When I was seven months pregnant, I flew to Spitsbergen to see the end of the world. I packed my suitcase with thermal underwear, a new merino base layer, two fleeces and my partner’s ski pants. I couldn’t fit into my own.

I always wanted to go to the Arctic. I imagined myself swiftly following in the footsteps of my childhood heroes, who were fighting the white emptiness. Instead, I could barely pull on my shoes. I had to buy new ones. The old ones had laces. 

Anyway, going on a sled into an adventure wouldn’t be possible. October was supposed to be the beginning of winter, but the bay near Longyearbyen – the capital of Spitsbergen – had not yet frozen over. The snowmobiles were stuck in the mud. There was hardly any snow. Well, on my first night, a bit of snow had dusted the flat-topped hills. It looked like a desperate attempt to sprinkle some leftover sugar on a cake. I was sweating in thermal underwear, a merino shirt and men’s ski pants.

Over the past 30 years Spitsbergen and the entire Svalbard archipelago – home to the world’s northernmost restaurant, northernmost supermarket, northernmost hotel, northernmost Asian shop and northernmost gas station – have been warming seven times faster than the rest of the world.

Instead of a dog sled, I boarded a catamaran. I would have preferred a motorboat, but the travel agency politely told me that they don’t recommend motorboats for pregnant women. It rocks too much, they said. It wasn’t until later that I realized that what they really meant was: there are no toilets on a motorboat.

So, I boarded a hybrid-electric catamaran and sailed on an ink-coloured sea. Although each of the passengers has flown thousands of kilometres to get to the island (me – 2,898 km, with two stopovers), increasing our carbon footprint, once we’re here we’re sustainable tourists.

It was three degrees above zero, but it felt like minus ten. The only sound you could hear was the wind. The only things to see were clouds, sea and ice.

Doomsday Glacier

In 2019, American writer Elizabeth Rush also headed to the frozen land, only in the south. She spent seven weeks on the icebreaker Nathaniel R. Palmer.

The research expedition for 57 people was organized by an international group of scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. Glaciologists, oceanographers, palaeoclimatologists, marine ecologists, geophysicists and biochemists, together with three journalists, cooks, sailors, technicians, electricians and seamen, were the first people in the world to sail to explore the forefield of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. Only recently has the Southern Ocean been warm enough to allow sailing right up to the glacier. Previously, the Amundsen Sea was covered with ice even in summer.

Thwaites gathered the most media frenzy of all the glaciers in the last years. It was even dubbed the Doomsday Glacier. Its front is 120 kilometres long and its surface area would cover half of Poland. It holds so much water that if it melted, sea levels around the world would rise by 65 centimetres.

In “The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth”, Rush focuses not only on the research that is helping to understand what is happening to the glacier, but also on the meticulous record of how 57 strangers are transformed into a temporary community. Through her writing we meet the scientists, we experience the boredom of the first weeks, and we throw ourselves into the work when Palmer finally reaches Thwaites.

The opportunity to join an expedition has come at a bad time for Rush. She and her husband had to stop trying to have a child – pregnant people are not invited to polar expeditions. Rush is afraid that such a break will ruin her chances of becoming a mother. But she also fears that she won’t become a mother after whatever she is going to witness during the expedition.

Her book is in fact a book about motherhood.

Lab meat

Can I feed my son avocados (good for his health!) since producing five of them uses 300 to 600 litres of water and their transport to Poland emits 1.7 kg of carbon dioxide?

How long can I let my son splash around in the tub? He could sit under a running shower for an hour, three times a day.  I’d like to convert that to litres of water, but I lack imagination. I know it’s too many.

Can I not feed him meat since I don’t eat meat myself? Can I make decisions about his future diet? What if in the future lab-grown meat is the cheapest and healthiest food on a global crisis-burdened earth and my son can’t digest it?

Could I have given birth to a child when someone had calculated that each new human being burdens the earth with an additional 59 tons of carbon dioxide during each year of their life?

Can I teach him the value of empathy when in the future ruthlessness might be more needed? 

Could I give birth to a child when all the worst-case scenarios predict that the world will become an increasingly scary place to live?

Sad patch of snow in the city park

As I approach the Nordenskiöldbreen glacier on a silent catamaran gliding across the dark-ink sea, I feel overwhelmed. It’s too windy outside to last more than a minute, so I stare out the window at the empty landscape. And I listen to the guide telling the story of Spitsbergen: whalers, trappers, miners, explorers. This place has always attracted people who wanted to take something for themselves.

I would like to write that what I see is spectacular. That it takes my breath away. But reality is cold and grey, and I need to pee again. The fjord is narrow, and between its brown arms lies a grey mass of ice – the glacier cliff is three kilometres wide. It does not look majestic. It resembles a small hill in a park when after a few days of winter, the thaw begins, and the snow looks miserable, wet and trampled by children’s sleds.

We sail around a piece of rock that the guide calls Retreat Isle. It looks more like a table than an island, maybe a small seal can fit on it. It appeared in this place in the 1960s.

