North to the Future
An Offline Adventure through the Changing Wilds of Alaska
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North to the Future
Narrated by:
Ben Weissenbach
Buy Now for $26.99
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Narrated by:
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Ben Weissenbach
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By:
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Ben Weissenbach
About this listen
At the age of twenty, college student Ben Weissenbach went north to Arctic Alaska armed with little more than inspiration from his literary heroes and a growing interest in climate change. What met him there was a world utterly unlike the 21st century Los Angeles in which he grew up—a land of ice, rock, and grizzlies seen by few outside a small contingent of scientists with big personalities.
There’s Roman Dial, the larger-than-life ecologist with whom Ben walks and rafts a thousand miles across Alaska’s Brooks Range. There’s Kenji Yoshikawa, the reindeer-herding permafrost expert who leaves Ben alone for eleven days to care for his off-grid homestead, where temperatures drop to -49 degrees Fahrenheit. And there’s Matt Nolan, the independent glaciologist who flies him to the largest glaciers in the American Arctic.
As these scientists teach Ben to read Alaska's warming landscape, he confronts the limits of digital life and the complexity of the world beyond his screens. He emerges from each adventure with a new perspective on our modern relationship to technology and a growing wonder for our fast-changing—ever-changing—natural world.
Critic Reviews
"North to the Future is a kind of bildungsroman of perception -- a story of learning to see and hear and feel by venturing out in the wild. It is a beautiful and necessary book."
—Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction
—Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction
"Ben Weissenbach’s absorbing North to the Future is packed with fascinating and eccentric adventurer/scientists, hair-raising wildlife encounters and haunting landscapes—all in the tradition of his teacher, John McPhee. But Weissenbach offers a contrasting dimension unique to a writer of his era: how all this reality feels to a 20-something raised on the airless virtual world of the 4”x2” screen. The book thus carries a double warning: of a threatened external environment and an internal one, too."
—John Colapinto, New York Times bestselling author of This is the Voice
"Far and away the best outdoor adventure book I’ve read in years. It takes a dire but somewhat distant topic, climate change, and brings it to within inches of your face, so you can hear the snuffle of grizzlies and the glassy crackling as the glaciers recede. In the process, it gently nudges us to relearn the raw art of being human: to walk softly, to see sharply, to be—vitally—present."
—Robert Moor, best-selling author of On Trails: An Exploration
—Robert Moor, best-selling author of On Trails: An Exploration
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