In praise of Sara Wheeler, a clear-sighted laureate of the world’s frozen regions

In this age of head-mounted HD cameras and space tourism, the role of the travel writer seems unclear. Brave and erudite souls such as Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin once bestrode the culture, taking readers to places of which they could only dream (or, indeed, read), teaching them about those far-off lands but also what it means to be alive anywhere. Though visiting much of the world no longer requires intrepid travel, there are still places that remain terra incognita in the popular imagination. These are the ones that Sara Wheeler likes to visit.

The writer’s work, which is mostly dedicated to Earth’s polar regions, has a frosty sheen. Her book about the Arctic, The Magnetic North, is essential for understanding a part of the world whose significance has grown since Donald Trump’s threats against Greenland. In a dazzling tour d’horizon, Wheeler lays out why the region has so beguiled those from lands further south, while also detailing what life is like for the Arctic’s people and what it takes to survive (and thrive) in such challenging terrain. Its introduction includes the line: “The survival of civilisation as we know it hangs on what happens in the Arctic.” But the book is not simply a climate-change jeremiad. It is a story about people that achieves the universal, providing a torch for our collective humanity to warm and light the road ahead, however icy it might be.