past, I think two or three years, that no more dark seasons. But we’re still here. We’re going to stay,

but, but again, it’s it’s vulnerable, and this last year, it was a good.

Ice year. So a lot of the fjords that have been open for the past 20 years, they got ice COVID. So you’ve got, you could go with your snowmobile or new routes that hasn’t been open for for years, basically. But it was also it was freezing cold for weeks, like minus 2530 for weeks, we had a week in January with, like, the felt temperature was minus 42

and that’s pretty cold. That is cold, yeah. And then two weeks later, it was plus two degrees, and it rained and the snow disappeared, and you had those warm spells probably once a month for the whole winter. And when you’re when it’s pitch black and you have the snow, it’s beautiful. But when it’s pitch black and you have the rain, it gets so dark

and you can’t see the mountains like you can sit here. And now it’s very visible, but you you won’t actually be able to see the mountain. But then also, I think one of the best, or some of the best sort of outdoor memories, is from from like, those really cold or stormy days. And we’re a group of mums who who gather every Tuesday and like, just get a goggles on and balaclava and full on down jackets, and we just go for a small walk in town in those conditions and feel very alive.

Hannah Stitfall  16:14  

How many mums are there in this group? 

Maria Philippa Rossi  16:17  

Oh, we’re about, well, people come and go, but no, we’re like five or six. So it’s fantastic, and it’s good way on sort of the Tuesdays, there are holy my husband knows don’t plan anything on Tuesdays, because I go, I’m going out with the mum’s group. We should have come and done a recording on a mum’s group day. That would have been great. 

Hannah Stitfall  16:33  

So how often do you go back to the mainland? Or do you try to not go at all? 

Maria Philippa Rossi  16:39  

No, well, I do end up going now and then, preferably not more than once every two or three months. It is a lot of flying, and you sort of think you have that in the back of your head that, like, we can sit here and we can have meat free Mondays, but we have our emission

carbon footprint, and it’s not small, and also just the fact that almost every time I sit in the aeroplane and we sort of taxi out on the runway, I just sit there and think, why am I leaving now, it’s beautiful, like I could have been on a trip. I could go there, and, yeah, I just want to come back.

Hannah Stitfall  17:12  

Finally, what advice would you give to someone who is considering visiting or moving to Svalbard? What should they know before experiencing life in the Arctic? 

Maria Philippa Rossi  17:24  

Well, if you’re visiting, the polar bears will not wait for you, and they won’t dance, and it was in Northern Lights. So do some research before you come, because I think your stay will be a lot more you will understand this weird little town a lot better. If you do some research prior to coming and if you’re moving here, be willing to sort of pitch into the community. Join as a volunteer. I forgot to mention all the choirs and stuff. That’s because I’m not very musical. But like you, there are so many dance groups and three different choirs and bands and everything. But like, join something like that. That’s basically the only way you can, you can have a good time here if you pitch into the community. Involved. Yeah, get involved. Yeah. And also the the activities Hall, with all its football and basketball and tandem, just, there’s just an abundance of stuff to do, but you need to be a part of it. And you sort of need to pitch in and then just,

that’s a stupid thing to say, maybe, but, but leave your phone at home now and then. Like, don’t, don’t go for all the Instagram moments and try to document everything. And I say that as a photographer and journalist. Like, just, just be, just experience it. And especially also with the if you’re visiting, I’ve seen so many tourists with their iPhones that will die within two minutes in the freezing cold, and then they think they have a bad trip, but God, just look at the at the mountains, at the sky, and just enjoy it and sort of appreciate that you’re able to be Here in this crazy, remote place of the world, the

Hannah Stitfall  19:04  

if you’re as sad as we are about this season coming to an end, I want to remind you that you can get bonus content by subscribing. Don’t forget that this series, we’re also offering listeners access to some very special bonus content. If you want to get an exclusive look behind the scenes, head over to action.greenpeace.org.uk.

Forward slash oceans. Dash podcast. This podcast doesn’t just explore our blue planet’s breathtaking beauty, but also exposes the dangers that threatens it. To find out more about Greenpeace’s work to protect the oceans and how you can support go to greenpeace.org. Forward slash oceans.

My next guest is a fascinating man. He’s an award winning filmmaker polar.

