Can walrus ivory teach us about value?

I was given polar bear patterned pyjama trousers by my brother this year, and they remind me that some indigenous people in the arctic have traditionally worn polar bear fur pants as an indication of their adulthood and hunting prowess. Although I don't like the idea of anyone hunting polar bears, I respect the rights of indigenous people who have always done so for survival. Polar bear pants have come to symbolise for me the fact that people have beliefs that I may not share, but do respect. Most importantly, polar bear pants are objects that are valuable not in a monetary sense, but due to their meaning to those who wear them.

Here's another object like that. This exquisite carving is made of 'morse' or walrus ivory (thanks to the ExploreNorth site for the image). It is a magical object, a weapon with sacred power to the person who made it. I am deeply interested in the way objects can have such value. It makes them non-tradeable, or at least not easily tradeable. You can't buy someone's sacred amulet; mere money can't replace its meaning.

Conversely, when the sacred value of an object is forgotten, it can be swapped for any other. It becomes merely a commodity. Most objects in modern western society are like this, and they are inherently unsatisfying. The loss of such values leads to a kind of greed that cannot be satisfied and such greed can be seen everywhere now. It's one of the tragedies of our modern condition. To a modern trader, the value of an object like this walrus carving would be simply that it is rare, and thus worth a lot of money.

When Pytheas made his epic journey in 320 BC, walrus were much more widespread in the North Atlantic than they are now. Their population was decimated by unscrupulous over-hunting by Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although we don't know how far south they lived or how abundant walrus were in the Iron Age, it is certain that the ivory from their tusks was prized. I believe that the reason Pytheas went so far north was because he was searching for the origin of this beautiful material.

What's my rationale? Well, it is reasonable to assume that Pytheas was looking for the northern origins of various materials. Amber and tin are almost certain, and perhaps we can add walrus ivory to that list. Just as Cartheginian control of Galicia made access to tin difficult, and thus Cornwall's supplies became important, it could well be that Phoenician control of North Africa threatened the trade in elephant ivory to the Greek colonies. The Greeks would undoubtedly have known that there were northern sources of an alternative ivory, and I like to think that Pytheas was in hot pursuit when he travelled to Ultima Thule.

Whether he was consciously searching for walrus ivory or not, he would almost certainly have come across walrus hunters. I wonder what their hunting rituals were like and how they viewed ivory. My guess is that they would have considered the killing of a walrus to be a profound, ritual event, of great danger to the hunter and resulting in a sacred substance of great mystical power.

However, trading along the long and complex routes that led to the Mediterranean could well have diluted that sacred value, so that walrus ivory, or morse, would be reduced to just a carving material exchangeable for similar things, like the tusks of elephants or certain kinds of wood. An ancient Greek would think about a walrus ivory carving in a completely different way from a north Atlantic walrus hunter. And of course, how we respond to an ivory carving today is different again. 

Retreat from hurry sickness

Modern life seems to be increasingly pressured, with ever more to do, at an ever accelerating pace.

Even polar bears seem to be suffering from the 'hurry sickness'. According to a recent study, thinning ice drifts faster than it used to, so polar bears must move further and faster each winter to find sufficient food.

To counter this trend, in early May next year I will be leading a creative writing retreat on the ultimate venue for relaxation: Tanera Mor, in the Summer Isles. To find out more see my website here and to make a booking see here or contact Lizzie on +44 (0)1854 622252 or by email.

Three reasons for coming?

1. It is immediately before the Ullapool Book Festival, so you can combine your love of reading and writing in one trip to the Northwest. The Ullapool Book Festival is without doubt the friendliest literary event of the year and always has a brilliant line-up of the best of Scottish writers.
2. It's cheaper than most other tutored retreats, like Arvon weeks or the retreats at the wonderful Moniack Mhor writing centre. Plus you get six nights instead of five.
3. It's on an island! Once we putter off from the jetty, near Achiltibuie, we really are away from it all, with just seals, eider ducks and the occasional porpoise for company.

