Arctic Heroes: A Tribute to the Sled Dogs of Greenland

Arctic Heroes takes a poignant look at the fate of the Greenlandicsled dog. In Greenland, where the melting ice sheet is irrevocablydisrupting the hunters’ 4,000-year old traditional way of life,the stark reality of global warming is an immediate and directthreat to their everyday survival.The Greenland dog, essential to Inuit settlement and survival,now faces extinction as hunters are forced to adapt to the vanishingworld around them. The sled dog population has shrunkfrom about 30,000 in 2009 to about 12,000 in 2019.In approximately 150 stunning images, and through hunters’personal stories, retold by the author, this book bears witnessto the animals’ magnificence and the deep, integral role theyplay in the hunters’ lives.The photographs included in this book were taken in Greenlandbetween 1986 and 2020.For over forty years, Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson,also known as RAX (b. 1958), has been photographing the people,animals, and landscape of the most remote regions of the Arctic,including Iceland, Siberia, and Greenland. In stark black-andwhiteimages, he captures the elemental, human experience ofnature at the edge of the liveable world, making visible the extraordinaryrelationships between the people of the Arctic andtheir extreme environment – relationships now being alteredin profound and complex ways by the unprecedented changes in climate.