Sara Wheeler @ EIBF

 

What’s the difference between the Antarctic and the Arctic, aside from their opposing polar locations? For Sara Wheeler, it’s life. The former an inhospitable terrain, incapable of sustaining life; the latter home to myriad of polar peoples, expressive cultures rich in art and history, birdlife and mammals. The hostile landscapes of Antarctica appealed to Wheeler’s youthful idealism and are the subject of her book, Terra Incognita. The Arctic, Wheeler found, comparatively abounds with life, a ‘much more expressive place, redolent of the zeitgeist’, a place appealing to the ‘elegiac fragmentation’ of middle age.
The title of Wheeler’s new book, The Magnetic North, foreshadows the content: It was the polar people and their lives, a humanist rather than idealistic attraction that drew Wheeler ever more into their land and their culture. Wheeler spoke at The Book Festival around two themes in the book: climate change and cultural change, leaving the audience with a poignant question: The polar cultures are inescapably caught up in the net of globalisation, but what happens when we try to make hunter gatherers like us? Do we create a noble savage or do we disenfranchise him? We face an environmental collapse, but they, in the face of already extreme and seemingly inhospitable conditions, face a cultural collapse. [Renée Rowland]