People you meet ultimately become a part of you, whether you like it or not; you remember them.

So I'm glad I met all of you.

I noticed this Sunday night that every single person here has such a bright pair of eyes. (And don't you worry--I'm not alluding to some "brighter" future that we'll all have together or anything.) What I honestly mean is that your eyes speak volumes about your personalities. They speak of who you are individually. Thinking back on the trip now, your faces flood my mind, they run past my eyes like a film reel. Each slide is the vibrant, fiery grip of a sliced hazel-green, a glazed cool azure, or an illuminating deep brown. These eyes are how I will distinguish you and encode you in my long-term memory bank. Still, these very eyes in each of your beautiful heads are what literally made this experience. They took in the tundra and filtered your most memorable times. They caught the mother and two COYs roaming beneath Buggy One that night, and even the independent COY when it looked up at you on two hind legs. They even saw Zoe's lovely foto presentation. And really, the more we see, the more we can envision. I'll remember you always for that.
So this is it. Thank you forever and I really love you guys.


Three last things:
1) Friends help friends
2) The most important thing is food
3) Don't start with the butt

"Wisdom, like an inheritance, is a good thing
and benefits those who see the sun.
Wisdom is a shelter
as money is a shelter,
but the advantage of knowledge is this:
Wisdom preserves the life of its possessor."
Ecclesiastes 7:11-13

And we'll all be sharing our wisdom from the tundra.
See you guys in 2017 when Lindsay and Jules officially get married.
















ps- I don't think I'll ever look at this 12-inch plastic oval the same ever again.

This is Breanna and Ruth, both of the Winnipeggers, co-blogging today!

When we come back as Arctic Ambassadors we’re not going to force everyone to SAVE THE POLAR BEARS IN THE ARCTIC. We’re not going to tell everyone what they’re doing wrong or how much harm humans are doing forcing us all down some kind of downward spiral. What we can share is the awe of the tundra. This evening after supper, Stacey from Queensland, Australia who is one of the adult facilitators, gave a presentation explaining the basic science behind greenhouse gases, Aurora Borealis, and Global Dimming. We were abruptly interrupted by three unexpected guests: the mama bear and her two COYs that we’ve seen every single day since we’ve been here actually came right up to the Buggy Lodge!

On the Tundra Buggy Lodge, we try to follow the set schedule as closely as possible; when a bear comes, everything stops.

We were standing on the deck of Buggy 1 within 6 feet of two COYs. One of the cubs came over and literally stood up right beneath us, and had its chin on the wall of the Buggy staring up at us in the eyes. It was incredible!

At 11:16pm, we need to go to sleep. Tomorrow we have to get up at 6:30am cook breakfast, ride a helicopter, visit a bear den, host two more videoconferences, practice and present our chapters from Impacts of a Warming Climate, and plan the most fabulous last supper PBI 2008 has ever seen! (And plan Sarah’s surprise 17th birthday celebration…)

ps- Here's a video I made earlier today with the other Ambassadors for Windsor Park Collegiate! Our scheduled vid conference didn't go through as planned... so we Ambassadors decided to make this sweet educational clip! Enjoy!

Threads, connections, and transitions.

“It’s my way of living
It’s my survival…
I live off the land
So what I take off the land,
It will give back to me…
It’s not a fancy thought,
It’s my way of life.”
—Betty

Four beautiful people came to the Lodge today to speak their lives, purpose, and through this became part of my own life. The first was an excellent trio native to the hunting and trapping culture. Patrick, a citizen of Churchill, and Jim and Betty, a couple with surpassing wisdom of the earth shared their stories of how they were no less than destined to become hunters and trappers in the north.

They brought an important issue to the table especially since one the main reasons for us being here is to support the conservation of the Arctic and animals. While being submerged in North American oblivion, it’s easy to say that these hunters in the Arctic slaughtering innocent wild creatures are crude in their way of life, but Betty really put it in perspective. She is a woman so sure of her place on earth that when asked if she felt guilty towards the making (and even overuse) of opulent fur coats, she explained this: what she is as a hunter and trapper of Arctic animals such as wolverines, foxes and beavers, is definitively separate from how they are processed in places like North America. She doesn’t worry how people perceive fur coats or criticize them as pure luxury; it simply is not her place. Her respect for Mother Nature is undeniable.