Expert and dedicated environmentalist, and he works out here in Longyearbyen. Basically, if you’ve watched a documentary shot in the Arctic, this man was probably part of the team behind the camera. It’s Jason Roberts, Managing Director of polar x

Jason Roberts  20:18  

okay, Jason, thank you for being here with us today. So you’ve worked on some big Hollywood films and with Hollywood movie stars. Can you tell us a bit about that? Working on a Hollywood feature film or mega drama series or something? It’s it’s two different worlds, and we did Mission Impossible two years ago, we’re shooting, still not released. Part Two for dead reckoning will come out in early 2025 but we’re shooting that with a roughly 200 and think it was 293 people involved. And then the next shoot we had after we were still wrapping that down and packing up, but the next thing that went out of the office here was a wildlife shoot with two guides and one cameraman. So

there was no very different, very, very different. There’s like two different worlds. You can’t explain it well. You go out with wildlife, one cameraman, two guides, which is quite often what we work with. Now for blue chip wildlife, we just need time and safety being in more than just one expert there.

So our preferred polar bear setup is two guides or two logistical people from my side, and one cameraman. You know, you hop over to a major Hollywood feature film, and you know, just the transport department will be 3040 people. So we went from 293

people, three big ships, one of them being a big offshore supply vessel, two hotel ships, two helicopters, three planes and two dog sleds,

two being the next one being a wildlife shoot. So they’re very different. So during your time, over the years of you’ve worked on all of the huge, big productions. I mean, you must have had all of them, incredible in so many different ways. Are there any moments that really stick out to you and you’re like, wow, there’s different moments. I think it also changes in the amount of time you spent with a creature. I know my moments with orcas now are very different than it was the first time, I think my first time diving with an Orca. I still can’t beat that, because it just kind of, I had no idea what I was going to do, and it was early days in orcas, and we didn’t really know if they might try to munch us a bit or bite us a bit. So it was a long, long time ago. No one said, you know, called killer whales for a reason, because they kill whales.

And that comes from Norwegian whalers actually the original name of killer whales. So it makes sense, if you translate it back to Norwegian, when the Norwegians were the whaling people out whaling in the southern oceans, which saw killer whales in them. So with a kilowatt orchi, you maybe spend a bit of time with the one creature. Maybe, if you have a pod for a month or two months, like in Antarctica, following the same pod for months, you get to learn individuals a little bit, but there’s not a great difference in them. You can tell the individual. But with polar bears, it’s so incredibly individual. We did this opening sequence of planet Earth, and that was a really tough thing to film, physically as well as mentally, because we were at the end of shooting, we had to shoot hopefully the opening sequence was a lot of pressure to make it happen, and then we didn’t have the easy shoot, weather wise and logistic wise. And how long was that? Probably about two months, seven weeks, eight weeks, and in skiing and sleeping in snow holes and freezing cold conditions and storms the whole time. So you can’t really get much worse conditions on planet Earth to work in. Yet I look back at it one of the best experiences in my life. I think actually a lot of those ones, the harder they are, the more you look back at them as being, you know, a romantic way, if you can look at having a really terrible time that way,

kind of type two fun. Yeah, type two fun, definitely. So I think with polar bears, I mean, when we did frozen planet one, the first series of flows, and planet one, we spent the first winter shooting. We spent four and a half five months. We decided to go what we call a mega shoot. And we go to an island called Half Moon Island, which had the record highest harvest of polar bears ever in the world. When once, when in Norway on Svalbard, you could actually still hunt polar bears. So for any one location, the record, there was 173

bears shot in one one year back in the 1960s

so we knew, with the population of bears back at pre hunting levels, that there’d be a lot of bears there. There were so many bears, it was like.

