Native Alaska / Volume Three | Arctic Visions

I’m in one of the most north village of Alaska, where there is the end of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the arctic tundra enters in the Beaufort Sea, the last frontier before the arctic ocean. Here I meet the pulsing heart of an unchanged earth for centuries.
Adaptation: this is the word that has conditioned for thousands of years the inhabitants’ life of the arctic polar circle. Inupiaq, the Inuit of north Alaska, native population spokesperson of human, ancient and kind dimension, which today finds itself in front of new and difficult challenges: from climate changes to the globalization, to the exploitation of a magic land, today, as never in history, is profoundly threatened. By their side, the big predator of the arctic, the polar bear, majestic mammalian that has evolved to thrive in the most ferocious climate on the earth, now they are fighting to survive.

Bears and Inuit, two parallel stories inextricably connected. Under the same sky, over the same surface, here men and animals have learned to live together, respecting great mother nature. Inuit, with their inter-weaving of strength and intelligence, they have learned to adapt themselves observing e imitating polar bears, retracing his footsteps, studying his equilibrium on iced and slippery surfaces, to replicate for every step his movement.

They have shared with all animals the same portion of earth, in the sign of a convivial promise of common life.

All animal species living in the pole have in the heart the memory that everything is changing. The ice is becoming everyday more unstable, the erosion of the coast is becoming more visible and threatening, migration routes are changing, day by day.

I can’t imagine a world without the icy white ice.
I can’t imagine a world without its ancient guardians of the cold.
I don’t want to imagine a world, without doing what I can to safeguard all of this.

Chiudi