If you register before the end of January, prices are reduced, so if you're tempted, book now!

Here are my wellies

Here are my wellies, standing in solidarity with the shoes in Paris, protesting lack of action on climate change by our government, and expressing my outrage at the bombing of an oil field by UK planes in Syria.

I'm also posting these wellies because life would be unbearable without them. It's currently lashing with rain, and the croft paths are all sodden and muddy after what feels like the wettest and windiest year I've ever known. Back in the Iron Age they had no wellies. How did they survive?

But seriously, I am almost speechless with rage at the crass cynicism of our prime minister David Cameron, who on Monday asked leaders at the conference of the parties to the UN Climate Change Convention, what  they would say to their grandchildren if they fail to tackle climate change. Presumably he was rehearsing his own lines, given that he was right then planning to fly jets to Syria to set an oil field alight, causing who can guess what level of carbon emissions.

So here I stand, stamping my feet with fury.

Soon I shall go back out into the rain, to scuff about and maybe kick something, think about polar bears, growl a bit and try to find somewhere positive to channel this angry energy. Suggestions welcome.

Polar Bears and Paris

The politics of polar bears and climate change is getting interesting. They are undoubtedly the 'poster bears' of the stop climate chaos campaign. But they are also the subject of political developments in the lead up to the UN Climate Change Convention meeting in Paris.

There are five countries with polar bears: Russia, Greenland, Norway, Canada and the United States. They are known as the 'Range States', and for decades they have been negotiating about what actions they need to take, individually and together, to protect our furry friends. The result was the 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, and subsequent Circumpolar Action Plans, which are signed up to by all five countries.

In 1973 the reason the range states got together was because polar bears were threatened by over-hunting. But as the years have gone by this has changed. Hunting is no longer out of control and the range states have now finally and formally recognised that climate change is the primary and overwhelming threat to the future of the bears, and with them, much of the rest of the polar ecosystem. They also recognise a range of other threats, namely: 'contaminants and pollution, human-caused mortality, shipping, resource and energy exploration and development, tourism and disease'. Crucially, they are committed to action to reduce those threats.

The range states met recently in Greenland and agreed their action plan, which states in no uncertain terms the need to tackle carbon emissions. The following is a quote from the meeting documents: 'The vision of the CAP is to secure the long-term persistence of polar bears in the wild that represent the genetic, behavioral, and ecological diversity of the species.  This vision cannot be achieved without adequate mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions by the global community.'

Polar bear scientists (see this report) seem to be optimistic that there has been a real change in direction by this political body. It is pretty momentous to see Canada and the United States signing up to a strong statement about the threat of climate change and the need to communicate and legislate to tackle greenhouse gas impacts. If this is an indication of the direction of travel of politicians in these countries, then perhaps we can be optimistic about seeing real results from the Climate Change conference in Paris later this month. 

And meanwhile, it's Polar Bear week, so what better way to spend it than watching the Polar Bear Cam as the bears go out onto the newly forming ice in northern Canada? While you're at it, you can make your own climate change pledge and sign the polar bear petition. I have no idea if it'll help strengthen the political will to tackle carbon emissions, but it can't hurt.

(Thanks to KT Miller and Polar Bears International for use of the image).

Ten bear poems

I am not the only writer for whom bears are their muse, and I'm not thinking here of nursery rhymes, doggerel or poems for children about teddy bears, but grown-up poems about real life, if sometimes somewhat mythical, bears.