Pain. It was crazy. It

was you let your guard down, and if you met the bear before you knew its behaviour. But it was when a new bear come in, then you’re always a bit worried. But it was, it was just ridiculous. It was like, there were, like, sheep in New Zealand everywhere. There was so many. There was bears everywhere. And you kind of, after a while, you can’t just be scared of them, and you can’t be worried about them, and you just have to watch over your shoulder the whole time that they’re not having an attempt at you. And that whole winter there was just, there was only three of us there staying in the original trappers cabin that had shot so many polar bears with what they’d done in Svalbard and Norwegian Arctic. They worked out these self guns that could put some meat on it, and the bear would shoot itself, and that’s how they could shoot so many those self guns are still, yeah, it was an awful way, but it was a different time. And I actually some of the hunters are still alive back from the 60s, 50s and 60s, and none of them I know were proud of what happened then. But it was a different time, so I just looked at it. Part of it was historical, and they actually gave us all the information about where the best place would be for frozen planet one. They’re good friends and very elderly gentlemen now, but they their knowledge was amazing, you know, and they lived out there of survival for themselves and to make money. So in a way, we copied what they’d done with hunting the bears, but we’re now hunting with a camera. So that was a nice feeling, staying in the same cabin, which is a shack, basically trying to survive in that trying to survive on the ice, you know, not to be caught out on drift ice, not being taken by a bear. It was exactly the same as being a fur Hunter 50, 100 years ago, but now we’re just hunting with a camera, which was an incredible experience. And what you get to experience with time is the individual and knowing the individual bear, so then you get to know its behaviour, the way it moves, the way we don’t have the smell. We can’t say we know the smell of the bear. It knows the smell of you. And that’s the nicest thing, is being able to spend the time with the individual bear, especially because they have a personality. It’s always fun to kind of guess sometimes there was another bear we called Misha, and she was, she’s passed away now, and she had a major amount of cubs. And cubs were the shittiest teenagers on planet Earth, and attack people all the time. But when the cubs were smaller, when there were children, not teenagers, then they were good fun. And used to always say, okay, that’s that quiet little cub. Must be female cub, and the other one’s boisterous. That must be a boy cub. And then you find out, you know, a few years later, that actually you got it wrong completely.

Hannah Stitfall  27:47  

When you’ve been on one of these long shoots. Have you ever had any really hairy moments, moments that you’ve been like, Oh, this is a little bit scary. 

Jason Roberts  27:57  

On longer film shoots, even shorter film shoots, especially the ones when you live in the field for a long time. Of course, there’s been hairy moments. I mean, statistically, I probably should not be here today, if you know, look at the statistics, but I think most of that is based on experience. You know,

I will often think back in the early days what we did, and, you know, maybe not based on the most experience either. So you know, of course, if you live with a polar bear in your environment, it’s often, I say, when we’re filming a blue chip wildlife series on polar bears. It’s when we’re filming them and close proximity and watching and understanding behaviour there’s not a great level of danger in that bear, it’s when you stop for the day and you’re living in that environment, and you go into the tent, or you go to the toilet, you take the toilet paper, and you walk down onto the sea ice to go for a number two behind an iceberg that’s probably got a higher danger level than actually when You’re filming the polar bear, and you let your guard down, and when I think of all the instances where it’s been close, it’s always been just living in the environment, not actually working in the environment. So go out to get some ice blocks to make fresh water, or go out to fill a snowmobile or a vehicle or generator with some fuel or something, and you’ve kind of finished. You’ve been working with the polar bear all day. You’ve been alert the whole time, constantly alert, watching behind you, watching behind you. And then you go back to camp, and you let your guard down. That’s when this gets dangerous. Riskiest number twos in the world. Yeah, exactly.

Unknown Speaker  29:37  

Number one. You just get wet when you run.

Unknown Speaker  29:41  

And that’s happened a few times.

Hannah Stitfall  29:45  

I can’t imagine that though, because when you are filming your eyes are on all the time, and I guess when you’re spending months and months out there, you’re like, oh, okay, subconsciously, you’re like, oh, I don’t have to look anymore. But actually that’s that’s when you really do, that’s when you really have to.

Jason Roberts  30:00  

Be alert. And I just think back of all the new instances and what we’ve we’ve always, we’ve never had any major instances in the company, which is, you know, lucky. I think at times it does worry me. Have a responsibility for for polar X and other people out working more so than for myself. I mean, it’s, it’s always a way you feel responsibility for other people. I think we all do it for the passion being out there. I think you get to experience which 99.999%

