Zoe Matties describes the four months she spent taking groups on tours between Argentina, the Falkland Islands, Georgia and Antarctica with One Ocean Expeditions as “holy moments.”
“It’s just this vast, mountainous, ice-covered piece of land in the middle of nowhere,” she enthuses in a phone interview from her home in Winnipeg. “Often, we’d go there and sit, and we’d be surrounded by penguins and the baby ones would come and nibble on your fingers. And then humpback whales would come and swim beside your boat and look you in the eye.”
But her trips between civilization and the undeveloped bottom of the world made her keenly aware of climate change and the devastating effects humans are having on the world—even by their visits to such far-flung locations.
Fish and bird populations are declining because people overfish and take away the bird’s prey, according to Matties. “And krill [which has decreased in numbers by 80 percent] is the keystone species for all the animals; the penguin populations and whales are declining,” she says sadly.
When she returned home to Winnipeg in May, the Canadian Mennonite University grad spoke to her home church, River East MB, about her trip. She told a story of seeing a glacier “calving,” when a large chunk of ice breaks off and falls into the ocean. It happens quite often in Antarctica, and even more so lately due to warming temperatures, she explains.
Matties drew on Romans 8:22, which says, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” She compares it to the experience of the groan of the iceberg pained by the effects of humanity.
In her time abroad, Matties says she felt struck by the interconnectedness of the earth. “Even though Antarctica is this really far-off place that we think we don’t have any impact on it because it’s so far away, it isn’t. It’s a part of a web of relationships of the ecosystem of the world. If God loves it, he also takes joy in the fact that we would love it.”
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