Like many people who have arduous and dangerous jobs, Bjørnar is uninterested in narrating his hardships. Fishing is the task, hardship is the cost, and the rewards are clear to him: he is the sole ruler of his floating kingdom of one, he earns a living, and he satisfies his profound love of the sea. He has no intention of giving up his fishing until his body forces him to do so. Life on land is, anyway, scarcely less hazardous. Fifteen years ago Bjørnar fell twenty feet between levels in a factory. He drove his wrist into his forearm and fractured his pelvis. He was in hospital, he tells me, waving his hand dismissively at my concern, ‘for some weeks’.
There is something of the polar bear to Bjørnar: there in his powerful physique, his heftedness to the north, those white eyes, and of course in his name: Bjørnar, the Bear, from the Old Norse björn. He is an intense, intelligent presence; a person you would want fighting for you and would dread as an enemy. He is not without self-regard, but I do not begrudge him that.
There is also a strong mystical streak to Bjørnar: unexpected, perhaps, in a man whose working life compels him daily to such pragmatism and self-reliance. But – as I will learn – Bjørnar looks often through things: hard into them and right through them with those pale eyes of his. He looks through people, through bullshit and through the surface of the sea.
Bjørnar settles himself in a big black swivel chair near the window, from which he can keep an eye on the water of the fjord. I jounce chubby Sigrid on my knee, delighted to have been trusted with a baby.
‘When I was a young man, do you know, Rob, I decided I would never leave my island of Andøya.’
‘It’s a rare thing these days, to stay so rooted,’ I say.
‘Maybe. To me it was obvious. This island has everything I need for a long lifetime, and I love it.’
He pauses.
‘Yesterday Ingrid and I watched killer whales, just there,’ He points east to the sea channel. ‘Orca, a family of them. We watched them for free!
Bjørnar stresses the final words of any sentence. He speaks with a plosive and idiomatically perfect English. He rolls his rs, he pops his ps and bs, and he adds a stressed schwa to the end of many words. STOPPP-uh. BOAT-uh. RRRROB-uh.
‘I have been to Oslo, of course, but I never like being off this island, unless I am in my fishing boat. This island, Rob, it grew me up.’
Ingrid sits nearby. Sigrid begins grizzling, and Ingrid passes me a teething ring. I ask Ingrid about her own childhood. She tells a remarkable story. She grew up on an island so small and remote it was a two-hour boat journey to the next largest island, itself a substantial boat journey from the mainland.
‘Our island was home to ten families when I was born,’ says Ingrid. ‘Which meant it was really home to one big family.’ I think of the Refsvika settlement – Ingrid’s had been even further out, even smaller.
‘Oh yes, I knew every inch of my island!’ she says, smiling. ‘When we were young we explored, that was what we did. No one with us to take care of us except ourselves. We knew each part of that place.’
One by one the families left, though, and by the time Ingrid was in secondary school only two families remained.
‘Gradually, the government made it more and more difficult for us to live there, and so we were forced to “come in” to the mainland. And that was where I met Bjørnar . . .’ She trails off with a smile.
Bjørnar bellows with laughter.
‘Never leave your island! That is the moral of that story, Rob! You will immediately find yourself in trouble for the rest of your days! Now, come – sit here by the table, I will bring the charts and show you where we will go together these coming days,’ he says.
He lays a chart out on the table. It is dog-eared and stained with what looks like blood. It is traversed by arcing purple lines and dotted with depth marks and buoy positions. It shows the northern half of Andøya, the fjord-cut western edge of the mainland, and perhaps forty miles of open sea to the north and west of the coast. Contours indicate the shifting depths of the seabed.
‘Here is Andenes, from where we will sail tomorrow,’ says Bjørnar, indicating with his forefinger. ‘And look, here!’ He moves his fingertip north by four or five miles, to a point where the contour lines bunch close together and tuck back in on themselves. On a mountain it would represent a gorge cutting through big cliffs. I have a flashback to the Lofotens and my crossing of the Wall.
