In the Empire of Ice Read Online Free
Author: Gretel Ehrlich
power will all be bigger and bigger providers of energy, but short-term climate targets, such as urgent and rapid industrial and agricultural emissions cuts, the shutting down of all coal plants, must be acted on now. We can no longer hide from the truth. “We’ve dealt ourselves a bad hand,” a scientist said. “We can’t bluff the planet.”
Surrender is not normally a word used to wage war against extinction. But surrender we must—that is, surrender our sovereignty over the planet. The interglacial paradise in which we’ve been living so comfortably is shifting to a world that will not be compatible with human life. Part of James Lovelock’s Gaian concept was an entreaty to get people to see themselves as part of Earth’s living systems, not the masters of them. As masters, we’ve done a poor job. We’ve ignored the larger workings of Earth, talking about it as if it was something apart from our lives. But take one breath and we breathe in weather; exhale one breath and we add CO 2 to the atmosphere.
The Earth cannot hold us. Its arms are too full. Despairing, I think about ancient ideas of beauty, such as the Navajo word hozho, which alludes to the total environment (ho) . It is a permeating beauty that includes harmony and happiness and all the steps we must keep taking to enhance hozho throughout life. Beauty saves us. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world.” Perhaps our sense of delight in the richness of the world has faded along with our discipline for the study of it. I hope not. My Greenlandic friend Jens Danielsen said: “The ice is not happy that the weather is going against it. I look and look and don’t see the ice wanting to come back. Please tell me, whose weather is this? It is not mine.”
THE ICE NEVER SLEEPS
T HE B ERING S TRAIT , A LASKA
“To many who are unfamiliar with the world of the Inupiat, it is a dark, unforgiving world…The land and the sea will show you its wrath if you cannot read what it tells you.”
—Herbert O. Anungazuk
IF GIVEN A SINGLE YEAR to make a circumpolar journey, it’s necessary to visit some places in midwinter, when, under a dark sky and in frigid temperatures, not much is happening. That was the circumstance under which I visited Wales, an Arctic village of 150 people, across a 50-mile-wide strait from northeastern Siberia. Winter is “story-telling time,” and I listened while the people of Wales talked about their lives.
Despite the modern conveniences of snowmobiles, telephones, computers, and an airport, the people of Wales, like villagers all the way up the Seward Peninsula, are semisubsistence hunters who live off bowhead whales, walruses, and seals. They also hunt eider ducks and geese, fish through the ice for tomcod, and go inland for caribou in the fall.
When ice age hunters and their families walked across Beringia, and later sailed the Bering Strait in their bidarkas, they continued their seminomadic hunting lives in what we now know as Alaska, all the way up to the north coast to present-day Barrow, Deadhorse, and Kaktovik.
Because Arctic Alaska is relatively low in latitude, their “larder” was much richer and more varied than that of Arctic Canada or Greenland. In some places, providing food for their families took less time, and as a result their ceremonial and material culture thrived. Much has been lost, though. Inuit people, indigenous to Arctic Alaska, are now a minority population here. Yet if you dig deeply enough, you find the essence of a culture is still there.
SIQIEAASRUGRUK (JANUARY)—the Month of the New Sun or the “Sun that Shines on Bearded Seals.” Snow has been falling. Light comes late and goes early—19 hours of darkness—but the white ground and white sky bring radiance to the far north. From my high perch in a ten-story-high hotel in Anchorage, the only patch of darkness is Cook Inlet, where open water slaps the shore and pancake ice
Surrender is not normally a word used to wage war against extinction. But surrender we must—that is, surrender our sovereignty over the planet. The interglacial paradise in which we’ve been living so comfortably is shifting to a world that will not be compatible with human life. Part of James Lovelock’s Gaian concept was an entreaty to get people to see themselves as part of Earth’s living systems, not the masters of them. As masters, we’ve done a poor job. We’ve ignored the larger workings of Earth, talking about it as if it was something apart from our lives. But take one breath and we breathe in weather; exhale one breath and we add CO 2 to the atmosphere.
The Earth cannot hold us. Its arms are too full. Despairing, I think about ancient ideas of beauty, such as the Navajo word hozho, which alludes to the total environment (ho) . It is a permeating beauty that includes harmony and happiness and all the steps we must keep taking to enhance hozho throughout life. Beauty saves us. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world.” Perhaps our sense of delight in the richness of the world has faded along with our discipline for the study of it. I hope not. My Greenlandic friend Jens Danielsen said: “The ice is not happy that the weather is going against it. I look and look and don’t see the ice wanting to come back. Please tell me, whose weather is this? It is not mine.”
THE ICE NEVER SLEEPS
T HE B ERING S TRAIT , A LASKA
“To many who are unfamiliar with the world of the Inupiat, it is a dark, unforgiving world…The land and the sea will show you its wrath if you cannot read what it tells you.”
—Herbert O. Anungazuk
IF GIVEN A SINGLE YEAR to make a circumpolar journey, it’s necessary to visit some places in midwinter, when, under a dark sky and in frigid temperatures, not much is happening. That was the circumstance under which I visited Wales, an Arctic village of 150 people, across a 50-mile-wide strait from northeastern Siberia. Winter is “story-telling time,” and I listened while the people of Wales talked about their lives.
Despite the modern conveniences of snowmobiles, telephones, computers, and an airport, the people of Wales, like villagers all the way up the Seward Peninsula, are semisubsistence hunters who live off bowhead whales, walruses, and seals. They also hunt eider ducks and geese, fish through the ice for tomcod, and go inland for caribou in the fall.
When ice age hunters and their families walked across Beringia, and later sailed the Bering Strait in their bidarkas, they continued their seminomadic hunting lives in what we now know as Alaska, all the way up to the north coast to present-day Barrow, Deadhorse, and Kaktovik.
Because Arctic Alaska is relatively low in latitude, their “larder” was much richer and more varied than that of Arctic Canada or Greenland. In some places, providing food for their families took less time, and as a result their ceremonial and material culture thrived. Much has been lost, though. Inuit people, indigenous to Arctic Alaska, are now a minority population here. Yet if you dig deeply enough, you find the essence of a culture is still there.
SIQIEAASRUGRUK (JANUARY)—the Month of the New Sun or the “Sun that Shines on Bearded Seals.” Snow has been falling. Light comes late and goes early—19 hours of darkness—but the white ground and white sky bring radiance to the far north. From my high perch in a ten-story-high hotel in Anchorage, the only patch of darkness is Cook Inlet, where open water slaps the shore and pancake ice
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