YouSaid · the spoken record

Neil Shea

lines on the record: 42
first: 2026-03-13
most recent: 2026-03-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Prepare better for that journey. And it's, you know, it's just not how it works. You go into the journey with what you have and what you can do. And then you try to share it. And anyway, those are two things that still stick with me.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just to take an easy example, the wolves feel like that to me. I feel like I was such a novice in trying to share any part of their story because I couldn't talk to them. I couldn't ask questions of them. I had to be still in their presence in a way that I'm not still when I live down in the United States in busy Brooklyn. So I wish I had been able to tell that story better. I feel like I'm going to be trying to tell the story of the wolves for the rest of my life. And then also the story of certain Indigenous elders like Jacob Marvin's father. There's a scene in the book where he and I are stuck in a house together during a storm. He doesn't speak English. I do not speak in Nuktutut, so we have to find other ways of communicating with each other. And we do, but I still think about that. And I'm sort of kicking myself. Why didn't you know more Anuktut? Why didn't you?”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think if I've been able to do anything, I hope I've been able to show people the beauty and sort of there's a, I think the tradition originated in Britain, but this idea of the sublime, which can be both beautiful and terrifying at the same time, Barry Lopez, again, to go back to him, sort of the patron saint of Arctic writing. He got this idea that it is both beautiful and terrifying to be in a space that is so different from our everyday lives, where nothing seems to happen, but at the same time, anything might happen. I hope I haven't given people a little window onto the beauty and wonder of the Arctic, both in terms of animal and human lives. The parts that stay with me are the parts that I don't feel like I told very well. I mean, you've written a book. You know that there's stories that don't make it in or stories that you never quite felt like you did justice to.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't know which way it's going to go, but if we look at almost any other part of the globe, we see which way it is trended, right? It's toward the consumption of stuff. So I do worry about that. But I think that it's occupying a larger place in many people's minds now.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People travel there as tourists or sort of to see the last of the polar bears or whatever it is before they all go away. The Arctic is actually coming nearer to us. And even recently with Donald Trump's sort of horrible fascination with Greenland, you see the Arctic brought into our living rooms, into our television screens in a way that it really never has before. So that was sort of an unfortunate way for Greenland to come to the fore, but it did. And I think that that's going to happen more as we go forward in time, as things heat up politically and climatologically. Like the Arctic is going to be something we're talking about much more. But does that mean that we're going to talk about the rich, joyous, wonderful ways that the animals and the people exist there? Or are we going to only talk about it in terms of what one crazy leader wants or what one mineral hungry company wants? Sort of the terms of the discussion.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's so beautifully put, Helen. Thank you for that. You're really on to something, this idea of sort of a dimension opening to us that has not been opened before. And one of the ways that I've thought about it is it's physically opening up. The ice is going away. But we're also able to measure it in the kinds of science that you do, let's say. We're also able to think about it philosophically. We're able to think about it in political and social dimensions. So all of these different sort of human abilities that have never really been in concert before come together and can sort of take in this massive change that's happening at the top of the world. I should pause and say we could do this. I don't think we are. We have all the tools necessary to sort of appreciate this gothic transformation that's happening, but we're not doing that. So I think that what place does the Arctic, you know, it's drawing nearer to us in a very strange way as more”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who can afford to go on a cruise, on an ice-hardened vessel, into a completely what was until recently a completely inaccessible part of the planet. So they're dropping a lot of money to go there. That's going to change any system, no matter what kind of system it is, the arrival of people who spend money. And so you're starting to see this in Arctic Canada as the cruise ships make greater and greater forays into this part of the world. It's changing economies, it's changing expectations, it's changing dynamics, not always for the worse. Sometimes it's good. But then in other places, you know,”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that one of the quickest ways to sum that up is we go back to Marvin in this town of Joe Haven on King William Island. This is a place where cruise ships are now regularly stopping through. So this was not something that Marvin grew up experiencing. But now more and more tourists are sort of dropping into this tiny town. I forget how many people live there, something like 1,400, maybe 1,200 people. And it's not a town that's really prepared to receive visitors. There's one tiny little hotel, mostly for government workers who come through. There's one museum. It's very nice, but it's not like, you know, it's not the Louvre. It's not anything else that we think of in a big city. So these places are being changed by the arrival of Western tourists. And when we say Western tourists, we sort of do a disservice to everybody. We're talking about people who can afford this, right?”