‘Here in Andøya we call this the Edge,’ Bjørnar says, running his finger back and forth along the bunched lines. ‘Here in Andøya, we live – how do you say it – on a bookend. This drop-off, this cliff, it happens only a few nautical miles from the coast. This is why the fishing is so rich and easy here: the fish gather at the Edge, and we do not need to go far to harvest them.’
He shakes his head.
‘To me the land does not stop when it dips into the ocean. It keeps on going and I know that land under the sea as well as I know this world above. I can see it as well as you can see that.’ He gestures through the window at the fjord.
‘It’s the knowledge about what is under the surface that for all times has kept these coastal people and this coast alive.
‘And here,’ he continues, jabbing his forefinger repeatedly into the chart near the Edge. ‘Here in some of the finest fishing grounds in the Arctic, here is where they were sonic blasting, testing for oil, here is where those idiots want to place the rigs.’
~
On 15 June 1971 production began in the offshore oilfield known as Ekofisk, sited to the south-west of the Norwegian continental shelf. At that point the extent of the Norwegian oil-holdings was still unknown, but the rapid success of Ekofisk began a speculative oil-rush along the west and north-west coasts of Norway. The Norwegian government responded quickly, creating Statoil in 1972 and establishing the principle of substantial state participation in each production licence issued for these wealthy waters.
Oil is Norway’s life-blood. Its system – political, infrastructural – is thickly oiled, through and through. Substantial taxes have always been applied to the income produced by oil and gas: in under half a century of operations, the oil industry has generated a national sovereign wealth fund – the Oljefondet, or Oil Fund – of more than three-quarters of a trillion pounds, equivalent to around £150,000 per citizen. The petroleum sector accounts for almost a quarter of value-creation in the country as a whole; almost a third of the country’s total real investments are oil-based. Huge sums have been invested by both companies and government together in oil exploration and oilfield development, as well as transport, supply and support facilities.
Yes, it is oil – and the Gulf Stream – that have made Norway’s modernization possible. One of the country’s most distinctive features is its combination of infrastructure and wilderness. The road that runs the length of the Lofotens – an engineering miracle that connects more than 100 miles of islands, involving undersea tunnels, mountain tunnels, avalanche-sheltered high roads, and dozens of bridges – was paid for in part from the oil chest. Norway loves nature, it loves technology too, and it sees these chiefly as complementary rather than opposed categories.
But Norwegian oil is running down. Around the turn of the millennium, production from the North Sea fields peaked at 3.4 million barrels per day. By 2012 it had reduced to almost half that level, with a correspondingly diminished income to the sovereign wealth fund. The obvious solution to the dwindling production volume was – and remains – to open new oilfields. Attention turned to the North Norwegian and Barents seas. Early in the 2000s, interest grew in the possibilities of tapping the reserves that were thought to exist beneath the waters off the Lofoten and Vesterålen islands. Around 1.3 billion barrels of oil were estimated to be buried near these archipelagos. The drilling areas were in relatively shallow water, were relatively close to land, and their geology promised steady returns. They represented good oil and – compared to other drill sites being considered much further north in the Barents Sea, where Arctic
conditions drastically increased extraction costs – they represented cheap oil.
However, these same seas are also home to one of the world’s largest cold-water reefs, and the Lofoten and Vesterålen archipelagos are among the most astonishing coastal landscapes in the world, drawing visitors from across the globe in a highly remunerative tourism industry. The waters off the island groups are also home to the fishing grounds that have been Norway’s gold for a thousand years, long before the discovery of oil. Dried cod from those fishing grounds was thought to have been carried as a staple seafood by the Vikings on their founding voyages to Iceland and Greenland. Cod is the nation’s founding fish – its original wealth fund.
