Airships Time Has Come

While nuclear power generation of steam processing for the Tar Sands is in the news off and on again, one of the other wonderful wacky ideas the Lougheed government in Alberta considered in the late 1970's and early 1980's was the use of Airships for heavy lift operations in the Tar sands.

The plans included airships with extra lift for carrying HD equipment, the extra lift provided by attached helicopters.

It turns out to be not so wacky and idea. Airships are an excellent energy efficient and sustainable form of transportation. The dangers posed in the past have been overcome.

But the Hindenberg incident doomed them to the pages of science fiction, from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to Michael Moorcock, for the last sixty years.

The Hindenburg Revisited

Everyone knows that the Hindenburg burned and crashed because it was full of hydrogen. According to Addison Bain, everyone is wrong.

But no longer a report on sustainable transportation in the arctic published last year suggests that Airships need to be seriously considered for Northern development. Furhermore airship development for the north is being taken seriously as a form of sustainable energy efficient transportation see the links below to conferences and studies.

A Zepplin first transversed the Arctic in 1931 in a successful mission. Italy and and Russia also experimented with ariships in the Arctic prior to WWII.

The 1931 Polar Flight of the Airship Graf Zeppelin

An Historical Perspective

With todays technology and designs lighter than air aircraft need to be considered for doing the heavy lifting that other petroleum based forms of transportation can't because of costs.

The International Pipeline and Offshore Contractors Association (IPLOCA) is giving serious consideration to this idea that was once bounced around the Lougheed cabinet. Ah those were the days when the Alberta Advantage was our imagination and enthusiasm for the future.



Examines the political, commercial and personal stories that lie behind airship flights within the Arctic Circle. This book goes far beyond a description of the flights themselves, however fascinating and adventuresome they may have been in their own right. From the first lighter-than-air ascent in the Arctic in 1799 to the flight of the 'Graf Zeppelin' in 1931, it examines some of the early plans and endeavours. 10 maps. Diagrams. 177 b/w illustrations/photos. 312 pages. Hardback

Big balloons prescribed as cheap cure for what ails Nunavut

It’s all up in the air

Prof pitches scheme to test airships in Arctic

Airship industry seeks wider acceptance

21st Century Airships - The future of flight

Airships to the Arctic

University of Manitoba 2003 Airships to the Arctic Symposium II

Airships to the Arctic III

The Mobilus Initiative: Creating A New Component of the US Aerospace Industry Centered Upon Transport Airships

Cargo Airships: Applications in Manitoba and the Arctic

A CASE FOR AIRSHIPS IN THE CANADIAN ARCTIC
Exploration, movement of heavy
bulky equipment, basic research, environmental
and resource management, and sovereignty
issues require transportation that
is cost effective (reduces the high cost of
caching fuel), can move slowly over the
landscape (oceanographic measurements,
geological and geophysical surveys, global
change surveys and wildlife census), has
minimal environmental impact, is highly
visible, and uses a vehicle that can move
easily over rough ice, water and land.
Given the scenarios outlined above it
is clear that other transportation options
need to be considered. One of these is the use
of airships. There are many skeptics concerning
use of airships but most people
agree that airships are light on infrastructure
(the airships are the infrastructure),
require little maintenance, and use comparatively
little fuel. Some of the uneasiness
with airships comes from the perception
that they are unsafe, primarily based on the
image of the burning Hindenburg and the
use of hydrogen.
This article presents a historical perspective
on arctic exploration using airships,
some past and current technologies relating
to airships, and a brief review of comparative
cost of operations. We also discuss the
potential benefits of airships to environmental
research and natural resource management
in the Arctic, and evaluate northern
weather patterns as they relate to airship
operations, as this is a consistent concern of
those who question their use under the
“harsh” arctic conditions.



The Mackenzie Valley Highway: Should it be Completed? If so, How Should It Be Funded

The first part of this paper will examine whether the Mackenzie Valley Highway project
is economically justified. Estimates of construction and annual maintenance costs are available.
In assessing the benefits from quicker and cheaper transport, account will be taken of an
alternative highway route, the Dempster Highway. Consideration will also be given to anemerging technology, airships, which in the near-to-medium future may become a viable alternative for the transport of consumer goods and commercial freight to Northern communities and development sites.

Full Proposals for IPY 2007-2008 Activities
Click for printer friendly version Proposed IPY Activity Details

1.0 PROPOSER INFORMATION

(Activity ID No: 324)

1.1 Title of Activity
The use of airships to study aquatic (marine and freshwater) and terrestrial ecosystems, visually and through the collection of samples across large sections of the Arctic

The key objectives are to test 1) airships as an alternate scientific vehicle, with a low environmental impact, by developing a series of ecological transects across the Canadian Arctic, 2) airships as a mobile transport infrastructure for short term flights such as caching scientific supplies, dropping off and picking up research crews in isolated areas, accessing hunting areas and testing scientific equipment (geophysical and oceanography). Furthermore greenhouse emissions will be documented and data will be collected on weather and air/water/soil/tree samples collected along the transects. Airships will also be used at sea ice break-up and during the spring hunt in the vicinity of Iqaluit. Of particular interest will be an assessment of the impacts, if any, on the movement of mammals and birds and the ability to improve census methods and 3) determine if airships could have a role in mitigating some of the effects of a warming Arctic.
The airship will originate from Yellowknife and key activity areas will be around Inuvik and Iqaluit. The Inuvik Research Centre and Nunavut Research Institute (Iqaluit) are major research partners in the proposal. ETAA plans several ecological transects from Yellowknife to Inuvik, Yellowknife to Iqaluit via Rankin Inlet. A transect is planned along the north slope of Alaska to Barrow and back across the Beaufort Sea in conjunction with the Canadian coast guard vessel (Nahidik). Additional activities will occur in the vicinity of Inuvik (transects over the Mackenzie River delta) and Iqaluit (test equipment, move supplies and move hunters during the spring hunt at the ice edge). The period of operation will be about 6 months over 2 years with most activity during the summer months. Arctic weather has often been considered a limitation for airship operation in the Arctic. A recent evaluation of weather patterns in the Canadian Arctic indicates that airships could operate much of the year in the Canadian Arctic because weather does not appear to be limiting.