of the whole planet will never experience. And that is being being one with nature, feeling the weather. I feel like, if I’m in the office in town, I can’t tell you what the weather was yesterday or two days ago. I can tell you the weather for a two month shoot in Antarctica 10 years ago, every day, what it was like because you’re you’re immersed in the weather and the environment, and you your senses adjust to which environment you’re in. You could, I think, not having a lot of experience. I think if you went to Jakarta in Indonesia and shot in the city and shot a monkey in a city somewhere, and all the noises and all the your senses adjust to that total input of senses all the time, smell, noise, movement around you all the time. And the same is the opposite way. It takes a bit of time when you go out on the ice to kind of tune your senses to the quietness of the ice and what’s happening. And you know, feels the complete opposite in a major city environment, where all of a sudden, other than wind noise, there is no noise. You know, polar bears hardly make any noise. Wars hardly make any noise. In the wintertime, especially, it is like very little sound except for the wind. And you adjust your senses, although you screw them so sensitive that you feel everything. You feel the weather. You feel the weather changes. You hear a little breath. And you know that that’s a ring seal under thin ice just off the beach. And then you you know, you look at the the way that the moss is behind the rock. So you know the average wind direction for when you put up the tent for the next snowstorm, because you know you’re going to get a snowstorm. So you crawl around and take the ice off from rock and look at the moss and go, okay, the prevailing winds are this direction here. This is how we’ll put up the tent. So you adjust all your your senses to that environment. I think it’s very hard to explain to people, because most people never had that and will never have that experience of living as one with the nature. What are the best moments you’ve captured on film? Some of the best ones, best moments we’ve captured on film? I know there’s been a lot, and are we talking about drama series, Hollywood or or natural history, everything, I think in drama is actually the one that’s above you on the poster there, Far North. It’s just mind blowing image wise. So I think on a drama, on a feature film, that’s my favourite on a drama would have to be the North water, BBC, costume drama with Colin Farrell, Stephen Graham, Jack O’Connor, again, very dark, way less story. That was also a wonderful both and been wonderful experiences to do. And I think on wildlife, it would have to be as a total series. It would have to be frozen planet one without a doubt. I think we we did blue planet, or we did, we did the polar bear special and the whale special, and this was all in the early 90s, and BBC wanted this group of, can’t remember if it was six or seven, and we did was all called the specials. And then come along, blue planet, and then planet Earth, and kind of down back the front. And we were like, stuck. What we could do next? So it would be frozen planet. And I think frozen planet as a series was one that lifted the bar. We went from being wildlife freaks talking about behavioural sequences for film and we weren’t filmmakers. We were more geeks over twitches for birds or geeks and wildlife generally, who played with a camera when we started frozen planet, I was very much like everything should be a work of art. Have a sequence in it, but look like a work of art. And I think frozen planet was the first Mega series that actually went into that kind of region of being, being artwork, in addition to being a behavioural, cinematography was next level, especially for the time, for the time it lifted. And you also it’s exactly that point. You have to think of the time, because I think of all these different things we’ve done and been so privileged to be able to lift the bar all the time. And you have to think what’s lifted the bar for the technology at the time the most. And that’s definitely frozen planet. I think as a single one off sequence might be back, but no one will remember this one, and I only saw it the other day, called um shadows on the ice polar bears, and which was done for survival Anglia for the.

Discovery back in the mid 90s. Someone found it on the archive. A few months ago, sent me a copy, and that was probably most beautiful film we’ve ever done. Little bit like what we at the time. It was a first full, one hour documentary on polar bears. No one had ever done a full they’d done Arctic programmes with a polar bear sequence in it. No one’s ever had done a full polar bear programme, and that was the first one we did in Well, now I sell sound old. We shot in 9596

Sue, and that was the first time anyone actually filmed a one hour and polar bears. And was a lot of people were sceptical to me saying it was possible. And I was like, Oh, we just got we went out for 422

days field over two years, mostly Svalbard, little bit in Russian Arctic, little bit in the Canadian Arctic. Mostly Svalbard did a Hudson Bay sequence. We did a France Joseph land sequence in Russia, and the rest were all soul bud for 422, days. And that’s a long time in the field. Calculate 422, days. That’s what five ex girlfriends or something like that,

I’m going to walk about

back in three months, maybe five months, if the ice lets you get out

back in those days. We also filmed a lot different. We had less equipment, less technology. We’re very traditional, long lens camera, hide, sit there for days at end.

It wasn’t making artwork like we moved on to later, which the negative side, like in Frozen planet, moving on to making every sequence look like art meant a lot more technical equipment, lot more equipment in all ways, and a lot more people. So I often dream back to the old days of hide and the long lens and just two people out there from Mum said end was very back to basics, very much. And of course, the shortwave radio with the BBC World Service to keep you entertained all the time.

