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tional tool. It reaches out to people in a way that intellectual arguments simply cannot. So you specialized on excursions into the polar world? Yes, I‘ve done big trips in all three areas. In 2005 I persuaded the actors Salma Hayek and Jake Gyllenhaal to travel with me to the Canadian Arctic on behalf of Green Cross. Our aim was to make people aware how melting ice is threatening the lives of the Inuit. We got a lot of coverage, it was a great success. The Antarctic expedition in 2006 gave rise to my illustrated book Antarctica, for which I persuaded Mikhail Gorbachev and Leonardo Di Caprio to write the preface. I returned to the Antarctic in 2007 with my cousin Orlando Bloom, and we succeeded in getting big media interest on the melting ice again. I did a transcontinental crossing of 2300 kilometres from the south to the north of Greenland, which was designed as a practice expedition for Antarctica which followed and covered over 4100 kilometres on skis and kites, both with my partner Eric. So you must be more than well trained? I train all the time. Still sometimes a mission fails like the one in 2017 to the North Pole. Reinhold Messner, who I admire very much, said once: The Everest is difficult. But the North Pole is 10 times more difficult. I really believe that it is the most difficult expedition in the world. I succeeded in 2009. I failed in 2017. And I‘m going to try again in 2020 as I believe that I will be probably be the last person to walk from land to the North Pole. Later on the ice will be gone. What difficulties are you facing in such an expedition? The arctic is unique, because it‘s essentially just an ocean with a layer of ice in varying degrees of thickness. This layer is always in motion. Mostly you have a drift moving the ice from Russia towards Greenland. When you leave from Canada you go exactly in the opposite direction. You‘re walking on ice which is moving backwards. E.g. it happened that I would woke up in the morning and be behind the spot I travelled the day before. It‘s like walking on a treadmill. When you sleep you move backwards and it‘s always a race against natural forces. And moving ice never moves uniformly. The currents, the wind and the tides are moving it up and down. It starts to break, creating channels of water, crumbles into walls of icy obstacles, up to three meters high. Pulling a 200 kilogram sledge behind you becomes more than a challenge!
You travel alone? Here it‘s too dangerous. My estimation of success would probably be 10% with a 90% chance of failure. As I am a very happy father of two little girls since a few years – which actually became my most exciting expedition – there is no question to do it that way! E.g. you sometimes have to swim through water channels produced by broken ice. You have to put on a dry suit, get into the icy water, swim and climb up high walls on the other side. Some times you walk on very thin ice, it flexes under your weight. Once I fell through the ice, it was -35 degrees Celsius and I was very lucky to have a partner to pull me out, helping me to get my dry clothes on. The other problem is the polar bears. They depend on seals normally cultivating a hole in the ice in order to come up and breathe because they‘re mammals. But more and more the sea ice is too much in motion. So the bears don‘t find any food and become really dangerous. You’ve written books and produced films, with a mission... I’ve seen too much and I feel a personal responsibility not only towards my family but to my fellow human beings. It would have been a failure not to use my tools to be able to make a little bit of a difference. I have not (yet) fallen into the political arena but my pictures are an extreme statement. I speak around the world. I do expeditions and a lot of interviews and media work. At the moment I have a public exhibition in Paris on the gates of the Luxembourg Garden with 80 large panels. In four months an estimated four million people will have seen it. Parallel I‘ve got a museum in Bangkok and galleries in Paris and Berlin (CameraWork) showing some work. I spoke at the United Nations, and for many of the Fortune 500 companies like BMW, HP or Apple. ...resulting in what conclusion? We know that the climate is disturbed, whether you choose to agree with the notion of humans being responsible or not. We know that this is something bigger than us and no amount of praying in church is going to make the difference. People feel the threat deep in their soul. And so we live in a climate of fear on the one hand, having technological solutions on the other hand. It‘s a great time because it‘s never been so exciting to find solutions to such a huge problem. The real question is whether we have the political will and whether the collective desire is sufficiently strong to generate demand so that that industry really transforms itself I c e b e rg XI X, G re e n l and 2010
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