Egg Island Journal: Tuesday, August 5

Our days here on Egg Island have now stretched to weeks. Each new day brings us something different to think about and report to our campaign crew and to the public. The major events in our lives are the weather and the consistently incomprehensible activities of the oil industry.

In many ways it is curious that we are able to contact anyone at all. Egg Island is a very remote location. As the eyes and ears of this campaign here in the Arctic and we must be able to communicate what we see and hear to the world beyond the Beaufort Sea coast. Our methods of contact are complex. We use a pretty amazing system to send our messages and pictures out of here, a system that allows us to see something here one minute and and you to see it up on the world wide web the next (almost).

Everything is based on our little wind generator. We power a 12 volt battery bank which is rigged through a voltage regulator to a rack of car-type cigartette lighter plugs. The regulator keeps track of how much power we generate and how much we use each day, so we can control our consumption and avoid slipping into a power deficit.

The gear we run off the wind system is the key to our information access. The center of the system is a brawny laptop computer with email, word processing and image manipulation software. We have a clever little digital camera which records images that we immediately download into the computer. To accompany our digital pictures, we write numerous messages and diary entries that describe what we see occuring here each day. These reports and diaries go into our email system for transmission off of Egg Island.

To export our message we use two communications tools. The first is a cellular telephone with a beefy antenna attached to our radio mast. This cell phone connects us to the edge of the cell phone network serving the oil complex around Prudhoe Bay. Our cell phone provides us voice connection to everyone we need to talk with, and is able to link with our computer via data modem to send and receive email messages. Each day a thin stream of data squirts out above the oil field from our base camp, carrying information about what these companies are doing to the arctic coast.

To back up the cell phone, we have a small satellite telephone the size of a laptop computer. A very sophisticated piece of machinery, it connects us with a satellite high over the Pacific Ocean which in turn fires our messages to the land-based telephone network. Because our cell phone can't quite handle the size and complexity of picture image data files, we transmit our web page images straight through the sat phone. It's amazing to be able to connect our camp to anyplace on earth via a tiny box no larger than a notebook, and to connect our computer through it to send pictures and news to our web page. All run off the wind sweeping across our island, via a 12 volt cigarette plug. Pretty cool system, eh Joe?

The other pieces of our communications are a set of VHF radios that allow us to talk between our camp and boats when we are scouting or exploring the land and sea around us. This is our lifeline for working in a cold and unpredictable environment. And of couse, we use many conventional film cameras and a video camera to record what we see.

It all adds up to a very effective system for gathering and sharing information about the oil industry's activities here on the Arctic Ocean. We've seen huge gas flares burning a hundred feet tall along the horizon. Each day we see columns of oily black smoke pouring into the sky as one pump station or another burns unknown oily waste. Sometimes this black smoke is so thick and intense that it looks like there has been an explosion at a well head. We have listened in on radio transmissions talking about a spill here or an accident there and how the clean up crews need to get some gear and mop up the tundra. In the twilight of the arctic night, the oil field developments to the south look like some sort of post-apocalyptic war zone with their gas flare fires and black smoke. Only to the north, out in the Arctic Ocean, is there still dark and quiet during the night. At least for now....

We're here to see all this and pass the pictures along to everyone who cares to see. Our fossil fuel addiction kills, from the time the oil comes out of the ground until the time it finally floats upward into the air as a greenhouse gas. It's time for us to change to a more benign method of powering our society, before the last frontiers are drilled and destroyed and the gasses released push our climate beyond the point of no return. We can change now if enough people hear the message and choose to act. It's not too late if we work together.

Tom
Radio Operator, Arctic Base Camp