Eliane Brum
Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty

Photography © Christian Åslund / Greenpeace –  Icebergs seen through the porthole of Greenpeace ship Esperanza, Antarctica, 2020

I had my hand stuck in a toilet in one of the nine bathrooms on the ship Arctic Sunrise when Tim Lewis pushed his tousled head through the door to tell me they would be showing a movie that evening about a virus that was devastating the whole world – except the Antarctic. Tim, a freelance marine biologist, was a member of a scientific expedition organized by Greenpeace and it was part of his mission to listen to whales, a task he threw himself into as if listening to a symphony from another world. I was concentrating on scrubbing out a dirty spot of unpleasantly explicit origin, and so I absorbed his information absentmindedly. At that moment, in January 2020, I had no way of knowing that Tim was not simply describing yet another disaster movie.

Leia o artigo completo na GRANTA (read it, in english – somente em inglês)