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Gretel Ehrlich
The American author Gretel Ehrlich has published many works of non-fiction, fiction and poetry including Solace of Open Spaces, This Cold Heaven and A Match to the Heart. She has visited Greenland ten times, resulting in a book, This Cold Heaven, a National Geographic story on the effect of climate change on traditional hunting culture in January, 2006, a National Public Radio report, and a forthcoming film. She is also the author of The Future of Ice, a non-fiction work on climate change including the first Cape Farewell voyage to the Arctic.
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Farthest North: The End of Ice
A circumpolar journey in the International Polar Year 2007-2008
Gretel Ehrlich has received a National Geographic Expeditions Grant for the International Polar Year 2007 during which she will make a circumpolar journey to talk with indigenous Arctic people at the top of the world about how their lives are being affected by the climate crisis.
Ehrlich will travel from Arctic Alaska, across Nunavut, to NW Greenland, northwestern Russia, and Chukotka in NE Siberia, traveling by skin boat, fixed wing plane, helicopter, reindeer, and dogsled, gathering traditional and ecological knowledge from elders, hunters, and village people as they face the crisis of extinction – of a culture and an entire ecosystem.
Farthest North: THE END OF ICE will be a book, a magazine piece, a website, and a documentary film, with updates on “Morning Edition” by SAT phone from the field. On her website: THE END OF ICE, it will be possible to follow her circumboreal travels, to read her journal updates, see images from the top of the world, and listen to Arctic people as they tell the world about their plight.
Follow Gretel and the project at:
www.point-hope.com »
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The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold
Gretel Ehrlich, 2004, Pantheon
'This book is written out of Gretel Ehrlich's love for winter-for remote and cold places, and the ways in which winter frees our imagination and invigorates our
feet, mind, and soul-and out of the fear that our 'democracy of gratification' has irreparably altered the climate. In The Future of Ice, Ehrlich travels to extreme points-from Tierra del Fuego in the south to Spitsbergen, east of Greenland, at the very top of the world-in her quest to understand the complex, primal nature of cold,'
(Random House)
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May 27, 2003
Left Tromsø, Norway this evening at a time when, in London it would be getting dark, but here it is light all night. When the mainsail is hoisted, the boat tilts to starboard, and the halyards slap and vibrate. Five sails go up. A hard westerly wind fills them. I'm on the Noorderlicht, a 150 ft. gaff-rigged schooner built in 1910, traveling north on the Barents Sea to an Arctic archipelago between Latitude 76 and 80 degrees north, called Spitsbergen.
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June 1, 2003
For the first night we have no watch and I miss it, feel as if I'd betrayed the boat and the sea. We sleep on glass. It too, induces a feeling of falling, because there are no rolling waves to keep us upright. I can no longer say "me" or "I"----It is "Us" ---all 20 of us ---bound together by the rough passage and
the sudden beauty of Arctic islands, whales, birds, horizons, glaciers, a polar bear - the fragility of what could be called a global ecosystem now undergoing major disruption because of human-caused pollution.
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June 3, 2003
Sitting on deck ,the coast unravels. "It's like three-dimensional walking standing still, " Gary Hume, the painter says. Max Eastley, the sound artist says: "Everything moves away at first, then after a few hours it comes back. Up and down and toward you and you're just a stone, a very small one, a piece of melting ice."
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Extracts from Radio Diary, 2003
Gretel Ehrlich
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 Heather Ackroyd
& Dan Harvey
Kathy Barber
David Buckland
Peter Clegg
Siobhan Davies
Gautier Deblonde
Max Eastley
Nick Edwards
Gretel Ehrlich
Antony Gormley
Alex Hartley
David Hinton
Gary Hume
William Hunt
Ian McEwan
Michèle Noach
Suba Subramaniam
Clare Twomey
Rachel Whiteread
More
 www.point-hope.com
Follow Gretel as she make her circumpolar journey in the International Polar Year 2007 
Buy on Amazon
Buy or find more information on The Future of Ice on Amazon
randomhouse.com
See more information on The Future of Ice at Random House
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