The issue of whether to drill for oil off Lofoten and Vesterålen has, over the past fifteen years, become a battle for the soul of Norway. The stakes are high and the forces are powerful. On the one side is a state machinery lubricated by oil money, and a population indebted to and embedded in oil culture. On the other are Norway’s perception of itself as a green nation – devoted to a secular religion of nature, committed to reducing global temperature rise and to fighting climate change – and its ancient identity as a fishing nation. Point 112 of Norway’s constitution declares that ‘natural resources should be managed based on long-term considerations, safeguarded for future generations’, and this is seen by many in the country to countermand the opening of new oilfields, especially in fragile northern waters.
During the 2000s, as the first proposals to drill off the Lofoten and Vesterålen islands took shape, so too did resistance to the plans. Those opposed to the drilling began to organize. Unlikely alliances were formed. A coalition emerged uniting national green groups (especially young people), local activists from the islands, conservationists, environmentalists and fishermen. The campaigners quickly learned how to make their case more visible. They took their battle to the capital, to the airwaves and to the newspapers. They held torchlit protest marches through Oslo. They convened public meetings by the twilight of the midsummer-night sun on the beaches of the islands under threat.
One of the people who at that time became a leading figure in the fight was Bjørnar Nicolaisen.
~
We leave for the Edge just after dawn, chugging through the breakwater sequence of Andenes harbour. Thud and splutter of the engine, a high blue sky, the sea oil-film still. Sunlight flaring green and red in the ice crystals caught in my eyelashes. Two thin reefs of white cloud to the west; otherwise clear, cold and still. Perfect fishing weather on a northern ocean.
Out past the last harbour arm. Snow-lines of peaks to east, west and south, dropping to the sea. A raft of eider on the swell, and a single cormorant perched on a tidewater mark, facing the sun, its wings cranked open into an iron cross. Then three swans steadily overhaul us, wings creaking like doors, flying north into Arctic space.
‘You tell me what to do and what not to do out here, and I’ll obey,’ I say to Bjørnar.
He looks back at me, tilts his head quizzically. ‘You obey rules? I never do!’ A barked loud laugh. ‘But for today, my rule for you is – don’t fall in! Anything else is fine.’
Bjørnar is wearing a raccoon-skin hat. The head of the raccoon is still attached and sits immediately above Bjørnar’s forehead, gazing forwards. Its body has been curled over a skullcap and stitched into place, with its tail hanging down at the back. The raccoon looks comfortable; a long-term squatter.
The raccoon’s eyes have been replaced with gleaming black false eyeballs. The effect is very disconcerting. Whenever I speak to Bjørnar I find myself looking into four seemingly sightless eyes, two of them jet black and two of them ghost white.
Out beyond the breakwaters the swell comes in long, slow hummocks, moving towards and then beneath us, tilting the boat sometimes by twenty or thirty degrees to the horizontal. The compass slopes in its gimbal with each peak and trough. Bjørnar moves around the boat as easily as if it were dry-docked.
The boat is a thirty-three-footer: a Libra class, Norwegian-made. It is called Trongrun, ‘Seabed of Tron’. Bjørnar bought it fifteen years previously from a man in Finnmark County for a million kroner. It is a hard-working space, stripped to the essentials, messy but efficient. A cockpit cabin with a sealable door for running in big seas. Two winches on the starboard side drawing two jig-lines, one fore and one aft, the aft line held clear of the propeller by a metal arm that can be swung out to starboard. Four hooks on each jig-line, with sand-eel or squid lures. It is about as simple a rig as could be – but more than enough in waters as good as these, with quotas as tight as they are.
Knives cling by their blades to a magnetic strip next to the cabin door. Lines of red and yellow lures are hooked in rows to the edge of the table in the cockpit. Bjørnar is wearing neoprene boots with grippy soles, yellow and blue waterproof salopettes, an orange jacket – and the raccoon. Every half an hour or so he takes a fresh plug of black tobacco from a tin, lifts back his cheek and slots it into place between gum and cheek, as if inserting a new bit of software.
Above the dashboard of the cockpit is a brown baseball cap: salt-marked and bloodstained. It glitters with fish scales. I tap it with my fingers. It’s hard as a fossil. The fish-finder hums and updates on a split-screen monitor: a jaggy Rorschach of orange, green and white.
