ANCHORAGE, AK (PNAN) – Opening Friday, November 19, 2021 at the Anchorage Museum, “Borealis: Life in the Woods” exhibition presents the images of Dutch photographer Jeroen Toirkens and words of journalist Jelle Brandt Corstius, who together visited forests in the boreal zone from 2016 to 2019, highlighting the stories of the forests and the people who live there, features loggers in Norway and scientific research in Japan, to newly planted forests in Scotland and the final chapter in Alaska.
The boreal zone region is known by different names by the Americans and Canadians, call it the Great Northern Forest or the Boreal forest (from borealis, Latin for northern), while the Russians call it Taiga, a word borrowed from one of the nomadic peoples who inhabit the coniferous forests of Siberia.
It is the largest vegetation zone on earth and can be called a world forest because it stretches from Alaska to Russia via Canada, Scotland, Scandinavia and Japan, covering 17.5 percent of the earth’s surface and containing 30 percent of the world’s trees.
Aside from their awe-inspiring beauty, these vast forests are Indigenous land for many in the region and provide habitats for a wide variety of animal and plant species, and constitute the largest carbon dioxide sink on earth after the oceans; therefore are of immense importance for the planet’s ecological balance.
Their value is little known and less than 12 percent of the forests have protected status, which are threatened from all sides, from commercial logging, invasive plant species and rampant forest fires.
The exhibit charts the journey that Toirkens and Brandt Corstius made through the region in eight chapters; moreover now the effects of climate change can be seen and felt more clearly, especially in the High North. https://vimeo.com/495174092