Hannah Stitfall  37:07  

After visiting Jason’s incredible studio, we took a walk up to the nearby mountains to take a final look at the breathtaking views of the ocean and beyond,

right? So Jason, you’ve brought me up to the side of a mountain. Can you for our listeners? Where are we?

Jason Roberts  37:26  

 So we’re on Spitsbergen island on the Svalbard archipelago, which is situated north of Norway, next to top of Greenland. It’s 79 degrees north. So as I say, if you go any further north, you’ll fall off the end of the planet. It’s flat up here, and we’re actually walking along the side of a mountain just outside of longibion, the capital of Svalbard, pretty much the only township on Svalbard. It’s quite, quite a common thing for people who do, who live in longibion, to go hiking in the local mountains. So it’s become if you move to live in the world’s northernmost community, it’s generally not because of your love of the arts and museums. It’s because of your love of wilderness and people. Norwegians are great at basically using the wilderness. It’s a very Norwegian cultural thing to hike in the mountains and hike. I was born in Australia, so my parents don’t quite get it. While you want to hike every mountain you see,

Hannah Stitfall  38:26  

how did you end up in Svalbard, all the way from Australia? And how long have you been here for? 

Jason Roberts  38:33  

I’ve been on Svalbard now for 34 years. By chance, more than anything, I left Australia. I guess, like a lot of people do when they’re young with a sense of exploration adventure, I just wanted to go back to the old days of exploring Indiana Jones way

and ended up in Norway, ended up in Northern Norway, ended up in Sami land, Lapland, where we have the traditional reindeer herding areas in Norway, and never planned to stay. And then a friend of a friend told me about Svalbard, and I kind of connected through somebody who asked me to come up to help him actually just do some carpentry on a cabin that was meant to be a short journey, but I landed on Svalbard with a name of an island 90 kilometres to the south, and walked out of town and crossed the first glacier of my life. I never seen glaciers. I never crossed the glacier. And I probably was the scared as I’ve ever been crossing the glacier. No one didn’t care about polar bears. We’re used to dangerous creatures in Australia, but, um, it was more the the wilderness that blew me away, and the landscape and the mountains and the glaciers and and when I come back from from that small job, then I kind of the whole way walking back was like, I’d like to experience this place for one winter, because we do have the polar night, which is.

Roughly four and a half months of total darkness. By the time I come back across the mountains to longing been the township I’d had the idea of staying the winter. And then when I said the winter, I thought, well, I better stay experiencing Midnight Sun and five months of total sunshine.

Yeah, so and now I just never left.

Hannah Stitfall  40:23  

And what is it like actually living here full time? 

Jason Roberts  40:27  

There’s there’s a lot of things about Svalbard, I’d say, more of a contradiction than than what you would expect. It’s like when you said to me earlier today, you expected a few houses, a little village, and you get to a little Township, basically with every service you could imagine. Living here is a lot like that. Sometimes I joke and say, Well, when I retire, I might move to Manhattan for a quiet life, because it is so busy here. There’s stuff happening all the time, and also, because of the work we do, we are incredibly busy around the whole Arctic and Antarctic, so life is actually a lot more stressful than any other place I’ve ever lived. So do you think you ever will end up in Manhattan, or is this? Is this it? No, you’re not allowed die unsoelbad. So I’m not sure where I’m gonna die. I’m not don’t know the question to where you end up. I mean, I’ve been incredibly privileged to experience so much on sole bud. And we don’t only work just on soil bud, we work throughout the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. An awful lot in Greenland. Greenland being governed by Denmark makes it a bit easier for us in language as well, because Norwegian Danish is much the same language. So anyway, when it gets dark in the Arctic, then we move to Antarctica. So we have a, you know, I have 28 seasons of filming in Antarctica. In a way, we chase the light as well. Soon as it’s dark in the north, we head far south. So how important are the oceans for Svalbard? That is the wonderful question, the importance of oceans, not only for Svalbard, but for the high Arctic, because most of the land mass in the high Arctic is glacial moraine or glacial covered. So being either ice or just rock from a glacial moraine, to be honest, is like a gravel pit being pushed by a glacier. So the importance of the ocean. Everything living on land is connected to the ocean. The whole cycle is connected to the ocean. Polar bears are connected to the ocean directly, because their main prey species is seals, but even the salt reindeer or living on land is highly connected to the oceans through the bird colonies. So where we get the biggest herds of reindeer, of course, is straight underneath the bird colonies, because they’re sea birds, of course, which are fertilising the ground by the period when they fly in and out all the time, which we know all about when we’re filming seabird colonies, you get covered in the pool all the time, but that’s making it so green. So, you know, Soul bud, without the Atlantic current and all the richness of the oceans, would have nearly no wildlife. So in the you know, you’ve been here for three decades now, in that time, we’re looking out over to the glaciers. How have you seen them change, the