The Transportation Context
Airships could form an integral part of sustainable passenger and freight transport.
The majority of new concepts for medium and large airships rely on rigid structures for
providing a maximum payload capacity, safety and efficiency. Airships cruise at a low
altitude (1000 - 2000m) which helps avoid interference with other modes. They require
little ground infrastructure and could link to other transport modes.
“Air crane” concept
The Dutch CargoLifter AG “CL160” is an example of a large semi-rigid freight
airship for point-to-point delivery of heavy and bulky loads – “air crane” concept. With
a payload capacity of 160 tons and a range of 10,000km this offers an option for
transport of bulky goods which might otherwise require bridges to be temporarily
removed or loads to be disassembled and reassembled. The first full scale prototype is
to fly in summer 2001. Larger airships targeting unique market segments like bulky and
heavy freight transport will require innovative solutions addressing logistic aspects of
this concept. There are other developments in Russia and the US.

Lovin' Hydrogen
Maverick energy guru Amory Lovins says a profitable, pollution-free hydrogen economy is just over the horizon. It's merely a matter of taming the most powerful gas on the planet
DISCOVER Vol. 22 No. 11 (November 2001)

The Hydrogen Economy
By Jeremy Rifkin
After Oil, Clean Energy From a Fuel-Cell-Driven Global Hydrogen Web

The Home Page for Lighter-Than-Air Craft

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
tar-sands, Lougheed, Alberta, Manitoba, Arctic, Canada, Zepplin, Blimp, LTA, airships, Hindenberg, hydrogen, helium, transportation, susatainability, airtransport, lighterthanair, Moorcock, HGWells

CANADA 
The Age of the Airship May Be Dawning Again

Dirigibles ruled the skies once. Can they make a comeback?

BY JUSTIN LING FEBRUARY 29, 2020

FOREIGN POLICY ILLUSTRATION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/GETTY IMAGES/OCEANSKY

You might think that the tragic end of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937 marked a clear end to the airship era. The famous footage of the German airship plunging in flames became the overwhelming image of a seemingly doomed technology.

You would be wrong.

For decades, the Goodyear fleet of blimps have been the only working airships most people had a chance of seeing in real life. But a handful of companies are looking to bring back the spectacular dirigibles.

The government of Quebec will be pitching 30 million Canadian dollars (23 million in U.S. dollars) to Flying Whales, a French company, to start building its massive zeppelins. The company has only been around since 2012, and it hasn’t gotten any of its airships off the ground—yet. The plan has been derided by opposition parties, not as a flying whale but as a white elephant.

But cargo airships may actually make a tremendous amount of sense. They are relatively cheap, they can carry enormous amounts of material, and they emit significantly less greenhouse gas than other modes of transportation.

The compelling arguments for dirigible travel put these airships in a class of technology, with nuclear power and lunar colonization, that is experiencing an unexpected modern renaissance.

Flying Whales’ LCA60T model, according to the company, will be able to carry up to 60 metric tons of goods, travel up to 62 miles per hour, and serve remote areas with ease. If all goes according to plan, the company hopes to get the first airship off the ground in 2022.

There’s still a healthy dose of skepticism around the company’s lofty promises. Its main backers, prior to Quebec’s financial endorsement, have been the French National Forest Agency and the Chinese government.

Flying Whales’ website is enigmatic, and the section of the site explaining the airships’ structure isn’t particularly helpful—the description of its structure reads “what else… – Hi George :)” while if you’re looking for details on their “safe lifting gas” it reads, somewhat snarkily, “helium obviously.”

It’s that last point that might make the whole idea completely untenable: There might just not be enough helium left.

The R-100 airship, circa 1920. THEODOR HORYDCZAK/U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A slow, steady return

While the most famous airship may be the Hindenburg, it was hardly the first—nor was it the last.

For a time in the first half of the 20th century, airships were fashionable, practical, and futuristic. But their calamitous track record ultimately soured the public.

Less remembered, perhaps because its downing was never immortalized on an album cover, was the English airship R101. The dirigible was dubbed the “socialist airship,” as it was designed and built by the United Kingdom’s state aviation department. The R101 was constructed as part of a state-sponsored competition, pitting government engineers against private-sector workers. The “capitalist airship,” the R100, was designed and constructed by a scrappy engineering team on a remote airbase in Yorkshire.

The opulent socialist airship was rushed to flight, even amid a variety of problems. It took off, en route to British India, just as its capitalist competitor set off for Canada. The government airship sagged and crashed into the French countryside just a day into its voyage, killing 48 of the 54 onboard—including the aviation minister—while the private airship conducted a celebrated tour of Montreal and Toronto before heading back to London. (“Everybody’s talking about the R100,” goes the chorus of a song from the iconic francophone Canadian folk singer La Bolduc.)

Most airships of the day took off using the highly flammable hydrogen—thanks mostly to an American monopoly on helium, its nonflammable alternative. Washington had banned the export of the gas, in part over fears of the military uses of the airships, which had been used in the world’s first air raids on London during World War I.

The helium-buoyant American ships weren’t always safe, either. The USS Akron carried out several successful flights across the continent, but it was ultimately pushed down by strong winds in 1933 and crashed into the Atlantic, killing 73 people on board and two rescuers.

As U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked after the Akron went down, “ships can be replaced, but the Nation can ill afford to lose such men.” Eventually, governments stopped replacing the ships.

The USS Akron over New York City in the early 1930s. U.S. NAVY/INTERIM ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGESBut it was the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, made famous by the newsreel footage of the zeppelin bursting into a ball of flames as it tried to dock at the Lakehurst air base in New Jersey, that really scuttled the industry. The United States’ decision to lift its helium ban after the crash did little to revive faith in airships. The U.S. Navy used its small fleet for anti-submarine warfare and reconnaissance in World War II, but the airship industry was effectively dead.

It would stage a comeback, in a limited way, some decades later, when Goodyear opted for nonrigid airships—blimps—for its advertising campaigns. Airship Industries came around in the 1980s, promising a return of the dirigible. Its ships, like Goodyear’s ships, had no rigid structure inside, meaning they could carry only limited cargo and no more than 14 passengers. The airships of earlier in the century had immense metal structures inside, allowing them to carry more. These new nonrigid ships were made famous by Bond villains, Pink Floyd, and, later, by Ron Paul supporters.

Fame aside, the blimps had little use for commercial air travel or cargo transport. The niche purpose of the blimps meant Airship Industries was hemorrhaging money, and it shut down by the end of the decade.