‘The white line shows the seabed,’ says Bjørnar, pointing to the monitor. ‘The orange above it shows the fish.’
‘And what is the orange and the green beneath the seabed?’ I ask. ‘That is the underworld, Rob! That is the OIL!’
We roll on over those blue hills.
‘Now,’ says Bjørnar later. ‘Now we are going out over the Edge. Here the land, how would you say it, plummets away beneath us.’
I feel my stomach drop, and have a sudden recollection of moving along in the drift tunnels of Boulby Mine years previously, passing underneath the threshold of the coastline and then out below the North Sea.
A plume of gulls follows us, crying into the wind. Bigger, longer waves, the boat riding them out. The spire of the Andenes lighthouse thinning with distance. I have the casket with me, think about slipping it overboard once we have crossed the Edge. There will be few deeper places.
‘As a fisherman,’ says Bjørnar, ‘you have to be able to see through the water. When you are out here, you can’t see anything. But I? I can see the shape of the landscape underneath us: there are bumps and valleys and mountains down there, and streams flowing, and fish moving in those streams. To be able to imagine this, you have to use your brain at the same time as watching your machinery, talking with friends on the radio here’ – he taps the two-way – ‘and sometimes it’s heavy waves, freezing cold, and we have to turn the boat up into the wind. Yes, fishermen must be multitaskers!’
He booms with laughter – and then stops smiling.
‘We face death every morning to bring food to those idiots onshore,’ he says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Politician-idiots. The people who want to blast open this seabed for more oil.’
A kittiwake among the gulls now.
‘Cod were here long before the oil was found, and they will be here – if we let them – long after the oil is gone. Cod fed the Vikings on their journeys, and they feed us now. When man has become so crazy that he is willing to offer his food in order to get more rich, more oil, then the craziness is complete and we have no hope any longer.’
Bjørnar’s fight with big oil began in the spring of 2007, when the Petroleum Directorate – the government agency responsible for regulating the oil and gas resources on the Norwegian continental shelf – arrived in Andøya. The Directorate had already reached out to marine biologists and to fishermen’s unions in the north of Norway, preparing the way for their campaign of suasion in Andøya and Lofoten. Now they wanted community endorsement for their plan to open up new fields beyond the Edge. Among the evidence they showed in favour of their plans was data gathered by seismic mapping.
Seismic mapping is a means of seein
g the marine underland. A specialist ship carrying a low-frequency, high-volume air gun fires sound pulses into the water. These pulses are powerful enough to penetrate some distance into the sea floor, before reflecting back upwards to where they are recorded by seismic sensors dragged on long cables behind the ship. The blasts can occur at intervals of under a minute, for weeks or months at a time. Barely audible above the surface, they fathom the seabed. But the sound blasts also travel for hundreds of miles laterally below water, sending thunderclaps sideways through the ocean. Seismic surveys are used not only by the oil industry, but also to target deep-sea sedimentary sections that are suitable for unravelling the nature and causes of past climate change, so that models for future climate change can be tested and refined. Most survey boats now carry specialist observers who watch for cetaceans and order firing to cease if they are seen, and who advise on how best to schedule blasting to avoid migratory patterns. Controversy and uncertainty nevertheless surround the technique, especially concerning its effect on whales, dolphins and other marine life.
A public meeting was called in Andenes, where the Directorate representatives laid out what they were framing as a ‘consultation’ with the people of Andøya about the possibilities of further oil prospecting, including more seismic blasting.
Bjørnar checks the lures on the jig rigs as he speaks.
‘I remember sitting on a chair there, listening to the first people talking. And I was thinking – it’s over. It’s already been planned, all fixed. The testing is already happening. This consultation is to me a performance, how do you say – a sham! It’s over! They are coming for the seabed, and to destroy our livelihoods.’ He pauses.
‘And at the same time I was thinking, I would like to see myself grow old, and maybe when I am old I will sit in a chair unable to move myself, and know then that I didn’t do anything to stop this. So I thought to myself, I must begin this fight now, today!’
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