On top of the world, it is still the ice age. But for how long? Almost everything about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as depicted in PBS Nature’s eye-filling program American Arctic is a study in beauty, from one of the last great caribou migrations on Earth to the ice-crowned peaks of the Brooks Range that separate the feeding grounds of the caribou to the high Arctic Ocean above. This is nature at its most extreme, where dawn twilights usher in the deepening winter and giant muskoxen try to dig down to the frozen grass to keep themselves alive. It is eight degrees warmer on average than it was just 50 years ago, and the climate is growing more erratic.
Freezing rain is becoming more common, which makes it harder for the muskoxen and caribou to reach life-giving sustenance. Caribou can dig through wet snow but when rain freezes during the long polar nights, it turns to ice, which is harder for the caribou to break through without injuring themselves.
Muskoxen were hunted to extinction throughout Alaska in the 1860s but were reintroduced in the 1930s, and therein lies a tale. There are now a few thousand living in Alaska but still, even so, every calf is precious. Survival in such a harsh environment is tenuous and yet, watching American Arctic is to marvel at nature’s resilience in the face of fearsome obstacles.
We’re living through worrying, troubled times, and yet there’s something pristine and oddly calming about well-made nature programs, especially when they’re quiet and reverential. American Arctic is that, and more. It’s moving without being sentimental and cloying, and the quiet narration, filled with graceful pauses and long silences, creates an almost holistic feeling of reverence for nature.
Back in the world, on those rare occasions when the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge makes the news, it’s usually to do with speculative drilling for oil and gas — a constant threat to the wildlife sanctuary that runs cycles of its own, depending on who's in power in Washington, DC at any given time — or the controversy over wolf culls driven by the idea that the real threat to the 160,000 caribou that remain are packs of ravenous wolves and not the climate crisis.
American Arctic skates over politics for the most part and instead focuses on nature in the raw, leaving viewers to form their own conclusions.
The filmmakers followed the Porcupine herd, arguably the Arctic’s most-followed and studied herd of caribou, for a full year. Summer poses different threats to the migration than winter, and a peaceful respite is hard to find. There is less snow and ice, but biting flies drive the caribou to extremes to avoid them. Rising temperatures have caused unprecedented ice loss in the Beaufort Sea throughout the year, with the result that polar bears that winter on the pack ice, hunting seals, arrive on dry land earlier and thinner each spring. Everything in nature is connected, and when one link in the chain breaks, the entire food chain is affected. American Arctic is gentle and giving, a welcome relief from the bombast and noise that permeates so much of popular entertainment today. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge supports a greater variety of plant and animal life than any other protected area in the Arctic Circle, and this program makes it easy to see why. In a world of so much decline, it’s good to know places such as this still exist. Life carries on.
American Arctic premieres Wednesday, April 13 on PBS at 8/7C, on the PBS app, and at PBS.org.
Courtesy of Florian Schulz ©Tom Campion Foundation/Terra Mater Factual Studios