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Except it wasn't a shit. It's hard for me to think they didn't, right? But the archaeologists, you know, archaeologists, they're sort of, you know, they're, they don't want to venture a guess that might be interpreted the wrong way. So far from what I understand, the DNA evidence isn't there. And they haven't found the bones to sort of support that kind of suggestion. But I mean, if you're just thinking to human terms, it's like what humans would do, right? So it's impossible to imagine that some at least didn't choose to survive that way. But we don't, it's sort of that murky part where science meets storytelling and we don't know what to say that's true”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were like, okay, there are neighbors. They're surviving. They're doing well. Their culture seems to be okay. Ours isn't. The Norse do not seem to have become more likely into it. And what this tells me is that there was some hang up there. There was some thing that they was a line they weren't willing to cross, even as the world sort of seemed to close down around them. And I think the lesson for us now is what are we willing to do in the face of these great challenges that are barreling toward us? With climate change, with political dissolution, with all these other things, are we willing to change or are we going to sort of vanish like the Norse did?”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard to flee from a place when you don't have timber to build boats, but it's also not clear that they all died either in conflict or from disease or freezing. So the science is not clear on that yet. But what they did do was they seem to have made a very clear choice not to change certain parts of their identity even as the world changed around them. And what I mean is that by the time the Norse colony was collapsing, the Inuit had moved down from, they had moved across from Canada into Greenland and they come south. They were a well-adapted Arctic people, and by the end of the Norse time, they were living essentially as neighbors with the Norse. The Norse could see these people who were doing well in the Arctic, but they did not become more like them.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're experiencing today for the Norse, it got very cold very quickly, but they still tried to do what we would do in their place, what we're doing now. They tried to adapt. They tried many different methods to sort of extend their farms, to save their farms, to keep hunting the way that they had done. And they also tried very hard, it seems, to preserve their Norse culture. So they were very, even though they lived in Greenland and lived there for almost 500 years, they were always looking back over their shoulder sort of to Europe and to other Norse culture as sort of reference point. So when things started to change in southern Greenland, one of the things the North did was try to maintain their Norseness against sort of this climatological storm that was coming at them. So that's, I think, where the lesson is. Ultimately, the Norse did not survive in southern Greenland. We're not sure whether or not they were able to flee.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I don't know if there's a, it's hard to say that there's a direct comparison. It's more like these ancient. They're obviously not the same as what we're experiencing now, but they're so thoroughly threaded through our lives that we're connected to the past. And so the things that happened continued to reverberate through our lives. And I think that if this is our opportunity to learn from whatever happened to the people who came before us. So it's like this, I think, it's the British anthropologist Tim Engold, who just sort of describes life as a rope that is composed of many fibers that sort of like tethered together. That's how I see our relationship to the Norse and to other people in the Arctic past. So the Norse came to Greenland and they succeeded for a while there. Hunting Walruses, grazing animals in the southern fjords. But then, you know, not too long into their sort of sojourn in southern Greenland, climate change became a real issue for them. The climate change is almost the opposite way to”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Northern Canada, and I spent time with the Clicho people who have been companions with a herd called the Bathhurst that is down to perhaps less than 6,000 animals now. And then in Alaska, I spent time with the Nunamut people who they're heard, the Western Arctic herd is still fairly healthy. It's got more than 100,000 animals part of it. But that herd not too long ago was at half a million animals. So you see that they're aware that the animals are declining. They're not coming as regularly along these migratory paths. So it's a real big question for a lot of people in the north. What are we going to become? That's the one thing. And then what are we going to eat? What are we going to practice our skills with? Our language is also tied to these animals. So when this starts to change, what will we do?”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If people who live in those regions consider themselves to be caribou people because they've been in relationship with these animals for so long for generations, for thousands of years. So if you decide, if you sort of define yourself as a caribou people, what happens when the caribou start to disappear? And so I visited some communities where they're trying to figure this out now.