In The Future of Ice, Gretel Ehrlich travels across the world, from her home in Wyoming to the Arctic, to look at winter landscapes and to consider how climate change is damaging our landscapes and the whole idea of winter.
It's a book packed full of lyrical descriptions, punctuated by snippets of her personal life and snippets about climate science and the science of glaciers:
"A glacier is an archivist and historian. It saves everything no matter how small or big, including pollen, dust, heavy metals, bugs, bones and minerals. It registers every fluctuation of weather. A glacier is time incarnate, a moving image of time. When we lose a glacier - and we are losing most of them - we lose history, an eye into the past; we love stories of how living beings evolved, how weather vacillated, why plants and animals died. The retreat and disappearance of glaciers - there are only 160, 000 left - means we're burning libraries and damaging the planet, possibly beyond repair."
I found the book to be rather overloaded with lyrical descriptions. I enjoy beautiful descriptions, but here I felt they sometimes lacked substance.
The Future of Ice by Gretel Ehrlich, published (2004) by Penguin Random House.
our city has no snow since 2017... sad.
ReplyDeleteI wish to read the book.... thank you for sharing your review.