As with many other commercially nonviable products, airships later found a home in the U.S. military. There was a hope that the dirigibles, which are capable of taking off and staying aloft for prolonged periods of time, would be ideal for persistent aerial surveillance.

The contractor Northrop Grumman was awarded a $517 million contract to build a surveillance airship in 2010, and it managed to build a successful prototype in 2012. The contract was axed a year later. Raytheon was awarded nearly $3 billion for its model, which tethered the airship to a mooring and allowed for constant surveillance of a wide area for a month at a time.

One of Raytheon’s spy blimps was tested in Maryland, where it hung eerily in the sky above suburban homes. In 2015, it broke loose from its mooring and drifted haplessly through Pennsylvania, trailed by fighter jets, before crashing in a field. Raytheon’s hopes of building more surveillance dirigibles crashed with it.

A similar program in Afghanistan, which became notorious among Kabul residents, saw even worse results. The tethers that kept the Big Brother balloons in place were notorious for snaring helicopter blades—one incident killed five American and British service members.

An aerial visualization of the Ocean Sky airship. KIRT X THOMSEN


A commercial appeal?

The market for military airships and commercial blimps remained limited thanks to past failures, though not dead entirely.

The cruise company OceanSky is forging ahead with plans to send a passenger airship to the Arctic, using a ship originally designed under the U.S. military’s surveillance program, with a planned voyage in 2023.

Many are banking that the real future of airships, however, is in cargo.

In the vast expanses of the Canadian north, there has long been a need for reliable transportation. Many communities are only accessible by road when winter rolls around and the ground and lakes are solid enough to drive on, if they are accessible by road at all. That means basic goods need to be stockpiled when the weather is cold or flown in by cargo plane—never mind supplies to build long-term infrastructure. Many of these remote communities are reliant on gas generators and are facing shortages of reliable housing stock.

The airships also promise to be a boon for economic development, if they work.

In 2016, a junior mining company in Quebec inked an agreement with U.K.-based Straightline Aviation to use a design being developed by Lockheed Martin to haul rare earth minerals from a remote open-pit mine—the road that was initially planned would have cut across a caribou migration path. That plan went belly-up when the minerals company went bankrupt, although Straightline is forging ahead with plans to offer commercial and tourism flights.

The interior of the Ocean Sky airship. HYBRID AIR VEHICLES LTD AND DESIGN Q

Stranded resources and communities are a policy concern in Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Russia, and elsewhere. Flights are expensive and carbon dioxide-intensive, and they require airport infrastructure. Shipping is more viable as Arctic ice melts, but that often requires deep-water ports and can have damaging impacts on marine life. It’s part of why people keep coming back to airships.

That’s the niche Quebec Premier François Legault is hoping Flying Whale can fill in the province’s remote north.

It’s why the French forestry sector is interested in the ships as well. The promise of lifting lumber from far-off places earned the company praise from French President Emmanuel Macron as one of the “industries of the future.”

The opportunity is also caveated with an array of risks and problems. There is no guarantee that the airships will even fly in the frigid north—Le Journal de Quebec reported that the airships will need a significant amount of water, which may be hard to come by amid Arctic temperatures.

Quebec seems unphased.

“If we don’t take risks, we go nowhere,” Legault told reporters earlier in February. Quebec’s investment earned it a 25 percent stake in the project, which in turn brought derision from opposition politicians—one questioned whether the government was inhaling helium when it made the decision.

The money puts Quebec on par with China in the project—Beijing put in $4.9 million for its 24.9 percent stake, through the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China General and the Ministry of Science and Technology. China has plenty of Arctic ambitions itself—and vast distances to cover in its underpopulated west.

The Hindenburg disaster in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937. FINE ART IMAGES/HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES


A lack of lift

There’s one massive drawback for the airship industry: The world is almost out of helium.

In recent years, helium prices have skyrocketed as supply has dwindled. Far from just being used in party balloons and blimps, the gas is necessary for MRI scanners and rocket engines. Stockpiles of helium often escape, and are wasted, during other extractive projects. While there have been shortages before, helium is a nonrenewable resource and can take an enormously long time to generate—estimates suggest the earth’s supply could be gone this century.

If the world runs out of helium, it’s not clear that there’s a good alternative. The dangers of hydrogen are well established, and the gas behind the Hindenburg disaster is unlikely to make an air travel comeback.

Hypothetically, there could be an airship lifted by a vacuum—that is, by material that can contain nothing at all inside but withstand the atmospheric pressure from the outside. It is, at this point, science fiction, although NASA has posited that some kind of vacuum airship could eventually be used to explore the surface of Mars.

Airship companies seem satisfied with helium for the time being. OceanSky cruises has a reassuring FAQ on its website, telling those looking to join them on an airship trip to the North Pole that 600 of their cruise ships “would account for just 1% of annual helium consumption” and that each ship “stays filled with the same helium as from its inception, less a tiny annual leakage.”

If these airships can take off despite carrying a century of failed projects, a lack of its necessary resource, and economic justifications that still seem more wishful thinking than reality—it might just be the return of the zeppelin.


Justin Ling is a journalist based in Toronto.

FOREIGN POLICY MAGAZINE

Hydrogen gas-fuelled airships could spur development in remote communities
Barry E. Prentice, Professor of Supply Chain Management, University of Manitoba 3 days ago

What do tomatoes, hemp and hydrogen gas have in common? Only one thing: they were all victims of misinformation that banned their use. Harmless products that could have had a positive role in the economy and society were shunned for generations. 

© (Piqsels) Hydrogen gas was banned for use in airships based on misinformation and outright falsehoods 100 years ago.

It seems incredible today to think that Europeans believed tomatoes were poisonous for about 200 years. People did get sick, and some died after eating tomatoes. The culprit was pewter dishes favoured by the upper classes. Tomato acid leached out enough lead out to be poisonous.

The advent of porcelain dishware and Italian pizza finally sorted out the real problem. But once a myth is born, it can be hard for the truth to emerge. Europe lagged a long time behind North America in tomato consumption.

The prohibition of hemp, the fibre of the cannabis plant, has a more nuanced story and competing explanations. Some accounts sound like conspiracy theories.

The alleged conspirators were industrialists in paper, plastics and pharmaceuticals who sought drug regulations to eliminate hemp as their competitor. This is difficult to prove, but economist George Stigler’s seminal article in 1971 on the economics of regulation lends support to the theory.

 

© (AP Photo/Paul Sancya) In this August 2019 photo, rows plants are shown at an industrial hemp farm in Michigan.

The best-documented cause of hemp’s vilification is racism. Notable racist slurs by U.S. government official Harry Anslinger, who drafted the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, leave no doubt of his bias. As commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, he targeted racialized minorities who used hemp plants.

The fear-mongering has ended in most places and important uses for hemp and cannabis are making a valuable contribution to health care, nutrition and fibre. But the stigma of the false claims continue, as does prohibition in many places.
Hydrogen ban

Unlike the prohibition on hemp, hydrogen gas bans in the United States and Canada are extremely narrow. It’s legal to use hydrogen for almost every conceivable purpose, except one: as a gas to provide buoyancy for airships, more commonly known as blimps (although there are differences between airships, blimps and dirigibles).

In fact, Canada still has a ban enshrined in its air regulations that states: “Hydrogen is not an acceptable lifting gas for use in airships.”

Canada’s ban on this use of hydrogen is strange given that Canada has never had an airship industry. The origins of the false information that led to this ban on the use of hydrogen are even more surprising.

Helium was discovered in natural gas in Kansas in 1903, and an experimental refinery was built in Texas in 1915. At great expense, a few barrage balloons were filled with helium during the First World War.

After the war, the need for helium was unclear. But officials from the U.S. Bureau of Mines wanted to protect their newly established helium refinery. They took advantage of the Roma airship accident in 1922 to sell helium to the military.

The Roma was a hydrogen-filled, Italian-built airship sold to the U.S. army. During trials, its rudder broke and the airship crashed in Norfolk, Va., hitting power lines during its descent. All 34 crew members were lost. 

 

© (National Archives) The Italian airship Roma flying over Norfolk, Va., in 1921.

Spreading a falsehood via the media that the crew would have survived had the airship had been filled with helium, the Bureau of Mines was given an audience in Washington, D.C. Before Congress, they staged a demonstration with two balloons and a burning splint.

The one filled with helium doused the burning splint. The one marked hydrogen would have put the flame out too, if it were more than 75 per cent pure, but contaminated hydrogen gas is explosive. When the burning splint touched the balloon, it went off like a cannon, rattling the windows in Congress.

Based on this poorly designed high school chemistry level experiment, U.S. politicians banned the use of hydrogen in airships.
Rubber-stamped laws

After the Second World War, when the U.S. became the dominant world air power, its regulations were rubber-stamped into the laws of other nations, including Canada. This is how Canada came to have a regulation banning hydrogen in airships that is grounded in neither science nor engineering research. The ban stems from a political decision made in a foreign country 98 years ago based on misinformation.

Hydrogen gas is increasingly heralded as the mobile energy source of the green economy. Hydrogen fuel cells are used for electric cars, buses, boats, forklifts, trains and recently a converted Piper airplane.

Read more: Hydrogen trains are coming – can they get rid of diesel for good?

It is perfectly legal to carry hydrogen in a high-pressure container to power any vehicle, including an airship, but not if carried in a zero-pressure container (gas cell) to lift the airship.

The prohibition on hydrogen has held back research and created doubts about the economic viability of airships that must depend on scarce, finite supplies of helium.

Lies and misinformation have consequences. Canada needs a transportation solution to the chronic problems of food insecurity, crowded housing and poverty in remote Indigenous communities.

Hydrogen-filled cargo airships could do for the Northern economy what the railways did for Western Canada 125 years ago. In the 21st century, myths and misrepresentations should not go unchallenged. Regulatory decisions made when we were still hand-cranking cars should either be justified or removed from the books.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Barry E. Prentice owns shares in Buoyant Aircraft Systems International (BASI), an airship research organization with no production and only one employee. He is also the president of ISO Polar, a not-for-profit think tank that encourages the use of cargo airships for northern transportation.

AIRSHIPS

Ghost islands of the Arctic: The world’s ‘northern-most island’ isn’t the first to be erased from the map

Kevin Hamilton, Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Hawaii 9/9/2022

THE CONVERSATION 


In 2021, an expedition off the icy northern Greenland coast spotted what appeared to be a previously uncharted island. It was small and gravelly, and it was declared a contender for the title of the most northerly known land mass in the world. The discoverers named it Qeqertaq Avannarleq – Greenlandic for “the northern most island.”

PHOTO © Martin Nissen These 'islands' are on the move.

But there was a mystery afoot in the region. Just north of Cape Morris Jesup, several other small islands had been discovered over the decades, and then disappeared.

Some scientists theorized that these were rocky banks that had been pushed up by sea ice.

But when a team of Swiss and Danish surveyors traveled north to investigate this “ghost islands” phenomenon, they discovered something else entirely. They announced their findings in September 2022: These elusive islands are actually large icebergs grounded at the sea bottom. They likely came from a nearby glacier, where other newly calved icebergs, covered with gravel from landslides, were ready to float off.

Video player from: YouTube (Privacy Policy, Terms)

This was not the first such disappearing act in the high Arctic, or the first need to erase land from the map. Nearly a century ago, an innovative airborne expedition redrew the maps of large swaths of the Barents Sea.

The view from a zeppelin in 1931

The 1931 expedition emerged from American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst’s plan for a spectacular publicity stunt.

Hearst proposed having the Graf Zeppelin, then the world’s largest airship, fly to the North Pole for a meeting with a submarine that would travel under the ice. This ran into practical difficulties and Hearst abandoned the plan, but the notion of using the Graf Zeppelin to conduct geographic and scientific investigations of the high Arctic was taken up by an international polar science committee.

The airborne expedition they devised would employ pioneering technologies and make important geographical, meteorological and magnetic discoveries in the Arctic – including remapping much of the Barents Sea.

The expedition was known as the Polarfahrt – “polar voyage” in German. Despite the international tensions at the time, the zeppelin carried a team of German, Soviet and U.S. scientists and explorers.

Among them were Lincoln Ellsworth, a wealthy American and experienced Arctic explorer who would write the first scholarly account of the Polarfahrt and its geographical discoveries. Two important Soviet scientists also participated: the brilliant meteorologist Pavel Molchanov and the expedition’s chief scientist, Rudolf Samoylovich, who performed magnetic measurements. In charge of the meteorological operations was Ludwig Weickmann, director of the Geophysical Institute of the University of Leipzig.

The expedition’s chronicler was Arthur Koestler, a young journalist who would later become famous for his anti-communist novel “Darkness at Noon,” depicting totalitarianism turning on its own party loyalists

.

© Wikimedia Built in 1928 and longer than two football fields, the Graf Zeppelin was normally used for ultra-luxurious commercial passenger transportation. Financing for the science mission came in part from the sale of postcards with stamps specially issued by the postal authorities of Germany and the Soviet Union.

The five-day trip took them north over the Barents Sea as far as 82 degrees north latitude, and then eastward for hundreds of miles before returning southwestward.

Koestler provided daily reports via shortwave radio that appeared in newspapers around the world.

“The experience of this swift, silent and effortless rising, or rather falling upwards into the sky, is beautiful and intoxicating,” Koestler wrote in his 1952 autobiography. “… it gives one the complete illusion of having escaped the bondage of the earth’s gravity.

"We hovered in the Arctic air for several days, moving at a leisurely average of 60 miles per hour and often stopping in mid-air to complete a photographic survey or release small weather balloons. It all had a charm and a quiet excitement comparable to a journey on the last sailing ship in an era of speed boats.”

‘The disadvantage of not existing’

The high latitude regions the Polarfahrt passed over were incredibly remote. In the late 19th century, Austrian explorer Julius von Payer reported the discovery of Franz Josef Land, an archipelago of nearly 200 islands in the Barents Sea, but initially there had been doubts about Franz Josef Land’s existence.

The Polarfahrt confirmed the existence of Franz Josef Land, but it would reveal that the maps produced by the early explorers of the high Arctic had startling deficiencies.

For the expedition, the Graf Zeppelin had been outfitted with wide-angle cameras that allowed detailed photography of the surface below. The slowly moving Zeppelin was ideally suited for this purpose and could make leisurely surveys that were not possible from fixed-wing aircraft overflights.

“We spent the remainder of [July 27] making a geographical survey of Franz Josef Land,” Koestler wrote.

“Our first objective was an island called Albert Edward Land. But that was easier said than done, for Albert Edward Land had the disadvantage of not existing. It could be found on every map of the Arctic, but not in the Arctic itself …

"Next objective: Harmsworth Land. Funny as it sounds Harmsworth Land didn’t exist either. Where it ought to have been, there was nothing but the black polar sea and the reflection of the white Zeppelin.

"Heaven knows whether the explorer who put these islands on the map (I believe it was Payer) had been a victim of a mirage, mistaking some icebergs for land … At any rate, as of July 27, 1931, they have been officially erased.”

The expedition would also discover six islands and redraw the coastal outlines of many others.
A revolutionary way to measure the atmosphere

The expedition was also remarkable for the instruments Molchanov tested aboard the Graf Zeppelin – including his newly invented “radiosondes.” His technology would revolutionize meteorological observations and led to instruments that atmospheric scientists like me rely on today.

Until 1930, measuring the temperature high in the atmosphere was extremely challenging for meteorologists.

© Radiosonde Museum of North America Pavel Molchanov and Ludwig Weickmann prepare to launch a weather balloon.

They used so-called registering sondes that recorded the temperature and pressure by weather balloon. A stylus would make a continuous trace on paper or some other medium, but to read it, scientists would have to find the sonde package after it dropped, and it typically drifted many miles from the launch point. This was particularly impractical in remote areas such as the Arctic.

Molchanov’s device could radio back the temperature and pressure at frequent intervals during the balloon flight. Today, balloon-borne radiosondes are launched daily at several hundred stations worldwide.

The Polarfahrt was Molchanov’s chance for a spectacular demonstration. The Graf Zeppelin generally flew in the lowest few thousand feet of the atmosphere, but could serve as a platform to release weather balloons that could ascend much higher, acting as remotely reporting “robots” in the upper atmosphere.

© Radiosonde Museum of North America. To launch radiosondes from the zeppelin, weather balloons were weighted to sink at first. The weight was designed to drop off, allowing the balloon to later rise through the atmosphere.

Molchanov’s hydrogen-filled weather balloons provided the first observations of the stratospheric temperatures near the pole. Remarkably, he found that at heights of 10 miles the air at the pole was actually much warmer than at the equator.
Fate of the protagonists

The Polarfahrt was a final flourish of international scientific cooperation at the beginning of the 1930s, a period that saw a catastrophic rise of authoritarian politics and international conflict. By 1941, the U.S., Soviet Union and Germany would all be at war.

Molchanov and Samoylovich became victims of Stalin’s secret police. As a Hungarian Jew, Koestler would have his life and career shadowed by the politics of the age. He eventually found refuge in England, where he built a career as a novelist, essayist and historian of science.

© Wikimedia The Graf Zeppelin was designed for luxury air travel.

The Graf Zeppelin continued in commercial passenger service principally on trans-Atlantic flights. But one of history’s most iconic tragedies soon ended the era of zeppelin travel. In May 1937, the Graf Zeppelin’s younger sister airship, the Hindenburg, caught fire while trying to land in New Jersey. The Graf Zeppelin was dismantled in 1940 to provide scrap metal for the German war effort.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

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Nunavut MP Lori Idlout calls for Nutrition North reform


Thu, December 1, 2022 at 7:09 a.m.·3 min read

Nutrition North Canada needs to support Nunavut hunters instead of subsidizing grocery companies, said Nunavut MP Lori Idlout in Ottawa Wednesday.

Idlout teamed up with fellow NDP MP Niki Ashton, from Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, to call on the federal Liberal government to reform the government-funded program, which Idlout says doesn’t serve Nunavummiut and is a subsidy for companies instead.

“I completely and wholeheartedly agree that the Nutrition North program needs to have an overhaul,” Idlout said during a joint press conference the two MPs held on Parliament Hill.

Nutrition North Canada operates a collection of programs that meant to improve northern residents’ food security — meaning having better and sustainable access to food.

Idlout said that one of the issues with Nutrition North is that it subsidizes fresh produce that’s flown in from the south, which, during the fall and winter months cannot be relied upon due to poor weather conditions.

Idlout held up various pictures of common grocery store items — apples, bottled water, chips — and noted the price differences between Nunavut and Ottawa.

For example, in Ottawa, four tomatoes cost $1.77, whereas in Nunavut that would cost $8.19, she said.

The main change Idlout would like to see is for the program to better support hunters in the territory because “one bullet could provide for 200 to 300 pounds of meat.”

Nutrition North currently has the Harvesters Support Grant which gives money to communities so they can buy harvesting equipment, gas, meals for elders, community feasts and more. The money is sent to Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. for each community.

Idlout said the hunters she has spoken to said they didn’t know that the program existed and that “there’s definitely a disparity between what the federal government is saying and what the communities are hearing.”

NTI did not respond Wednesday to Nunatsiaq News’ questions about where that money goes. The organization has application forms for the program for reach region on its website.

Asked how Idlout would like to see the program benefit Nunavummiut who rely on grocery stores for food, she said that if hunters are better supported, they can provide food for community members who aren’t hunters themselves, or have hunters in their family.

Kyle Allen, spokesperson for Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, the department that administers Nutrition North, said the federal government has increased its funding for the various programs under its wing.

He said the harvesters support grant was developed in partnership with northern communities and supported more than 5,500 harvesters.

The federal government also has programs outside of Nutrition North to help northerners with the increasing cost of living, such as reducing child-care fees and increasing the Canadian Workers Benefit.

“Many Canadians face real challenges with the increased cost of living,” he said.

“That is why we have a fiscally responsible and compassionate plan that is targeted to low-income families and individuals and support for the most vulnerable.”

Allen did not answer if the Liberals would commit to reviewing the program.

David Venn, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Nunatsiaq News

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Climate change is melting ice roads — a lifeline for remote Indigenous communities

As the key winter connectors disappear, First Nations are looking for all-season solutions amid a push for mineral extraction on their lands

WE NEED AIRSHIPS FOR THE NORTH

BY HILARY BEAUMONT ● FEATURES ● MAY 15, 2025

LONG READ

Jessie Boulard / Grist

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. It was produced by Grist and co-published with IndigiNews.

---

It was the last night of February and a 4×4 truck vaulted down the 167-kilometre winter road to Cat Lake First Nation in northern “Ontario,” a road made entirely of ice and snow. Only the light of the stars and the red and white truck lights illuminated the dense, snow-dusted spruce trees on either side of the road. From the passenger seat, Rachel Wesley, a member of the Ojibway community and its economic development officer, told the driver to stop.

The truck halted on a snow bridge over a wide creek — one of five made of snow along this road. It was wide enough for only one truck to cross at a time; its snowy surface barely two feet above the creek. Wesley zipped up her thick jacket and jumped out into the frigid night air. She looked at the creek and pointed at its open, flowing water.

“That’s not normal,” she said, placing a cigarette between her lips.

Wesley, who wore glasses and a knit cap pulled over her shoulder-length hair, manages the crews that build the winter road — a vital supply route that the community of 650 people relies on to truck in lumber for housing, fuel, food, and bottled water. In the past, winters were so cold that she could walk on the ice that naturally formed over the creek. Now it no longer freezes, and neither do the human-made snow bridges.

“It’s directly caused by global warming,” she said, lighting the cigarette.

Jessie Boulard / Grist

More than 50 First Nations in Canada — with 56,000 people total — depend on approximately 6,000 kilometres of winter roads. There are no paved roads connecting these Indigenous communities to the nearest cities. Most of the year, small planes are their only lifeline. But in winter, the lakes, creeks, and marshes around them freeze, allowing workers to build a vast network of ice roads for truck drivers to haul in supplies at a lower cost than flying them in.

Despite their isolation, the ice roads are community spaces. They guide hockey and broomball teams from small reserves to big cities to compete in tournaments. They enable families to stock up on cheap groceries. They bring people to medical appointments in cities and facilitate hunting and fishing trips with relatives in neighboring communities.

But the climate crisis is making it harder to build and maintain the ice roads. Winter is arriving later, pushing back construction, and spring is appearing earlier, bringing even the most robust frozen highways to an abrupt end. Less snow is falling, making the bridges smaller and more vulnerable to collapse under heavy trucks. 

The rising temperatures give trucks only a few short weeks to bring in supplies — and often with half-loads due to thin lake ice and fragile snow bridges. Last year, chiefs in northern “Ontario” declared a state of emergency when the winter roads failed to freeze on time, and in March this year, rain shut down the ice roads to five communities.

First Nations urgently need permanent roads, but it’s unclear who will pay for them. Government of Canada officials say it’s not their responsibility, and with price tags running into the hundreds of millions of dollars for each community, First Nations typically don’t have the money to fund them. 

But there is a third, more complex option: Many communities that rely on disappearing ice roads sit atop lucrative minerals. And where mining is approved, road permits and government funding soon follow.

The Ring of Fire and development on Indigenous lands

For nearly two decades, companies and governments have eyed a circular mining area in northern “Ontario” as a promise of economic prosperity. Named after the Johnny Cash song, the Ring of Fire spans 5,000 kilometres and contains chromite, nickel, copper, platinum, gold, and zinc, all of which can be used to make EV batteries, cell phones, and military equipment. Scattered across the north are dozens of mines that extract gold, iron, and other minerals, but none compare to the scale of the Ring of Fire.

But resistance by First Nations and a lack of paved roads has stalled extraction. Mining the region could threaten the fight against climate change: “Ontario’s” northern peatlands, for instance, sequester an estimated 35 billion tons of carbon that could be released if the land is mined. The proposed Ring of Fire mining area alone holds about 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon. To put that in perspective, the Amazon rainforest sequesters about 112 billion tonnes of carbon. 

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has longed for years to develop the Ring of Fire, even promising to “hop on a bulldozer” himself. The province, which is responsible for natural resources and road permitting, has committed CAD$1 billion to build permanent roads to open up mining, asking the federal government to kick in another CAD$1 billion. Meanwhile, at least a dozen First Nations in “Ontario” are requesting government funding for all-season roads.

During the recent election, Ford vowed to “unlock” the Ring of Fire and has introduced legislation to fast-track development, actions that some First Nation leaders perceived as a threat. The Nishnawbe Aski Nation, or NAN for short, a regional Indigenous government representing 49 First Nations in northern “Ontario,” warned the province that it was overstepping its authority. 

“The unilateral will of the day’s government will not dictate the speed of development on our lands, and continuing to disregard our legal rights serves to reinforce the colonial and racist approach that we have always had to fight against,” said NAN Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler in a statement. First Nations in the Ring of Fire area are not necessarily antidevelopment, but Fiddler said they must be engaged as partners under regional treaties.

Responding to the premier’s promise to get on a bulldozer, Eabametoong First Nation Chief Solomon Atlookan said, “Nobody’s gonna come without our consent.”

Located in the Ring of Fire region, Eabametoong relies on a winter road for supplies, including lumber for housing. The seasonal window for their ice road has shrunk so much that the community struggles to bring in enough materials to address a severe housing crisis. According to Atlookan, some homes have as many as 14 people living under one roof. Eabametoong used to haul fuel over the winter road, but it is now flown in at a much higher cost.

Atlookan said that building a permanent road could threaten traditional ways of life by bringing in tourists, allowing settlers more access to lands to build cottages, and increasing competition over hunting and fishing. But climate change and rising costs are forcing him to seriously consider a paved road.

“We need to begin working on it now,” he said.

Atlookan is not against mining but knows there are trade-offs. His community’s traditional territories contain countless interwoven streams, lakes, and rivers, and mining upstream could contaminate nearby walleye spawning habitat.

“They don’t realize how interconnected those tributaries are, where the fish spawn,” he said. ”It’ll destroy that livelihood for our communities. So there’s a lot at stake here.”

The province is motivated to build all-season roads to allow a more sustainable flow of goods as climate change threatens the ice roads, according to a spokesperson for Greg Rickford, “Ontario’s” minister of Indigenous affairs and First Nations economic reconciliation. They’re committed to “meaningful partnerships” to advance economic opportunities in the region, the spokesperson added.

But that’s not how Atlookan views the situation. He described a conversation he had with Rickford, who offered to build him an all-season road. He said he asked Rickford if he wanted access to minerals, and the minister denied that the road would be for mining access. “I said, ‘Rickford, that is what this is all about.’”

While Eabametoong is located in the Ring of Fire region and shares a network of winter roads with a cluster of other communities, Cat Lake is in a different situation.

Cat Lake is 257 kilometres west of Eabametoong, as the crow flies. The reserve rests at the edge of a watershed where five major rivers flow in opposite directions, affording the community access to various rivers for travel, hunting, and living off the land. It is not located in the Ring of Fire region and has its own winter road that doesn’t connect to other communities.

Cat Lake is rushing to build an all-season road by 2030 at a cost of CAD$125 million, which the community cannot afford on its own. Cat Lake is considering two routes for an all-season road. One option involves construction over the current 167-kilometre winter road. The other option is to piggyback on an all-season road that would be built to a gold mine, if it is approved. The Springpole mine site is 40 kilometres from Cat Lake, giving the community the option to build a shorter all-season road.

Jessie Boulard / Grist

First Mining Gold wants to drain a lake and dig a 1.5-kilometre open-pit mine to reach the gold underneath. To access Springpole, the company needs to build an all-season road.

In past years, company vehicles reached the site by driving over a winter road that passed over a frozen lake. But several times those vehicles plunged through the thin ice due to warm weather, according to First Mining Gold’s 2023 ESG report. The company figured it was too risky to keep crossing the lake, so it asked the province for permits to build an overland winter road.

Ontario issued a permit for the company to build the winter road without Cat Lake’s consent, prompting the First Nation to request an injunction to stop construction. The community dropped its court case after reaching a settlement with the province last year. First Mining Gold did not reply when asked for comment.

In September 2020, as the company prepared to apply for permits, Wesley invited Elders to a meeting to ask two questions: Did they support Springpole, and did they want an all-season road?

“In order for us to get a road, we might have to let them open the mine,” Wesley explained.

The Elders said they don’t value gold but do value lake trout, and they believed the project would destroy fish habitat. Elders also said they wanted an all-season road that would allow young people to connect with the world while embracing their culture.

“We said ‘no’ to the mine, and we said ‘yes’ to the road,” she said.

After the Elders’ meeting, Wesley began to look for ways to fund a permanent road without relying on mining. She said the federal government is hesitant to fund an all-season road to only one community, and the province won’t talk to Cat Lake about an all-season road. To unlock funding, she began pursuing economic partnerships like working with PRT Growing Services on forest regeneration and a local bioeconomy that would involve a tree-seedling nursery in the community. Cat Lake is also partnering with Natural Resources Institute Finland to do an assessment of their forests. 

“Relying on industry would mean that we would have to do mining with First Mining. And like I said, the community values land, air, and water. We don’t value gold,” she said.

‘Every year it’s been getting a little bit warmer’

The farther north you fly in “Ontario,” the fewer glimpses of infrastructure like power lines, cell towers, or paved roads. The winter landscape is composed of evergreen forests shot through with rivers and lakes, bright white from the snow resting on top. From a plane, the ice roads can be seen cutting through the trees and running over frozen lakes.

On a chilly, sunny afternoon on the Cat Lake winter road, Jonathan Williams drove a red truck with chains pulling heavy tires behind it. Known as “drags,” the tires smooth out the rough parts of the road. Warm weather makes the surface bumpy, requiring constant attention from workers like Williams, who has built winter roads for the last eight years.

“The year I started, it was minus 50 [degrees Celsius],” he said. “I was out fixing trucks on the road, and it was frickin’ crazy getting frostbite on your hands. After that, every year it’s been getting a little bit warmer, a little bit warmer.”

It costs about CAD$500,000 each year to build and maintain Cat Lake’s winter road. The warming climate is taking a toll on the machines used on the road, but the budget no longer covers the expense of a CAD$10,000 broken machine part.

Winter road construction, which splits the cost 50/50 between Indigenous Services Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development, typically starts in November or early December. That’s when crews drive heavy machines over the earth to press it down. When snow arrives, they use grooming machines to pack it.

Like many reserves, driving over Cat Lake’s winter road requires passing over a lake with no bridge. When winter arrives and lake ice begins to form, crews repeatedly flood the lake to make the ice sturdy enough for heavy trucks. When the ice is ready, workers celebrate by spinning their grooming machines in circles on the frozen surface, a ritual called their “happy dance.”

To build the required snow bridges, crews use grooming machines to jam huge piles of snow into creeks. They let the snow settle for about 36 hours and then flood it to form icy crossings. The flowing water underneath naturally forms the ice into a culvert shape. “That’s why you need such a massive pile of snow to push out there, because all the water will take it away if there’s not enough,” Williams said.