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fur, bones up into these very sort of starved areas deliver in nutrients their bodies, their stillborn calves, even the placentas, to all of the other animals and people who live up there. And then they're sort of circulating back down into the south. So if you think about this happening seasonally year after year after year, it's this slow pumping of blood and life into these very cold regions. That said, caribou in North America and in Russia are declining very rapidly. 20 or 30 years ago, you used to see herds of caribou that had half a million animals or more. Now a lot of those herds are really dropping off. They're down to 100,000 animals or less in some cases. So you have to imagine the circulatory system kind of getting weaker and shutting down in some places. Many of the natives...”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a really important question, Helen. Thank you for that one. The idea with the caribou is that all across the top of North America, you have animals that are specifically called migratory caribou, and they make these enormous journeys each year. They can migrate hundreds of miles up to a thousand miles or more, walking from the places where they spend the winter, often in the trees, bore a forest. Then they head north in the springtime into the Arctic and often end up near the Arctic coastline where they give birth to the next generation of calves. Then they'll spend the summer up in the Arctic grazing and keeping away from the mosquitoes, as you know, they're problematic up there. And then they'll come back down again in the fall. of the continent is almost like a circulatory system. It's bringing heat, blood, warmth.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when the caribou hunts failed or the seals didn't come, that's when people sort of felt like they needed to move into a town so that their children wouldn't starve. So choice is a strange word. I think that if you asked a lot of young Inuit, particularly men, you'd find a great deal of nostalgia for a way of life that's much closer to nomadism.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“form of hybridized culture between the very old ways and modern understanding. So I think Marvin is a good example of somebody who lives sort of between those things because he still goes hunting quite often with his family and friends. But then he comes back and he has a job in town and he has an apartment where he lives with two of his sons. So I don't think it's a question of going back into the past. And when you mention this idea of choice I think in Canada particularly it seems like a choice to move into a village, let's say, to stop being a nomad and to move into a village. But when I talk to elders of Jacob's generation, that's Marvin's father, most of them, their parents did not necessarily want to move into villages or towns. They were forced to do so because there was famine in the land and the Canadian government didn't really offer any assistance.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that many in Inuit, and that's in Canada, and Inujia, that's in Alaska, those cultures are sort of, they're trying to figure out what they want to go. This desire to know the Old Testaments for surviving on the land, to know the old techniques for hunting. With that said, I think it's really hard to grow up as kids do these days, surrounded by, or let's say, submerged in, this Western culture that gives precedence to technology to work, to money in a very Western way that is still very foreign to a lot of the cultures in the north. So you see people trying to hold on to it in different ways. But I think where it does become far more difficult is that if you think of Marvin's parents, this couple that had never learned to speak English and who had grown up in a nomadic lifestyle, I don't think anyone would is trying to return to nomadism. I've never encountered that. I think that it's going to be some new...”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Living a nomadic lifestyle who had grown up that close to the land following the caribou, fishing, hunting for seals on the ice. So as they passed away, that world was drifting further and further into the distance. Marvin was one of these rare people who was sort of able to keep one foot in that world while also dwelling in the English-speaking tax paying sort of got to have a job Western idea of what civilization is.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That his parents had grown up in, which was only Anuktut, and a very nomadic way of life. So he became this conduit between the two generations, between sort of people who had grown up on the land, who were not fully sort of incorporated into the nation of Canada. And this younger generations who had gone to English-speaking schools, they'd learned all the Canadian history. They knew the maple-leaf flag as their own. That sort of thing. And in the chapter that you're talking about, Marvin is sort of a translator between the modern Western world and his parents' older nomadic one. And he moved between them with more ease than most people his age. He was about 27, I think, at the time. What that came to represent for me was sort of the world that his parents grew up in was fairly rapidly disappearing. There weren't too many older folks who could still remember.