change on climate, on Svalbard? Because Svalbard is right on the marginal zone between the pack ice coming from the north pole down and the Gulf Stream, Atlantic current with warm water hitting the west coast here. So you see drastic change on swell, but much more we are a bigger temperature change than anywhere else in the world. Summer temperatures have gone up. We average six degrees in last decade. So it’s a lot. So so the negative side of climate change on swell bud is, of course, where we’re standing, we could easily have mudslide rock slide, because beforehand, it’s all been frozen solid the soil. So the biggest change you see is actually the glacial retreats, and you see often, like we’ve just done with Greenpeace, photographic work of the fronts of the glacier, how far further they are back compared they were, say, 1920s

that’s a wonderful way to show people visually how far it’s gone back. But what’s hard to show visually is the body mass of the glacier up on the inland ice, up where you see way up over past pyramid, 1000 metres at height. You know, you’re a kilometre up in the air on the glacier ice cut all of that is shrinking massively, and that’s like the body of the glacier disappearing. And that’s much harder to show in an image, which I wish we could show in an image, because that’s, that’s what shocks me the most, actually, the front of the glacier going back a kilometre. Okay, it’s a kilometre vice at the glacier, and people see that and understand the climate.

Change. What they can’t understand is that body mass disappearing, the billions of tonnes of ice up there just melting away.

And then to look at something on the positive side is around us here, we have a much greener landscape than normal. We have also because of protection of wildlife, we have more geese. We have the geese from Solway first is it called in Scotland, that migrate to Solvay to breed. You know, they were close to extinct in the 1970s now, they’re massive numbers. I walk out to the car park at the office in summer, and there must have been 500 goslings running around underneath the cars. Absolutely lovely. We have more reindeer than ever, so because we’ve protected the environment on Svalbard and cared for it basically by not hunting everything. Nearly all species are bounced back to pre hunting numbers, which, yes, it’s even in the 30 years since I come here, the amount of reindeer around town, the amount of of geese and birds and everything, has exploded. The amount of belugas in the fjord and larger whales and the fjord mouth have all exploded back to, we’re still not back to original numbers. A lot of species, especially the species that live a longer recycle, recycling or rebreeding cycle walrus are bounding back in numbers, yet the big whales will take much longer, of course, to come back. But you know, it’s 15 years ago since I saw the first bowhead whale in the bay here, and no one has seen a bowhead here for 400 years. So just goes to show when you when you let nature do its thing and stop hunting it, then it will bounce back. Yeah, which is a nice positive thing to give the message to people that climate change is a massive issue, and it’s a global population issue, and it’s a global issue because they are massive population the climate change is in effect in somewhere like Svalbard, but it’s not been created on Svalbard with 2500

people. You know, in the middle of nowhere, we really don’t have much effect on anything, and we’re just a tiny little dot being longing down to the township. Here we are minuscule.

Hannah Stitfall  47:19  

It has been a real privilege to speak to so many inspiring people working tirelessly to protect the oceans. If you want to find out more about what you can do to help, we will leave some links in the episode description, and that is the end of my trip to Svalbard, and the end of this season of oceans life underwater.

This episode was brought to you by Greenpeace and Crowd Network. It is hosted by me, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster Hannah Stitfall. It is produced by Vicki Wright, Catalina Noguera, Robert Wallace, George Sampson, Kate Stevens, Steve Jones and Christina Irivnak. Sound design is by Crawford Blair. The music we use is from our partners, BMG, Production Music. The team at Greenpeace is James Hansen, Alex Yallop, Jeane Meyer, Marta of charik. Flora Hvesi, Becky Malone and Alice Lloyd Hunter, archive, courtesy of Greenpeace. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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