Arctic
The white man's customs go the way of the mist. The world of newspapers, business, telephones, ballot-boxes, and jazz seems in memory no more real than his dream does to the sleeper awakened. Is it possible that somewhere there are people even now being ostracised by their kind for eating olives with a fork or peas with a knife? People who judge a man by his grooming, his bank account, or his ancestry? Our new world has stripped us to the fundamentals; and it is a salutary, if not a little humbling, to reflect that these fundamentals-intelligence, character and health-are not peculiarly human, that they are the same with men, with horses, with dogs, and with the ants.
Evidence of human occupation in the Arctic is littered around most of the places we visited. The Russian government has a programs of work to clean up some areas, but the funding comes and goes. The rangers on Wrangel Island have done a lot of work to move most of the rubbish to settled areas of the island. — at Wrangel Island.