Yesterday was World Environment Day. A day to think about our environment and what positive actions we can take to improve it. Every summer when I’m on Spitsbergen, I find garbage everywhere. Driftwood of course, brought by different currents from Siberia, but also lots of plastic straps, bags, crates, fishing nets and so on. Even bath ducks… Most of it is not produced on Spitsbergen, but carried by the gulf stream and dropped on the beach. When I find a beach like that, I ask the guests to help and pick up some of it. The collection of garbage was the result of such a clean up action where we cleared 200 meters of beach… We took it with us on the ship and brought it back to the ‘capital’, where we can deposit it for free. The governour or Spitsbergen has made a special program “Clean up Svalbard”, asking tourist ships to do so. Together we’ve cleaned up large parts of the archipelago, turning it a bit more into the wilderness it should be…