Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30

FOREWORD

Hi, Paul McCartney here.

1968. That was quite a year. The people were on the streets, revolution was in the air, we released the White Album, and perhaps the most influential photograph of all time was taken by an astronaut called William Anders. It was Christmas Eve. Anders, his navigator Jim Lovell and their mission commander Frank Borman had just become the only living beings since the dawn of time to orbit the moon. Then, through the tiny window of their Apollo 8 spacecraft, their eyes fell upon something nobody had seen before, something so familiar and yet so alien, something breathtaking in its beauty and fragility. ‘Oh my God,’ Anders cried. ‘Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!’

‘You got a colour film?’ he asked the others. ‘Hand me that roll of colour quick, would you…’ For a minute or so, three human beings in a tin can nearly 400,000 kilometres from home scrambled furiously to fix a roll of film into their camera. Then Anders lifted it to the window and clicked the shutter and captured our delicate home planet rising slowly over the horizon of the moon. Earthrise. That single image made such an impact on the human psyche that it’s credited with sparking the birth of the global environment movement – with changing the very way we think about ourselves. That was nearly half a century ago, the blink of an eye in the grand sweep of time, but something quite remarkable has happened since then. For as long as humans have inhabited the Earth, the Arctic Ocean has been capped by a sheet of sea ice the size of a continent. But in the decades since that photo was taken, satellites have been measuring a steady melting of that white blanket. Much of it has now gone, and it seems possible that for future generations the North Pole will be open water. Think about it. Since Earthrise was taken we’ve been so busy warming our world that it now looks different from space. By digging up fossil fuels and burning our ancient forests we’ve put so much carbon into the atmosphere that today’s astronauts are looking at a different planet. And here’s something that just baffles me. As the ice retreats, the oil giants are moving in. Instead of seeing the melting as a grave warning to humanity, they are eyeing the previously inaccessible oil beneath the seabed at the top of the world. They’re exploiting the disappearance of the ice to drill for the very same fuel that caused the melting in the first place. That’s why, in summer 2013, thirty men and women from eighteen countries sailed for a Russian Arctic oil platform, determined to focus global attention on the new Arctic oil rush. They saw how fossil fuels have come to dominate our lives on Earth, how the energy giants bestride our planet unchecked. They knew that at some time and in some place somebody had to say, ‘No more.’ For those activists that time was now and that place was the Arctic. Their ship was seized, they were thrown in jail and faced fifteen years in prison. Millions of people from across the world raised their voices in support of the stand they took, including many from the great nation of Russia. The tale you are about to read is extraordinary. It is one of fear, hope, despair and humanity. But we still don’t know how it ends. That is up to all of us. Including you. Please encourage your friends to help bring a hopeful conclusion to this moving story.