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Joe Haven on the mainland in a community where English was not spoken, where people had sort of found Christianity through traveling missionaries and trappers and traders, but who did not live in a village the way that we would think of it. So his father and mother grew up hunting and fishing and moving with the seasons. And eventually in the 60s or 70s, they moved into a town. But they never really learned English. Marvin's father, Jacob, would use English to sort of tell, to make a joke. He knew a couple of cuss words and a couple of phrases, but it wasn't a serious language to him. If something needed to be discussed seriously, he would speak in Inuktutut. And then he raised Marvin to speak Inuktutut as well. And he only spoke to Marvin in Inuktutut. So Marvin grew up between sort of the English-speaking Canadian world and the older world.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Marvin lives in a town called Joehaven, which is sort of in the middle, roughly the middle of what I would describe as the Canadian portion of the Arctic. It's often called the Arctic Archipelago, this vast maze of something like 30,000 islands. And Joe Haven is close to the mainland, but it sort of sits at the confluence of the major routes of the northwest passage. So his town and his people have been a big part of the story of exploration in the north for a long time, but they've also been sort of so far removed from the development of Canada and the United States that they've very much been on the fringes of sort of the Western idea of nation-state. Marvin's parents were born in the, I believe it was the 40s, the early 40s, to the south of the...”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm sure you get the idea. It's enormous, obviously unforested. It's about the size of the UK, but only about 200 people live in all that space. So to our common definition, it's complete wilderness. The wolves and the other animals can do as they please. They can go, they're limited by things that we would not necessarily think of. So it was this vast sense of space and untetheredness. It was that size of the freedom was almost frightening in sometimes, because especially when there were no other animals present, when I was somewhere completely by myself, Could do anything, but that didn't mean that I was sort of free to do what I wanted, if that makes sense. It's sort of an inversion of freedom, the way that we commonly think of it.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really amazing. When I think about Ellesmere Island, where this is where all of this took place of the wolves, it's the northernmost island in Canada. Have you been there, Helen? Have you studied, worked there? No.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Smelly machine that was sort of pumping CO2 into the very atmosphere that we had come to experience. So it was a mixed bag that way. But yeah, sometimes we would be literally walking with the wolves over the landscape that they knew so well, but that the pups, their four pups, did not know. So this was interesting because at certain times I felt like I was learning things at the rate of a wolf pup, which isn't to say that I'm anything close to as effective as the wolf pups are living in that environment, but they would stop to learn something because they were only a few months old. And then I would have to learn the same thing. Why did they just go sniff this? Why did they spend so much time tumbling around on this piece of old bone? So it was really amazing to be in company with them that way.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a way, it was like that. I mean, sometimes we could walk with them. And then when I spent many hours alone with them, I could walk around with the wolves. Most of the time they were too fast for us, wolves, four-legged fleet-footed. They can move over the tundra even at a leisurely pace like two or three times faster than humic can walk. So we had to keep up with them on all-terrain vehicles, these four-wheelers. And that was sort of the mode that we would employ to follow them around. So at times it felt like we were flying along the tundra with them. And at other times, it felt like we were just at the mercy of this very loud.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really shook me in a way that I did not expect because we're so used to animals fleeing at our presence, fleeing at our footsteps, withdrawing to the edges of where we live. But these wolves, they didn't do that. They held their ground. Even holding their ground is the wrong way to say it. They were on their ground. And they met me as, if not an equal, then something slightly less. So they knew it was their territory. They weren't afraid of me. And contrary to the way that dogs sort of avert their eyes when we look at them or gaze at them, the wolves would stand and steadily gaze into my face, asking questions of their own. I couldn't tell what they were. But they were fully in possession of both the territory and their own lives. And we're so unfamiliar with that kind of experience with animals that it just shook up everything I thought I knew.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it would, if we're asking for the superlative, it would have to be the wolves. I think I begin the book with narwhals, but that was 20 years ago now. So I still think of them almost every day, but it's certainly moved backwards, away from the present. The wolves were the animals that sort of”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's say, or Europe and Russia, which has most of the Arctic territory there. So that's what it was. It was just a take that was trying to shake up the normal way we see the Arctic.