| THE END OF ICE Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption Dahr Jamail New York: The New Press, January 2019 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-62097-234-2 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-62097-234-4 | 257pp. | HC/BWI | $25.99 | |
Like Jonathan Waterman of Where Mountains Are Nameless, Dahr Jamail covers the country. For this book, his third, he ranged widely. As he puts it,
My original aim with this book was to provide a view of what was happening around the world: from the heights of Denali to the Great Barrier Reef; from the remote, windswept islands in the Bering Sea to the Florida coast. I wanted to explore how the forests across the western United States were impacted by drought and wildfire and investigate what was happening to the Amazon, the largest rain forest on Earth. Knowing that most people will likely never visit those of those places, I hoped to bring home to the reader the urgency of what is happening to the glaciers, forests, wildlife, coral reefs, and oceans, alongside data provided by leading scientists who study them. – Page 7 |
The high peaks captured his soul early in his life, and he returns to them as often as he can. After a ten-year stint in the Middle East as a war correspondent, he turned to environmental reporting and produced this book, along with numerous articles and interviews.1 He tells us that the time he spent in war-torn Iraq was less arduous than witnessing the effects of climate disruption. I can sympathize: we humans have always had wars to vex us, but wrecking our home world's entire climate is something new and unique, a skill only recently mastered.
Much like the sacrifice zones Naomi Klein describes, environmental sacrifice zones are not only ugly, but causes of long-lasting harm to the human prospect.
These are only a few of the places Jamail shows us. The misery of the humans in those places comes through — as does the fact that all Earth is now an environmental sacrifice zone. And the Trump administration reportedly will shut down the Denali Commission,3 a program to relocate Alaskan villages threatened by climate changes.
I venture into the wilds and into the mountains in large part to allow space and time to stretch themselves back to what they were. The frenetic pace of contemporary life is having a devastating impact on this planet. Humans have transformed more than half the ice-free land on Earth. We have changed the composition of the atmosphere and the chemistry of the oceans from which we came. We now use more than half the planet's readily accessible freshwater runoff, and the majority of the world's major rivers have been either dammed or diverted. As a species, we now hang over the abyss of a geoengineered future we have created for ourselves. At our insistence, our voracious appetite is consuming nature itself. We have refused to heed the warnings Earth has been sending, and there is no rescue team on its way. – Page 9 |
Indeed, this account begins with him hanging over an abyss himself: dangling deep in a crevasse in Alaska's Matanuska Glacier, saved from death by the narrowest of margins, on Earth Day 2003.
Rescued by his climbing companions, he went on to visit the world's environmental sacrifice zones: the places where climate change and the other depredations of humankind are hitting the earliest and hardest. He immersed himself in them, grokking and cherishing the changes going on around him — although, to extend the analogy, the impact on his soul was often harsh, requiring profound adjustment.
He brings back to us, and presents in these pages, the grim lessons he has learned. Such as the one I quote above. He reports in detail on location-specific lessons: that Alaska's glaciers are going away soon; that half the world's coral reefs will soon be dead; that ranching and mining in Brazil will lead to a drastic loss of diversity in the Amazon rain forest. The loss of scenic snow-capped mountaintops and the disappearances of colorful species, from fireflies to reef fish, is bad enough. But these aesthetic harms mask a variety of very real material damage, some already present, more on the way: flooding cities, prolonged droughts, lower crop yields, the spread of tropical diseases, and the biggie: declining biodiversity. (See the sidebar for examples.)
You may know Rudyard Kipling's poem If. There's a parody that goes, "If you can keep your head when all about you men are losing theirs, you don't know what the hell is going on." When it comes to climate change, I think that version has merit. When calm reason avails you nothing, when earnest entreaties fall on deaf ears — then comes the impulse to rare back and shout, "You freaking dolts!"
With a BA in geology from Princeton, an MS in marine geology from the University of Miami, and a Ph.D. in earth and planetary sciences from Johns Hopkins University, Wanless is extremely well positioned to provide a holistic view of climate disruption. Now in his seventies, Wanless has been tracking sea levels throughout his storied career. We sit down at a table covered in books and folders in his office. I notice photos of a trip to the Greenland ice sheet on the wall. I begin to tell him that I just met Kirtman and Mowry and learned about their perspective on sea level rise when he interrupts me.
"We've screwed ourselves," he says. "We kicked the bucket. We have gone off the cliff. 93.4 percent of the global warming heat we've produced is in the oceans, and half of that went in just since 1997. That is unbelievable. If we'd only gotten hold of this when we knew about it in the '80s we'd have less than half the problems we have now." Wanless, who has been watching things go from bad to worse for so long, is taken aback at the business-as-usual mind-set. "We have to stop doing this," he continues. "With population increasing, with industrialization ongoing, and with the sad exuberance about opening the Arctic as an opportunity to get more oil and gas, shouldn't we be thinking, 'Oh my God, what have we done?' "
– Page 115
Dahr Jamail is a superb storyteller, if somewhat wordy and lacking a few of the basic rules of English. But there's no doubting his courage or his dedication to journalism. His true-to-life account of the onslaught of climate disruption in remote corners of the world is grim but necessary to read. Full marks, and I rate it a keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.