The Arctic Messenger Gains a Voice - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 28

I learned that Lars-Otto's meeting at the AARI was over, but we had to quickly find
each other's hotels because I was leaving for Geneva the following afternoon. Like me,
Lars-Otto had been told that I was booked at the Hotel Leningrad, but in those days, the
Soviet travel office (Intourist) put you where they felt like it at the moment when you
happened to walk in to claim your booking. There was no such thing as a single hotel desk
at a Soviet hotel. It was a succession of office windows that gradually brought you closer
to the Amazonian key lady on your assigned floor. I had “failed” at the first window of the
Hotel Leningrad and been reassigned to the Hotel Moscow. I knew that he would probably
never find me. Therefore, it all depended on my finding the Hotel Olympic. No one had a
clue where it was. It was a failed rendezvous. When I finally did meet Lars-Otto, he ex-
plained that the Hotel Olympic was the accommodations part of the Henrik Ibsen that had
been placed on a large barge and moored in the Neva River. The Henrik Ibsen had been a
sister to the Alexander Kielland , an offshore oil accommodations' platform that had cap-
sized with the loss of 123 lives at the Ekofisk Oilfield in March 1980. Immediately after
the accident, the Henrik Ibsen was removed from the North Sea and recycled to help with
an unanticipated impact of perestroika: a huge demand for hotel space in Russian cities.
ArcticgovernmentsheldtwomoreFinnishInitiativepreparatorymeetings:oneinYel-
lowknife(Canada) inApril1990andtheotherinKiruna(Sweden)inJanuary1991.During
this period, the proposed Arctic sustainable development strategy evolved into the Arctic
Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) and its component activities and programmes
began to take shape. The key development for Arctic environmental monitoring took place
in November 1990 at an expert meeting hosted by Norway at the Hotel Bristol in Oslo. It
was there that I finally met Lars-Otto and it was immediately obvious to me that we had an
outstanding champion for the Arctic environment. He had previously worked on the North
Sea Task Force, an international science programme set up to measure the state of health
of the North Sea. He could easily identify the key elements of cooperative monitoring and
the challenges we could expect. It was a long and difficult meeting. There will be more on
Lars-Otto's unique skills later, but they include the ability to focus on an objective while
listening carefully and sympathetically to what others have to say. He patiently guided us