Bernice Notenboom is a Dutch climate journalist, filmmaker, and polar explorer whose life bridges the worlds of adventure and environmental storytelling. Born in 1962, she has journeyed to some of the planet’s most extreme frontiers—not to conquer them, but to listen to what they reveal about our changing world. She became the first Dutch woman to ski to the South Pole and later summited Mount Everest, experiences that shaped her deep understanding of endurance, vulnerability, and the fragile balance of nature.

Her work moves fluidly between exploration and communication. Through documentaries such as Sea Blind and books like Arctica: mijn biografie van de Noordpool and Survival Mind: De kunst van het overleven, Notenboom turns personal expedition into collective reflection. Her storytelling is not about heroic achievement but about witnessing—how the human mind and the planet both respond to crisis. In Survival Mind, she explores what happens when we are stripped of comfort and certainty: how clarity and creativity can emerge in moments of extremity.

What makes Notenboom’s voice distinctive is her way of connecting the outer landscape to the inner one. The ice, the mountains, and the storms become mirrors for the psychological and social climates we live in. She invites us to see resilience not as toughness, but as adaptability—the capacity to stay open in the face of change. Her narratives combine scientific awareness with poetic attention, making the reality of climate change feel deeply personal and human.

In this way, Bernice Notenboom stands as both explorer and interpreter. She gives shape to what might otherwise remain abstract—the melting Arctic, the invisible emissions, the slow transformations of the Earth. Through her writing, films, and talks, she challenges us to look beyond survival toward something more enduring: a way of living with the planet that honors both its limits and its beauty. 🌍