Scientists have proven that the Nordenskiöldbreen glacier has been melting continuously since 1896. It used to be three and a half kilometres longer. It will soon become a patch of ice and snow that does not even reach the sea. 

Disintegration

“One day, we were cruising in clear seas in front of the glacier. The next day, we were surrounded by icebergs the size of aircraft carriers,” Jeff Goodell, the other journalist on board Palmer, wrote for Rolling Stone. The scientists had to stop their research. Within 48 hours, a 33-kilometer-long section of the Thwaites Ice Shelf—the part of the glacier that floats in the sea and stabilizes the rest of the ice from sliding—had broken apart, turning the Amundsen Sea into a maze of icebergs. And the water began to freeze. Palmer had to return north.

The research conducted in 2019 helped to understand that Thwaites is melting faster than expected. Not because the air is warming, but because the ocean is warming, and the water is melting the glacier from below. For now, only the shelf is melting, but scientists say it will disappear within a decade at the latest, maybe even as early as this year. Then the glacier itself will start to melt.

Thwaites acts like a cork. When it disappears, warm water will enter the West Antarctic ice sheet, which will also start to melt. And the entire ice sheet holds so much water that its release will raise the world’s sea level by three meters. It won’t happen in a year, but the erosion of Thwaites and the Antarctic ice sheet will affect our children and their children. We can say goodbye to the Old Town of Gdansk.

Elizabeth Rush—debating with herself whether to give birth or not—details Palmer’s findings. She adds, “Ever since my return, I’ve wondered if the prolific calving we witnessed was a fecund or a fatal act, a birthing ritual or death throes?” But she’s not naive. Her earlier Pulitzer-nominated book, “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore”, chronicled the changing American shore from Louisiana to Oregon to Rhode Island.

Rush knows the dangers of the climate crisis. She understands the dangers of part of Antarctica breaking apart. But a year after her return from Antarctica, she gives birth to a son, Nicolás.

Second body

I thought that for a whole week spent behind the polar circle, I would be constantly in awe. But instead of awe I feel uneasiness – and I can’t find the source of it. It’s not the sadness of the landscape without trees. It’s not the discomfort of a belly that makes me wobbly and heavy. It’s not the awareness of witnessing the melt. 

This strange feeling seeps into my body when I walk on the streets of Longyearbyen with its population of 1753 people (of which roughly 500 come from south-east Asia – hence the Thai shop with frozen lemongrass and kaffir limes) and a view of mines perched on tops of the mountains. One of them is still operating – providing coal for a local power plant and for steel for the automotive industry. The feeling makes itself comfortable when I sit down to a meal watching locals in their elegant outfits and slippers brought from home in a bag similar to one I used to take with me to school every day. 

I can’t name it. I’m trying to describe it and the closest I come to is I’m missing a home that I haven’t yet created.

It is on the day of the trip to Nordenskiöldbreen that I realize what is happening. I am standing at the barrier in too-tight pants and a too-tight jacket, wrapped in a wool scarf, and the wind is bringing tears to my eyes. Suddenly I understand that I have been here before.

I am here every time I get on a plane, take a shower, send emails or watch TV shows on my computer. My carbon emissions, a byproduct of my daily life, arrived here before me. Daisy Hildyard, in her book “The Second Body”, writes about this invisible body that each of us has, which – while we are taking a bath – wreaks havoc in the world.

“In normal life, a human body is rarely understood to exist outside its own skin – it is supposed to be inviolable […]. You are encouraged to be yourself and to express yourself – to be whole, to be one. Move away from this personality, self-expression, and you risk going out of your mind, being beside yourself, failing to be true to yourself, hearing other voices, or splitting your personality: it doesn’t sound good. […]. You need boundaries, you have to be either here or there. Don’t be all over the place.”

Hildyard notes that climate change is forcing us to reconceptualize our bodies. The truth is that ours have spread beyond the skin and across the globe: “even the patient who is anaesthetized on an operating table, barely breathing, is illuminated by surgeons’ lamps which are powered with electricity trailed from a plant which is pumping out of its chimneys a white smoke that spreads itself out against the sky. This is every living thing on earth.”

Each of us, especially those from the rich Global North, has a second body. I found mine scattered in the mud that reigns instead of snow on Spitsbergen and on an islet exposed by a retreating glacier whose front – where the melting and calving occurs -is grey and jagged.

I found mine, dancing in the North. 

Our great fault?

“What on earth is a carbon footprint?” This question appeared in 2005 on the spreads of major American newspapers. Below it is the answer: “Every person in the world has one. It’s the amount of carbon dioxide emitted due to our daily activities – from washing a load of laundry to driving a carload of kids to school.” And then in a small font you can read the address of a website with a calculator that will help you calculate how much harm you are doing to the Earth. Since then, the idea of a carbon footprint has become part of our everyday life, and calculators that help us calculate it – a tool for measuring individual guilt.

