Vintage Books, 2005
On a Crash Course with Creation
When Gretel Ehrlich’s publisher asked her to write about climate change and the effects if we become “deseasoned,” she was living for six months on a Wyoming glacial moraine — snow pressing in on her tent. Ehrlich’s reflective journey in The Future of Ice encompasses Tierra del Fuego, the World Heritage glacier Perito Moreno, the Chilean Andes, and a 1,000-mile sail through the Arctic Ocean to Norway’s island of Spitsbergen.
This is not an ice and snow travelogue, however. The Future of Ice lays out the disturbing realities of a warming planet due to greenhouse gases by using both scientific findings and exquisite metaphor. As to why disappearing ice matters, she explains, “The Arctic is a canary giving warnings about the health of the planet. Its ills are a symptom that points to root causes of every ecosystem’s illness.”
Central to her “ode and lament” is the research community’s alarm (from NASA to academics) at the greatly-increased melting rate of ice sheets and glaciers at opposite ends of the globe. The cost to all species, from humans to plankton — polar bears and seals are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum — is devastating. As ice continues to vanish, no seals can raise their pups; no seals means no food for polar bears; no polar bears means no subsistence hunting for the Inuit, and this loop, one of many, collapses.
Only a handful of writers can combine the global with the personal, and science with the poetic. Ehrlich makes us feel the crisis not just from the head, but from the heart. Her internal questions convey grief as well as indignation at our “democracy of gratification” on a crash course with Creation due to short-term thinking. Reflecting on native peoples’ beliefs, she asks, “When did we begin thinking that weather was something to be rescued from? When did we trade in our ceremonial lives for the workplace?”
The Future of Ice is about a heavy topic, but the book is not heavy. Bits of personal conversation from her traveling companions about research, or about being seasick, offer a nice counterpoint to the big picture of climatic crisis. Her voice is as well-crafted as a Japanese brush painting — no extra strokes — beckoning us to “be driven into action by the wild beauty and difficulty of a place; to make decisions based on what we can do for the earth — not how much money we can pimp from it.”
A resident of Torrington, Conn., when she isn’t in Maine, Linda Beyus is a frequent contributor to Working Waterfront.