NORTH TO THE FUTURE

A search for authentic reality in the climatic and geological extremes of Alaska.

The title refers to the state’s official motto, adapted with hope as the Prudhoe Bay oil fields above the Arctic Circle once promised a future of perpetual petroleum-based prosperity. But as those fields lie next to some of the largest remaining expanses of magnificently pristine wilderness on the planet, whether to exploit it or leave it alone has remained unresolved all these years later. Meanwhile, a half century of humans burning other kinds of fossil fuels has had alarming effects on Alaska’s spruce forests, permafrost underbelly, and mountain glaciers. Weissenbach, a writer from Los Angeles with more experience reading about adventure than living it, is the unlikely but eminently relatable protagonist of this highly readable mix of memoir, travelogue, and reportage on the arctic front of climate change. He serves as a smartphone-addicted 21st-century every-American foil to a roster of hardy, prickly, weather-beaten souls who have made a life studying, mapping, recording, and just living on the northernmost edges of the habitable (and barely inhabited) United States. For example, Roman Dial, a legendarily self-punishing adventurer and ornery climate scientist, leads the author and several better-adapted young Alaskans on two expeditions through the massive Brooks Range, one east toward the border with Canada in search of Alaska’s northernmost spruce, and one west toward the Bering Strait to catalog changes in the region’s flora and fauna. Enduring grizzly bears and packs of wolves, smoke-choked skies, and days of solitude in frigid endless nights, Weissenbach is pulled out of the two-dimensional world mediated by phone and computer screens into the awesome, terrifying, and beautiful existence changing rapidly and inexorably before his eyes.

John McPhee has a worthy successor.