The carbon footprint question and link were not part of a journalistic piece, but an advertisement commissioned by oil company BP as part of its “Beyond Petroleum” campaign.

Almost two decades later, a database Carbon Majors – created by a world-renowned scientist – published a report in April 2024 which shows that as much as 80 percent of greenhouse gases emitted worldwide come from 57 companies. Some of them are state-owned (33 percent of global emissions), some private (also 33 percent). Among the latter, BP is in third place – just behind Shell and ExxonMobil.

The corporation whose $100 million per year advertising campaign has convinced us that it is our fault is responsible for one percent of global emissions. In Jonathan Watts’s piece covering the Carbon Majors report for The Guardian, Richard Heede, the founder of the database, says: “Don’t blame consumers who have been forced to be reliant on oil and gas due to government capture by oil and gas companies.”

When describing the BP campaign Rush rages. She understands that corporations influence – and manipulate – momentous life decisions such as becoming a mother. “Carbon calculators suggest all life should be viewed through the wrapped lens of an extractive economic system where taking is assumed, with no giving, tending, or mending in return”. She herself has spent a lot of time feeling ashamed about wanting to be a mother.

“The real choice we face,” Meehan Crist wrote in her seminal 2020 essay “Is it OK to have a child?” for the London Review of Books, “is not whether to eat meat or how many children to have, but how quickly to make profound and rapid structural changes, without which no personal choice will matter.” She adds that the decision to have children, which for many women, especially in the Global South, is still not a matter of choice, “is not the same as choosing not to have a car or to eat a plant-based diet. Having a child isn’t merely one consumer choice among many.”

Chimeric community

The transformation into a mother is a radical transformation. The size of the foot changes, the composition of the blood changes, even the neural pathways in the brain change. Foetal cells – called chimeric cells – make their way into the mother’s heart, lungs, liver and kidneys. The woman becomes a chimera, a combination of herself and her child. The ego disappears – at least for a while, at least in some areas. The single self grows, expands, encompasses more than one person. Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes the whole world.

The transformation into a mother is a disappearance and expansion at the same time. Abundance despite scarcity. It is not pleasant. And yet it is.

Becoming a mother also means a new set of values. Crist wrote that “having a child has been a commitment to life, and a commitment to the possibilities of a human future on this warming planet.” Rush speaks of “an act of radical faith that life will continue, despite all that assails it. […] to have a child means having faith that the world will change, and more importantly, committing to being a part of that change yourself.”

Rush sees change coming through the community. “[…] real climate resilience is something we have either together or not at all,” she writes. And she wonders how the fact that at the end of the world it was possible to create a community of people who are very different but united by a common goal can be transferred to the everyday life of other continents. She contrasts her selflessness, helpfulness and tolerance from the time of the cruise with the aggression that appeared in her at the beginning of the pandemic.

As if she wanted to show that if someone who snaps at the postman for coming too close was able to spend seven weeks building community with strangers with different views, then anything is possible.

And we too – with our weaknesses – can meet in a community that exists despite everything.

Universal Mothering

The image that stays with me from Rush’s book is of a glacier calving. The ice disintegrating – like a woman giving birth.

Motherhood in times of crisis makes us ask questions about responsibility towards future generations. But the radicalism of motherhood lies in everyday details: making breakfast despite being tired, watering the plants and cleaning the kitchen. In small acts of care for the community of humans and non-humans.

Instead of obsessing over how much emissions dinner will cause, can we count the acts of care that support the planet—and the interspecies community? Could we create calculators for fidgeting that changes the world?

In her famous book “Of Woman Born: Motherhood as an Experience and Institution”, Adriene Rich wrote: “The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival”.

Can people who mother – children, cats, dogs, turtles, ladybugs, the sick, the healthy, those close to them, those far away – change the world through mothering?

Don’t open, Sesame!

On my last day in Svalbard, I took a taxi to go outside of the city. You can’t leave Longyearbyen’s borders on your own without a gun. The drive is short, and after five minutes the taxi leaves me uphill in the mud, next to a strange building looking like a blade stuck into the mountain. The tall concrete walls are topped by a glass facade. When the sun reflects off it, it sparkles like the Northern Lights.

It’s a real fortress and I won’t enter it today. Nor any other day. All I can do is stand in the mud and look at the double steel doors, behind which lie 642 million seeds protected by permafrost.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built sixteen years ago with one aim in mind: to protect the world’s genetic biodiversity. It’s believed to be the most secure place on Earth: its three chambers can hold up to 2,5 billion seeds and they are placed in permafrost, so even if the electrical cooling system switches off, the seeds are going to be protected at a stable temperature: -6 degrees. 

In 2017, the corridor leading to the vault was flooded with water – it leaked from the outside, from the ground that was supposed to never thaw.

We built a uterus inside of the ground, a uterus that awaits with life. Are we able to protect it?

I feel my son’s leg somewhere close to my liver. I call for a taxi. I want to go home.

Can a new world grow from a puddle? Again?

Editor: Juliusz Kurkiewicz