1. Top of the list is Galway Kinnell's 'The Bear' from his 1968 collection Body Rags (and also in his Selected Poems). This is a strange and wonderful telling of a winter hunt of a bear, wounding the animal, following the trail of blood and climaxing when the hunter reaches the bear and kills him. 'I... tear him down his whole length/ and open him and climb in / and close him up after me, against the wind / and sleep.'  And thus there is a 'parabola of bear-transcendence' in which the poet becomes the bear. Extraordinary and totemic. 
2. There's an echo of the same idea in Margaret Atwood's 'Bear Lament.' in her 2007 collection The Door. 'You once believed if you could only / crawl inside a bear, its fat and fur, / lick with its stubby tongue, take on / its ancient shape, its big paw /big paw big paw big paw / heavy-footed plod that keeps / the worldwide earthwork solid, this would // save you, in a crisis.' This idea of the bear as holding the earth together is so important, the recognition that it is a keystone of our ecosystems and that without them, we are threatened. The poem ends with the cry 'Oh bear, what now? And will the ground still hold? And how much longer?'
3. Which of Ted Hughes' bear poems to choose? It has to be 'The Bear', from the 1967 collection Wodwo. 'In the huge, wide-open, sleeping-eye of the mountain / The bear is the gleam in the pupil / Ready to awake / And instantly focus.' Here is the bear as our guide from this life into death, or into another life.
4. Much more recent is the wonderful 2012 collection Ice by Gillian Clarke, throughout which a polar bear is the presiding spirit. Forget some of the trite use of Ursus Maritimus as the 'poster bear' of climate change, here is the real thing, vulnerable and powerful. In the opening poem, 'Polar', she says,  ' I want him alive. / I want him fierce / with belly and breath and  growl and beating heart, / I want him dangerous...'
5. J O Morgan's In Casting Off (published by Happenstance this year), is another collection with the presence of a white bear hovering in the margins of many poems. It makes itself known, splendidly, fishing in 'Dividing Line', when a leaping salmon caught by a bear 'ceases at once to be shape - becomes fish. // Its sideways thrash about the claws / that have punctured its course, that have drawn it / clear from its universe of water.... The blood / of the fish / becoming / the blood / of the bear.'
6.  Mary Oliver's 'Truro Bear' (from The Truro Bear and other Adventures, 2008) is a possible bear, seen in the woods by people, 'three or four, / or two, or one.' She hasn't seen it herself, but she's watching out, and 'everywhere I look on the scratchy hillsides / shadows seem to grow shoulders.' Oh, I so know what that is like!
7. There are lots of bears in Chrissy Williams' 2013 pamphlet Flying into the Bear, and some favourite lines. 'Everyone could use a  bear sometimes, everyone could use a wild bear..' So, to choose just one, it's 'The Invisible Bear', the one you fly into if you lie back at night and look up into the sky. 'There's not much comfort in a bear you can see through, but then / in times of not much comfort, reach out for what you can.'
8. 'Eliza and the Bear' is the long title poem by Eleanor Rees' 2009 collection. It begins, 'I did not know my lover was a bear', and goes on from there...
9. I have to include Kevin Cadwallender's Bear and the Elementals, which is online here, and consists entirely of bear poems, my favourite of which is, I think, 'Bear Somnus'. 'In the roll and scratch and snore / of winter, a dream enters .. death calls too, reminding / Bear that sleep is its cousin / and dreams are messengers.' 
10. Finally, am I allowed to include one of mine? It's in my 2007 collection Castings, which you can get here, and given the time of year, its a seasonally appropriate autumn 'Polar Bear', hanging out in the multi-coloured woods near Churchill, Canada.
    
    
    Low-angled sun gleams
    through claret leaves
    and caribou lichens pale green
    in the first skiff of snow.
    
    
    A frozen hare watches
    the flight of a falcon
    and spruce fingers point
    where the winds will blow.
    
    
    Tamarack needles flutter
    and flurries of snow buntings dart
    over flaming jade, bronze
    and copper-leaved willow.
    
    
    Photographers get set to lie
    to freeze-frame your world
    starched, ice-bleached arctic
    whitewashing your rainbow.
    
    
    Here you lie in the forest
    a snoozing sumo wrestler
    under trees barely able to hold
    up the sky, so heavy with snow.
    
    
     So, which bear poems would you include in the list?