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June 17, 2024 - In-Svalbard
I wakeup a bit late and after a quick breakfast I strike out on a morning run. I first head up Adventdalen, crossing the piping conduit bridge and then running parallel to the stream along a mixture of gravel paths and roads until I’ve gone about halfway to Nybyen. I then cross back over the stream on a second more robust bridge that goes up past the church and circles back to toward Mary Ann’s after a hill descent. Completing that loop, I return to the main road that connects the airport to Longyearbyen and run it’s length up the fjord until I reach the dog yard and the polar bear sign that indicates the limits of town. It’s much more remote out here, even though I can clearly see housing and apartment buildings further up on the hillside about a half mile back towards town. I pick my way up the slope towards said buildings, and then cut back through town past Blåmyra and the main commerce center. After the run, I shower and drop by Cafe Huskies, a coffee shop in town that Jonas mentioned during our hike a few days ago. I get a coffee and a slice of cake and am surprised by two literal husky dogs hanging out in the seating area, from whom I now realize the shop got its name.
The cafe is small, occupying one half of a storefront that it shares with Svalbardposten, the two establishments separated by a mudroom vestibule for shoes. It’s packed today, filled with English tourists off of a cruiseship that docked in the port earlier. Two of these guests sit across from me, and we somehow get to chatting. They seem fairly self-aware, with one of them saying “they must love us here” with a tinge of sarcasm, referring to the waves of people entering the cafe. Suddenly, a reindeer is spotted outside, and everyone flocks to the windows and runs outside to take a picture. I finish off my coffee, and move on from the cafe.
My next stop today is the Svalbard museum, hosted in the same building as UNIS. Once again leaving my shoes in the lobby, I buy a ticket and proceed into the main exhibition space, where I follow a timeline mapped to the walls that wraps around the building. The timeline starts in prehistoric Svalbard and runs all the way to the current year, with different sections dedicated to distinct eras of the island’s development. The middle of the room highlights the wildlife indigenous to this region, including taxidermy for all major fauna. I’m being brief here with this description, but I spend nearly two hours browsing the museum - some of it I already knew from my own research or from my previous visit to the Polar Museum in Tromsø, though many things surprised me (including cartography of mineral resource allocation/concentration across the island, which I’d been searching for in vain for quite a while).
After the museum I take a nap in my room before going over to a restaurant to meet up with a local journalist, Tobias, who I’d been corresponding with for a while about current events on the island. We discuss the new voting laws and the Svalbardmelding. Tobias admits that prior to moving up here for school, he had no idea just how different Svalbard was from mainland Norway - having lived here for a year, and now working as a journalist for the summer, he has a much better understanding though he still finds it strange that he can vote for local council members when others who have been here closer to a decade cannot. The conversation shifts to tourism and logistics, and I find out that Tobias visited the owner of Co-op earlier today to interview him about the stressed shipping schedules due to reduced cargo flights. The journalist tells me the Co-op boss was angry, angry that mainland Norway is stepping into local business just to restrict it and angry that a junior journalist was sent to interview him - he thinks it’s a bigger issue that needs to be highlighted prominently by Svalbardposten’s best. Tobias tells me that any and all cargo shipments containing goods sold inside of Co-op were coordinated personally by the owner, who directly subsidized a portion of those flights to make sure products and produce could be stocked on shelves here in Svalbard. He is now having to interface with and plan around commercial flights, a task which he has very little sway over. When flights don’t come, or tourists book all of the flights, there’s little to nothing anyone here can do to ensure there won’t be shortages of certain items. It’s not until later that I understand the deeper problem with tourists booking flights - the biggest issue is when everyone on the plane books a flight to Longyearbyen and then immediately boards a ship going on a two week cruise around the island; this double whammy ensures no products are shipped on that flight and no money is spent in town.
My discussion with Tobias circles back to the built environment, and what it enables and/or prevents for people living here. The journalist explains how his housing for the summer was assigned to him by the company he works for, and because of this he needs to either enroll in a UNIS program this fall or plan to leave the island. We also discuss the lack of more permanent infrastructure on the island, like competent hospitals. The recent Svalbardmelding addressed vocalizations by residents regarding a lack of early childhood facilities, better hospital care, senior citizen and mental health resources - these concerns were met with a sort of blanket statement: no one has the guaranteed right to live in Svalbard, if parents are concerned with wanting better schools for their children they should take them elsewhere. Here we see a total reversal of the rhetoric embedded in the motif that seems to be the first thing advertised about Svalbard: anyone is free to come here without a visa, anyone is free to work here.
This attitude from the government is pervasive down to almost every aspect of the built environment, though it’s at odds with Norway’s desire to make this place somewhere desirable and attractive to mainland Norwegians. In particular, Tobias emphasizes the lack of mental health resources - he says that this place takes a toll on people, especially during the long winters with no sunlight. I mention that I saw an opinion piece in the copy of the Svalbardposten that I picked up earlier in the week, an article directly called this topic out - it was written by Lene, the woman that organized the community cleanup. In the article she says the exact same thing Tobias is telling me now: many people are depressed, but no one will admit it. If you visit a doctor here in Longyearbyen and mention symptoms of depression, they will insist you need to go back to mainland Norway, or wherever you’ve come from, to seek treatment. Here we see the built environment in a remote location, or the lack thereof, being weaponized against its populace, which resounds in tandem with the very same situation being leveraged with the island’s housing stock. Tobias concludes with a fairly damning statement: “only perfect people can live here”, you can’t be sick and you can’t be depressed, you’re discouraged from being too young and you can’t be too old, you can’t get pregnant or you have to go to a better hospital on the mainland, and you better make sure you can work or you won’t have housing. To top it off, hopefully you’re also Norwegian, otherwise you can’t vote and you certainly aren’t part of Norway’s envisioned future for this place.
location: Longyearbyen (SJ)
ext air temp: 47.1 F
relative humidity: 66.1%
dew point: 36.8 F
wet bulb: 42.6 F