Playwright who explored Arctic to warn of vanishing ‘paradise of ice’ at COP26

Vanishing paradise: The Arctic scenes that poet and playwright Nick Drake warns is fast disappearing from view due to global warming (Picture: Nick Drake)

A playwright who took part in an Arctic expedition that revealed a rapidly shrinking ‘paradise of ice’ is taking his experiences of the climate emergency to COP26.

Nick Drake saw the scale of the global environmental crisis first-hand on a ship that sailed for 20 minutes in waters where a glacier had stood only four decades beforehand.

Nick’s travels in the Svalbard archipelago 1,200 miles north of the Norwegian mainland left a deep impression that has informed his performance piece for the event.

In summer 2010, the Londoner joined a group of artists, writers and scientists who sailed around the remote, frozen wilderness in the Arctic Ocean close to the North Pole.

‘It was a completely thrilling privilege to be there and to experience the Arctic wilderness, it was a paradise of ice of extraordinary beauty and silence,’ he told Metro.co.uk.

‘It took us quite a long time to educate ourselves about climate change in terms of what we were seeing because it was so beautiful.

‘The captain showed us where the glacier had started 40 years ago and we then sailed for another 20 minutes before we reached the face.

‘Things like that were really confronting in terms of what has been lost. I came away with a sense of astonishment that there should be such a place of extraordinary beauty and that industrial activity over the last 200 years is destroying it.

‘The shield of ice, the Arctic, is essential to the climate stability that we enjoy on this planet and destroying it will be calamitous. It was both wonderful and terrifying.’

The Arctic wilderness where glaciers are fast receding as global warming continues to take its toll on the frozen paradise (Picture: Nick Drake)

Nick Drake walks in the Arctic tundra where he found fast-shrinking glaciers and a land under threat (Picture: Nick Drake)

A journey into the high Arctic has informed Nick Drake’s performance piece at COP26 entitled The Farewell Glacier (Picture: Nick Drake)

Nick, 60, used the voyage for a book of poems called The Farewell Glacier, which has been turned into a 40-minute music and poetry performance piece for the summit’s Green Zone in the Glasgow Science Centre.

Voices human and non-human from the Arctic’s past, present and future have been woven into a tale taking in the first European explorers and whalers, the impact of mercury poisoning and visions of the future as the unrelenting ice loss continues.

At stake is the Arctic itself. According to the World Wildlife Fund, ‘the world’s refridgerator’ could be ice-free in summer by 2040 if carbon emissions continue to rise unchecked.

Nick Drake’s party sailed for 20 minutes in a sea 550 miles south of the North Pole where a glacier had stood only 40 years earlier (Picture: Nick Drake)

A mountain peers out of the cloud but ice is nowhere to be seen in a picture from Nick Drake’s journey into the Arctic (Picture: Nick Drake0

‘One of the things that struck me when I came back was that the Arctic is very, very far away and only really exists in our imaginations,’ Nick said.

‘I want to connect the audience to the reality that our house is on fire and the clock is ticking very fast. Change must happen.’

The Green Zone – where creative projects will take place on the fringe of the summit – will bring together a wide range of voices from across the UK and overseas, with some events being live-streamed for free.

Playwright Nick Drake believes the power of the imagination can bring about changes in the urgent fight to save the planet (Picture: Nick Drake)

The Farewell Glacier, in collaboration with Scottish composers Emma Donald and Isbel Pendlebury, will play on November 2 at Tower Base North.

The UN Climate Change Conference, which launches half a mile away at the Scottish Event Campus on Sunday (October 31), has been hit by doubts over whether the UK government will be able to secure binding commitments from the leading carbon-emitting nations.

The Svalbard archipelago is part of a region where one estimate predicts there will be no summer ice in under 20 years’ time (Picture: Nick Drake)

President Vladimir Putin has said he will not be among the 120 leaders due to attend and Chinese President XI Jinping has yet to confirm if he will make the journey to the Scottish capital.

However many of those heading to the parallel Green Zone events and talks are enthused about bringing about change, albeit at a grass-roots level.

‘Poetry is a memorable art form that you can carry around in your head,’ Nick said. ‘My hope is for the audience to have an experience that in some way may change them.

‘I want to ask them not just to hope but to decide for themselves what they can do to make change happen.

‘We feel powerless and hopeless when confronted with a global, structural problem but at the same time there is enormous grass-roots work going on now; almost everyone understands the nature and scale of the problem.

‘Individually we do have power but above all we do have imagination, so I want my piece to show how beautiful and yet how damaged the Arctic is and for people to imagine a better, more sustainable future.’

For more about the performance, click here

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