More shockingly, they brought a full-sized wolf pelt!



The next man who spoke was called Kevin Burke. His sincerity, passion, and directness about his love for the Churchill community and for the bears shook us all. As one of the first drivers of the Tundra Buggy, he is colored with vivid experiences. One including a casual morning walking to school being caught by something in the corner if his eye—a 1200 lb polar bear! It would take over two hours and two decades to do his story justice. In three words: Follow your dreams.

“POLAR BEAR!” exclaims Eva, our wonderful Dane. Like a sleeping puppy who hears the food bag open, the 25 of us in the Tundra Buggy perk up our ears and dart our attention to the right side of the vehicle. Cameras gripped in hand and eyes starved for our first sighting, we are left desperately unsatisfied with the realization that it’s just a “big white rock.”

Nevertheless with patience and utmost alertness, Eva called out, “POLAR BEAR!” again, and this time it was real. In the distance approximately a mile out, three white round specks of the horizon shuffled around. It was our first polar bear! No, it was our first THREE polar bears! And, it was sunny! (versus the cloudy norm of autumn in Churchill) The mama bear and her two cubs (known as COYs, Cubs of the Year) lollygagging close behind created a most beautiful sight, even from a mile away.

In our monster of a buggy, we crept along the Hudson’s coast as a tiptoeing elephant towards the three bears. We continued at this rate for two more hours, trying hardest not to startle them, until we were within about 40 feet of them! We all fell in love.



Seeing the polar bears today truly solidified our reason for being here. Earlier in the day, the Ambassadors discussed as a group what we wanted to accomplish for being here besides the obvious of actually seeing a bear. (Checkmark!) Our roles as learners and leaders became real the moment the bears came into view.

Looking through the 12-inch oval plastic window, window to my Winnipeg, the bottom half is conveniently taken up by a giant blue propeller. But if you peek over the edge, you’ll see little Winnipeg bumbling about to start their Friday morning. At 6:30 am, it is still dark on the west side; the bumbling cars’ headlights define Route 90.

As I spy on the early Winnipeg traffic from 5000 (??) ft, I realize I’m not getting ready for school nor am I hopping on a number 16 to bus downtown to get there: I’m on a 34-seater Calm Air early morning flight, destination: the TUNDRA! With all of our sweet matching Canada Goose jackets, courtesy of Canada Goose and PBI, digital cameras, and pure excitement for what’s to come, the 17 of us are waiting for our lives to be influenced forever in T-minus 2 hours.

***

“Thank you for flying Calm Air, welcome to Churchill, Manitoba! It is 1° C.”

We became easily attached to our blue parkas.

We were greeted by the great infrastructure of the Churchill Airport, no more than the size of a high school gym. Very soon after, we migrated onto a coach bus and drove about eight minutes towards the city. We learned our first fun fact here! We passed a hill of garbage, a towering pile known as the Bear Recycle Dump—an accumulation of the whole of Churchill waste over the past two and a half years!

This was an attempted solution for the attraction of dangerous bears to the city, who gravitated to the MOST IMPORTANT THING in the world (ingrained in our heads by Robert’s mantra): FOOD. It unfortunately grew to just be an oversized organized garbage basket, idle, and most likely rich in an array of captivating scents. It’s issues such as this one that plead our attention. In our honest effort to fix a problem, preventing bears from human contact for example by concentrating the town’s waste, we sometimes run ourselves into stumbling blocks. It is the next step in realizing and continuing to mend the problem that we need to keep alive.

Besides the fact that the town mall seems to be called Trapper John’s Mini Mall and is wood paneled, the beauty of Churchill most definitely lies in the reaching blue-grey waves of the Hudson’s Bay, the burnt ginger that is the pine tree horizon, the bountiful rock vegetation of a polished mineral and the 60-something local Grandma fetching groceries at The Northern Store on a four-wheeler ATV. This was only the town!

Four hours later, after visiting the Polar Bear Jail and roaming into an abandoned medical experiment center from the late ‘60s that housed the controversial death of three polar bears, we finally reached the Tundra Buggy Launch where we boarded a magical arctic bus that would transport us to the Lodge. It was a 2-hour rove over tundra boulders where we spotted our first signs of arctic wildlife, a fleet of ptarmigan birds. They were not exactly the 1200 pound polar bears, but we have five more days here and a lot more to see! Photos to come very soon!