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the standard map of the world likes sort of the southern environments where I possibly you grew up, Helen, that Mercator projection and the wall map that we often think of, it just sort of is cluttered up with the borders of different countries, the size of different countries, the countries in relation to each other in a way. And I thought that the top-down view would give, would sort of not strip those things away, but it would give a different appreciation of what the North is or what the Arctic is. And if you start from the pole, your eyes look at the point of the North Pole first, and then they sort of flow down around the sides of that and see the Arctic as a region of its own rather than one that is sort of just above these political entities that we all live in. So it's trying to sort of give a different view on it that didn't sort of preference Canada and the United States.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The scientific definition was certainly part of it. That's like what is it again? It's the depth at which the ground freezes during certain parts of the year. That's right. But it's also sort of an allusion to what Bruce Chatwin did, I think, many years ago in his book song lines, and also the idea that many different lines sort of circumscribe what the Arctic is in our minds, whether it's the tree line or the Arctic circle itself, which is really just a line dotted around the top of the map. And then there are all sorts of political lines that sort of sort of divide it now, whether it's Canada and the United States, Greenland, Russia, Norway. So this was a boundary.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly well common. It doesn't do justice to the richness and sort of the dimensionality that exists in the far north. It's certainly not a blank sort of void the way that we're often tempted to think of it. People live there many, many animals live there. They're constantly moving, coming and going. The seasons are moving and coming and going as well. So it's a very dynamic place that's sort of looks blank like a blank page to us because we're both far away and it is huge. It's just enormous.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I find that Of the first things that Often when I'm talking about the top of the globe, people think that I'm talking about the bottom. They think Antarctica”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it would change. But it's a measurement that doesn't really Isn't influenced by human activity, whereas these other ways of measuring the Arctic Sort of circumscribed by what people believe, what they think they're going to find in the north. So I find north or far north is a Easier way to wrap in all the many Types of Arctic That I found in my wor”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Types of north where the trees are out, it can mean where the sea is mostly frozen for most of the year Mean Or permafrost begins. one of the Solid definitions of it. Where Winter darkness For a certain amount of time. Don't change no matter what the climate is doing or which way the”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that the Arctic is. As a term, it confuses people a lot because they think that just the Very north of the globe. But when you look in more fine detail at what that means, the Arctic is difficult. Sort of wrap your head around.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be different, I think, over many years or worked for national geographic that I would have a period of like a week or even more where I'd come back and I'd have to figure out how to live again in sort of the clutter of the United States. And I mean that in all kinds of ways the material stuff, the political stuff, the social stuff. Now I have three small sons who don't give me any time to sort of Come back down It's just immediate reentry. So there's no sort of grace period. Going away and coming home.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This treed and heavily developed landscape going into something like that feels like you've, I don't know, maybe lost 20 pounds, 20 sort of mental pounds, and you're sort of free to see things in a very different way. So that's why I'm drawn to deserts, I think, and polar regions.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A really interesting question. I think one of the first ways that I was able to put it into perspective was through the work of another writer, Barry Lopez, who said that it was attracted to what he called classical landscapes, deserts and polar regions. And I think what he meant was regions that are sort of aesthetically uncluttered, or at least regions that were different from where he had grown up, which was on the east coast and in the west coast of the United States. So for me, when I go to the north or to a desert, say in Iraq or somewhere else, they seem uncluttered to me. So there's a lot less visually to be distracted by. There's, you know, no trees. There's no billboards. There's very little infrastructure. So that was sort of, that's what I think of when I'm entering one of these places. It feels like sort of dropping off the excess clutter. And I know that's not the way it is for people who live there, but for me coming from the south.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where grape minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorent As the ice retreats at the top of the world, a new geopolitical frontier is emerging, from when you'd Russian militarization in the Arctic to China's ambitions as a near-Arctic power, and even talk in Washington a strategic control of Greenland, who will shape the future of the North Pole and what is really at stake. On today's episode, journalist and author Neil Shea joins us to discuss how the Arctic is becoming both an ecological frontline and a geopolitical battleground, drawing global superpowers northwards even as the region's wildlife and indigenous communities face unprecedented change. Let's join our host Helen Czerski now with more. Welcome to Intelligence.”
2026-03-13 · Intelligence Squared · What Is Really at Stake at the North Pole? With Neil Shea · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT