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<\/p>\n\u201cNorth to the Future: An Offline Adventure Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
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By Ben Weissenbach; Grand Central Publishing, 2025; 301 pages; hardcover $30, ebook $14.99, audiobook $27.99.<\/b><\/p>\n
When Ben Weissenbach was an undergrad student at Princeton, he studied with John McPhee and became enamored with McPhee\u2019s 1976 book \u201cComing Into the Country.\u201d While still an undergrad, he received a university journalism grant, which he applied to a loosely conceived project involving interviewing interesting Alaskans, following McPhee\u2019s example. In the summer of 2018 he met Roman Dial, the renowned adventurer, mathematician, biologist and APU professor, and accompanied him on a moose hunt. That led to two lengthy science expeditions through the Brooks Range with Dial, in 2019 and 2021.<\/p>\n
In addition to these, Weissenbach also spent considerable time with Kenji Yoshikawa, a reindeer-herding permafrost expert, and Matt Nolan, an independent glaciologist who studies Alaska\u2019s Arctic glaciers. He could hardly have found more \u201cinteresting\u201d Alaskans than these three or presented them, his relationships with them and their work in more fascinating terms. He refers to the three as part of \u201ca small and hardy group … in a kind of scientific Wild West.\u201d<\/p>\n
Weissenbach, from Los Angeles and now a Ph.D. candidate in polar studies at Cambridge, identifies himself early in the book as a member of \u201cthe first generation to go through adolescence with front-facing cameras.\u201d He\u2019d grown up spending \u201can ungodly number of hours\u201d on the internet and practically no time outside, with the \u201cperennially distracted mind of a digital native.\u201d Uneasy in that world, he sought to disconnect from the \u201cdinging and buzzing\u201d to see what life might be like in a place where people were not similarly distracted and \u201cdid things instead of just talking about them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Weissenbach\u2019s book title, \u201cNorth to the Future,\u201d sounds like the cliche it\u2019s long been for promising exploitation and riches. It takes a bit of settling in to realize that the author\u2019s use of it is ironic, and that the future he suggests is an almost dystopian one of environmental change. Almost, because he presents the science he learned in all its complexity and surprises, as a process that asks questions and is constantly revised. <\/p>\n
The one accepted fact is that the north of Alaska has been warming much faster than most of the rest of the planet, resulting in significant changes to weather, plant growth, animal movements, the freeze-thaw cycle and human lives. Weissenbach documents this through his direct experience in the Arctic along with reporting on the work of the scientists he accompanied and further research, including that related to earlier explorers and scientific studies.<\/p>\n
The two expeditions with Dial \u2014 one through the eastern Brooks Range from the Dalton Highway to the Canadian border and the other from the central Brooks Range west, eventually to the community of Kivalina \u2014 were for the primary purpose of documenting treeline and the degree to which vegetation was moving north as a result of climate change. Satellite photos show a northward \u201cgreening,\u201d but it was the Dial group\u2019s feet-on-the-ground, weekslong treks through remote terrain to collect the data that details treeline advances in specific places, conditions and degrees. <\/p>\n
Along the way, Dial and his hand-picked students observed and recorded many other examples of environmental change \u2014 among them sloughing banks, drying wetlands, drained lakes and rivers running red with iron released by thawing permafrost.<\/p>\n
Weissenbach carefully and clearly describes how treeline movement will influence not just the biology of the north and the migrations and feeding patterns of animals but climate change itself. While trees (and other vegetation) sequester carbon they absorb from the air, they also darken the earth to hold, rather than reflect, heat from the sun. The net effect of this is still under study.<\/p>\n
Apart from the adventuring \u2014 the bear encounters, river crossings, fierce storms and injuries \u2014 and the science, the delight in \u201cNorth to the Future\u201d is to be found in the portraits Weissenbach constructs of those he gets to know. Employing vivid scenes with frequent dialogue and finding humor in every situation, he truly brings to life his \u201ccharacters.\u201d <\/p>\n
Dial is perhaps the best drawn character, in all his eccentricities, demands and generosity. As they approached the starting point for the first expedition, the author writes, \u201c\u2019I hope this all works,\u2019 mused Roman. \u2018It seems pretty improbable, doesn\u2019t it?\u2019\u201d Soon, sharing a small tent with a fragile zipper that required highstepping through a restricted top opening, and with the group\u2019s food cache stored between them, Weissenbach realizes, \u201cIf I was going to last six weeks in a tent with Roman, one of us would have to change, and it wasn\u2019t going to be him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Throughout, Weissenbach, a skilled observer and self-aware writer, remains acutely conscious of what he does and does not know about the world around him. Drawn to the tundra as a \u201cblank spot on the map,\u201d what he soon found \u201cwas not an absence, but a pungent mesh of spongy mosses, neon lichens, and leafy greens. An entanglement of life that resembled, in its vivid color and complexity, a terrestrial coral reef.\u201d Looking closer, more came into view. \u201cHundreds of tiny trees, a new generation no more than a few years old, bristled up through the soil.\u201d<\/p>\n
In our age of alienation from genuine experience and the natural world, it\u2019s refreshing to come upon a young person, open to being tested and fortunate in his encounters, who inspires by his example. Many dream of adventure; few actually seek it. Fewer still can turn experience into artful and informative storytelling. John McPhee, to whom the book is dedicated, is surely proud of his former student.<\/p>\n
[Book review: A journey through polar science helps explain our living world and its future<\/a>]<\/p>\n