A century ago, before planes and trucks became ubiquitous, remote reserves used tractor trains to pull supplies in sleds over the frozen landscape.

“It’s a big bulldozer that pulls trailers behind them, sometimes 10 of them, and that’s where all the fuel came from, the groceries. Because they didn’t have big planes at the time,” explained Chief Atlookan of Eabametoong.

“Back in the day, you didn’t worry about ice conditions — the ice was 40 inches thick.”

The remoteness of reserves is a direct outcome of the country’s colonial history. In 1867, the British Parliament claimed “Canada” as a colony by passing the British North America Act, which later became its constitution. It granted the federal government exclusive authority over “Indians and lands reserved for Indians” and gave provinces authority over certain issues that affect First Nations, like mining.

Since European settlement, massive land grabs and the creation of reserves have left Indigenous peoples in “Canada” with only 0.2 percent of their original territories. Reserves were often deliberately sited in remote locations, away from critical waterways and productive farmland. There was never any intention of connecting reserves to cities; instead, they operated like jails, preventing people from moving off-reserve or seeking economic opportunities.

The federal government has a fiduciary responsibility to First Nations, as affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada. Similar to the “U.S.” government’s relationship with tribes, this means the government has a legal duty to act in the best interest of Indigenous people.

“Since the [court’s] decision, they’ve been looking for ways to offload their fiduciary obligations,” said Russ Diabo, a First Nations policy analyst and member of the Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake.

Although the federal government is obligated to provide the necessities of life on the reserve, like housing and water systems, federal funding formulas are unregulated and up to the government’s discretion, explained Shiri Pasternak, professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. As a result, there are huge discrepancies between what is needed and what is approved. “The underfunding of reserves amounts to systematic impoverishment,” she said.

This chronic underfunding means many First Nations experience crowded homes and broken-down water treatment plants. Although the federal government has committed to ensuring clean drinking water on reserves, more than 30 First Nations currently have long-term drinking water advisories. This includes Neskantaga in northern “Ontario,” which has been under a boil water advisory for three decades. Last year, in response to a lawsuit over “Canada’s” failure to provide clean drinking water to First Nations, the federal government argued it has no legal duty to ensure First Nations have clean water.

Despite the federal government’s history of abandoning its duties to First Nations, more communities are looking to Indigenous Services Canada, or ISC, for road funding. Of the 53 First Nations that depend on winter roads, 32 have asked ISC for funding to develop all-season roads.

Adapting to a warming climate

The sun’s pink light disappeared over the horizon and night fell over the frozen lake surrounding Wesley’s community. She sat in the driver’s seat of her 4×4 truck that was parked on the lake’s icy surface. She watched as workers, bundled up in coats, toques, and boots, drilled a hole in the ice and pumped murky lake water through a hose into a machine. The spout of the machine, pointed upward at a 40 degree angle, blasted a stream of snowflakes into the air. 

A couple of years ago, Wesley asked her band council for a snowmaker.

“They thought I was crazy,” she said. “The chief finally told me, ‘Go ahead and buy a snowmaker.’” 

Wesley has managed winter road construction for the past eight years. Her dad was the community’s economic development officer before her and was also responsible for the winter road. She grew up crawling around big machines; she would climb them and pretend the floor was lava. 

When she took over her father’s job, men cast doubt on her ability to oversee winter road construction.

“She’s a girl, we don’t have to listen to her,” Wesley said, describing how they perceived her. “My dad told me, ‘You’re the boss. Tell them what to do.’” She said she proved herself, and now the workers respect her. They don’t ask questions, they do what she says. 

The snowmaker is a short-term adaptation. Wesley said the community has asked the provincial and federal governments to support construction of its all-season road.

Jessie Boulard / Grist

In an interview in March, ISC minister Patty Hajdu recognized the disappearing ice roads as an emergency.

“‘Emergency’ doesn’t even feel strong enough [to describe the situation],” she said. “It’s so urgent that we do more together to figure out what this next stage of living with climate change looks like for, in particular, remote communities.”

But Hajdu stopped short of committing funding for specific all-season roads. Instead, she said the cost will likely be shared but that the federal government was committed to funding all-season roads. “In theory, yes, but it isn’t as simple as a yes or no — it is project by project,” she said. “I can’t speak about specific amounts. I can’t speak about specific routes.”

She said the situation is more complex than it seems, and the province has complete control over which routes are prioritized and built.

ISC provided about CAD$260,000 for Cat Lake’s feasibility study to confirm potential routes for an all-season road. Hajdu said this is “an important step to the finalization of any infrastructure funding.”

Hajdu vowed not to tie all-season road funding to the acceptance of mining projects. “We should not be increasing funding for First Nations in any realm as a condition of approval for anything. That is very coercive and it’s very colonial,” she said.

“I wouldn’t believe it, because they use money as a way to coerce decisions. They may not directly openly tie it,” said Diabo, the policy analyst. 

Last year, ISC allocated CAD$45 million for construction of a bridge and permanent road to Pikangikum First Nation, which has a winter road that crosses a lake. Although the government announcement did not mention mining, the road will also lead to a proposed lithium mine.

Each summer, more fires burn through northern forests, Diabo said.

“We’re in a time of emergency, and the issue of the disappearing winter roads is part of that.”

Under the dual pressures of climate emergencies and extractive industries, some communities will decide to go forward with mining to build all-season roads. “We’re seeing that already,” he added.

In October, Wesley visited the lake that First Mining wants to drain for its proposed Springpole project. The company’s open-pit mine is in the final stages of the permitting process, and the company expects to receive federal approval by the end of this year.

For Wesley, the area isn’t just beautiful, it’s a reminder of her connection as an Ojibway person to the water, trees, fish, and land. It’s a relationship she described by saying, “I belong to the land.”

“I was almost crying, because the land is forever going to be changed in that area,” she said. “We’re gonna have a hole in the ground that’s forever going to be there. I don’t know how not to be emotional about that. Those are my relatives.” 

Author

HILARY BEAUMONT
Hilary Beaumont‬‭ is an investigative journalist covering the climate crisis and‬ intersecting issues. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Al‬ Jazeera, Rolling Stone, VICE News, The New Republic, and High Country News, among others.

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