Breaking the year-long blog silence, I love how the Svalbard and Aberystwyth ‘bubbles’ collide so often. At the moment Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise is on her way to the coasts of Svalbard and her Captain started his journey from Aberystwyth, where he is based when not at sea. In fact, I have the pleasure of singing… Read More
Scrap metal lined up for shipping in Pyramiden I have been thinking about ‘waste’ and its value quite a lot while in Svalbard. Pyramiden one might think is an extreme example. However, though teaming with things that are no longer in use for their original purpose, there is a significant amount that is not in… Read More
I have just learnt of the sad, sad passing away of an amazing environmental campaigner and perma-culture teacher, advocate and practioner, Paulo Mellet, whom I met and studied with at CAT. It seems more than a happy co-incidence that today I visited the Polar Permaculture project and met an energetic and enthusiastic project leader just… Read More
We log in via the visitors book, pass the security guy, don hard hats with the Statsbygg logo (the state construction arm of the Norwegian government) and file into the dank corridor (which must be the bit outside the mountain) and through the second metal door that has been unlocked for us. We descend as… Read More
(For anyone not of the right age and taste in music to get the Skunk Anansie reference, this blog title needs screaming loudly and with passion!) As mentioned last week, Environmental Protection is a big talking point in Svalbard, as is the future of coal mining here. The ‘paradox’ between the two, is perhaps no… Read More
Today I have been comtemplating this question quite a lot and had some very interesting discussions around it. I can say with some certainty and without causing too much uproar, that it can mean very different things to different institutions and individuals. From a surface glance, the tensions (or not) between the three ‘legs’ of… Read More
Today was an amazingly clear, sunny day, in contrast to yesterday (though it has just come over white and snowy again right now!). It would be all too easy to post a beautiful, postcard perfect landscape shot…but not today at least, though plenty of those have been taken! Influenced by our latest lunchtime listening (a… Read More
Today was very white. A balmy -1 degrees C and snow all day, it felt a bit like Christmas! The skyfull of snow blended with the snow on the mountains and all views were turned to just white. Today’s photo got me thinking about a lecture from Michael Haywood that we listened to last night… Read More
I might be in danger of sounding like a broken record, but last month I returned from another great conference and am struck again by the importance of getting out there and presenting my research, but for different reasons. This time, I headed to the very North of Norway for the Barent’s Institute’s “Mining the… Read More
With there being some snow around (although not much in Aberystwyth), along with a flurry (sorry!) of documentaries popping up featuring one hell of a lot of ice, I thought I’d start a little series of posts about the ones I’ve been watching. First up: Chasing Ice If you haven’t heard about this one, it’s… Read More
samsaville.org 