Anyone listening to Radio 4’s Book of the Week last week may be surprised by some of the facts revealed about the Arctic in Sara Wheeler’s The Magnetic North.

To write this book, Wheeler spent two years travelling around the five countries that make up the Arctic Circle: Canada, the United States, Denmark, Norway and Russia.

With each country’s own vast Arctic territory hosting its equally vast home-grown personalities, Wheeler has many stories to share.

From Alaska’s Sarah Palin to Chukotka’s (Russia’s little Chelsea) Roman Abramovich; from the formerly nomadic Inuit people to the Lapps (who have 300 words to describe the action of a ski on snow and who, until recently, castrated reindeer by biting off their balls, by the way), inspirational Arctic stories are plentiful.

Then, of course, there’s the multitude of scientists resident there, desperately trying to assess the future of this planet; their stories are equally, if not more, inspiring.

Once known best, perhaps, as a challenge for foolhardy explorers, the Arctic is now notorious as the front line for world energy supply (10 per cent of all our oil and 25 per cent of all our gas comes from the Arctic).Also, perhaps not coincidentally, as the home of environmental scientists. Listening to this Book of the Week, I, like the book’s author, was struck by some of the paradoxes of climate change. As a technologist, however, the paradox that touched me most was the ways in which technology is impacting Arctic societies.

So much of traditional Arctic life is now dead (indeed, because of this, she had to draw from the work of writers who came before her – such as Chekhov, Turi and Munthe): Whilst older Induits still wrap themselves up in seal skin before braving the outside to hunt for their tea, their grandchildren are sitting in front of the TV watching The Simpsons; where young parents once harvested cotton grass to heal their baby’s umbilicus, they now spend their time blogging about their newborn; where herders and hunters once roamed majestically across the ice, scientists now hang up their snowsuits in their purpose built Arctic science stations, desperately trying to understand what is happening to the environment around them.

Wheeler provides a very different perspective of these purpose built Arctic science stations than my fellow blogger Tim Rettig did in his summer posts: Satellite City in Barrow, Alaska; Barrow Alaska Project and High Availability in the Arctic, of course.  Both, however, pass on valid first hand accounts of how technology is being used to help people understand how our activities up here are poisoning lives down there, and what, maybe, we can, do about it.

Well worth listening in…