“What Will Be Different When You Get Home?” ~ Roshi Bernie Glassman
I went to Svalbard this summer because Morri wanted to go there – she was in Norway for five weeks on a writing grant, finishing a rewrite of the novel that she began during her year in the Boston University MFA program in creative writing, and we went to visit. I always wanted to see the midnight sun.
Svalbard was an experience, a three-hour flight north from Oslo. A sign at the entrance to the hotel bar announces, “Northernmost bar in the world.” Outside Longyearbyen – it was until quite recently a company town, named for the American industrialist John Munro Longyear whose company developed Svalbard’s coal reserves – our tour guide’s rifle was slung across his shoulder. A road sign warned of polar bear crossings. The guide went through the litany of deaths by polar bear in the last twenty years. Not very many; not good for tourism which is now the principal source of island revenue followed by scientific research. The mines are all shut down. Norway is 97% reliant on renewable energy. Svalbard is protective of its wildlife. A polar bear shooting is treated by the local police as a murder. The only justification is self-defense. There’s a strict quota on reindeer hunting and a lottery for licenses, one only per license, only open to residents, no commercial hunting.
In Svalbard, global warming has a reality I didn’t expect. Polar bears, reindeer, walruses, arctic foxes are all in danger. The experience of being there and hearing from people who are living global warming strangely reminded me of the Peacemaker Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz. There, Roshi Bernie Glassman had asked us – we were all moved in different ways by our experience – what would be different when we got home? The same question was coming up for me as I was leaving Svalbard. Can I just go back doing my recycling, otherwise going about my business? What else can I do? It’s not an easy question now. It wasn’t an easy question at Auschwitz. Bernie didn’t have an answer. That’s why he was asking.
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