Arctic With Bruce Parry

Bruce travels to Alaska, America's last great wilderness, where modern-day pioneers are harvesting the vast natural wealth of the seas. Bruce learns the ropes onboard a salmon-fishing boat, and dives to the bottom of the Bering Sea to look for gold. In the far north Bruce witnesses the annual whale hunt of the Inupiak people whose ancient tradition is now at odds with the modern world and questions what is more important: the life of a whale or the death of a culture?

Bruce travels to the far north of Canada to live with the Caribou people and witness their annual spring hunt. The Gwitchin tribe has hunted migrating caribou in the Arctic wilderness for thousands of years, but this tradition is now under threat from oil exploration. Bruce then heads south to the tar sands of Alberta, home to the second largest oil reserves in the world, to discover how native people cope when the oil industry moves into their territory.

The final stage of Bruce Parry's six-month journey is through Arctic Europe. He travels to a remote Russian village, deep within the vast Boreal forest that stretches for thousands of miles across the top of the world. Life here has changed little for hundreds of years, and people still depend on the food they gather from the woods that surround them. Bruce then travels north into Norway, where he lives with the Saami, reindeer herders who use snow machines, boats and even helicopters to move their animals. Bruce's last stop is a remote scientific community in the Svalbard archipelago, where he learns about the fragility of Arctic ecosystem. As the long winter night draws in, Bruce is treated to an iconic Arctic spectacle as the aurora borealis light up the night sky.