The End of Ice: bearing witness and finding meaning in the path of climate disruption

By Dahr Jamail, The End of Ice: bearing witness and finding meaning in the path of climate disruption (New Press, New York, 2019) 257 pp. $25.99. ISBN 978-1-62097-234-2.

A reporter for Truthout and author of several books based on his reporting, Dahr Jamail writes in his introduction that he first saw “anthropogenic climate disruption” from glacial reduction in successive years of mountain climbing in Alaska. Following his reporting on climate and environment in 2010 (beginning with the BP oil spill), he sought to share what he found in other climate-sensitive areas of the world and came “to realize that only by sharing an intimacy with these places can we begin to know, perhaps love, and certainly care for them.”

In 2016 and 2017 he visited several places in Alaska, Mount Rainier, Glacier National Park, three coral reefs (Palau, Guam, Australia), Florida, US temperate forests, and Brazil’s rain forest. Everywhere, he interviewed local experts who pointed out consequences of a warming climate. In his own mountain climbing, he could see the differences for himself by comparison with his previous experiences.

In Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Jamail found reduced snow cover and vanishing glaciers which in turn endanger the 69% of the world’s fresh water they contain. For Alaskan native tribes such changes mean a change in their traditions and the way they live their lives. But there are consequences for the rest of the world as well. Jamail reports on Ira Leifer’s research that tracks Arctic warming from currents in seas adjoining the Arctic Ocean, some of which contain methane bubbling up from the ocean floor. These releases are believed to carry a potential fifty gigatons of methane, which would have the equivalent effect of a thousand gigatons of carbon dioxide--two thirds of the 1475 gigatons of carbon dioxide released by humans since 1850. Leifer feels that release of this methane into the atmosphere is inevitable and that “there is no reason the global climate couldn’t push past tipping points that mean only 1 billion people can live on the planet.”

Jamail’s visits to coral reefs, which “cover less than 2 percent of Earth’s ocean floor yet are home to one quarter of all marine species,” and to western temperate forests offer no compensating encouragement. He laments that oceans are treated as dumps, because people can’t see below the water. He feels that if they could see what happens to reefs the same as they can see what happens to a forest, they would show greater concern. Not that he finds much concern about “drought, clear-cutting, deforestation, wildfires, beetle infestation” endangering forests, with the world’s dead trees contributing 20% of global carbon dioxide emissions. In several chapters Jamail expresses his emotional reaction to what he is learning.

Jamail also received some emotional reaction when he visited Thomas Lovejoy in the Amazon rain forest. This forest contains 20% of the world’s rivers, untold numbers of yet-to-be-discovered species, and the bases of many pharmaceuticals. Having worked there since 1965, Lovejoy predicts that the 2oC global temperature increase above pre-industrial levels sought by the Paris Accord (we are at 1.2oC now) will raise sea levels 4 to 6 meters and destroy much of the coral.

The additional temperature increases resulting from Arctic methane release to the atmosphere is one of the book’s most dire consequences of climate change. Another is the sea level rise cited by Lovejoy during Jamail’s visit to Florida, where climate change threatens sea level rises up to a foot by 2030, three feet by 2050, and eight feet by 2100. There Jamail found Ben Kirtman of the University of Miami acknowledging the need for adaptation in addition to mitigation against rising sea level. In Miami this means keeping freshwater systems free of contamination by sea water. Already high ocean tide in Florida covers fresh water drain pipes and causes sewage to back up. This is decreasing real estate values and increasing insurance rates. Yet construction continues with, for example, 230 new condos in 2018. Bruce Mowry, city engineer of Miami Beach, is dealing with “sunny-day flooding” with some 60 pump stations, raising city streets 30 inches, and requiring single family homes to be at base flood elevation. South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard (who is also a biology professor at Florida International University) grieves that climate change-denying Governor Rick Scott vetoed sewers for the two thirds of South Miami still on septic tanks which are backing raw sewage into bathtubs. At the bottom of the political hierarchy, he feels alone in what he knows and is regarded as a Cassandra speaking amid the culture of denial which surrounds him.

Harold Wanless, Geology Chair at the University of Miami, criticizes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for underestimating the effects of climate change because they use only peer-reviewed materials published more than three years previously and need to come to a consensus based on them. With only 44% of Miami-Dade County higher than six feet above sea level, Wanless realizes that not all of south Florida can be protected against expected sea-level rise. In addition to affecting Florida, projected sea level rise will be disastrous for Vietnam, Bangladesh (where India maintains a barrier against future refugees), Lower Manhattan, and many islands.

Although many of the changes that Jamail describes are now part of our daily news, it is even more sobering to encounter them all together in one book, and described by the experts who have been keeping track of them. The situation he describes is a source of frustration for Jamail. He cites articles recalling that in 1965 President Lyndon Johnson was warned of the risks of increased carbon dioxide emissions, and that a 2oC temperature increase above pre-industrial levels would reduce the Amazon rainforest by 40%. He sees the Paris Accord as “just the latest instance of governments failing to respond to the fact that we are dealing with the single largest existential crisis humanity has ever faced.”

It should then come as no surprise that at the end of his book Jamail returns to his beloved Denali to compose a very personal conclusion from what he has learned and shared with his readers. He recalls how the ill effects of cockiness in his first attempt to ascend Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, taught him the importance of respect for nature, the lack of which he feels “is leading us to our own destruction.” “By desecrating the biosphere . . . we are setting ourselves up for what I believe will ultimately be our own extinction,” he writes. “This is the direct result of our inability to understand our part in the natural world. We live in a world where we are acidifying the oceans, where there will be few places cold enough to support year-round ice, where all the current coastlines will be underwater, and where droughts, wildfires, floods, storms, and extreme weather are already becoming the new normal. ...There is no removing the heat we have introduced into the oceans, nor the 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere every single year. There may be no changing what is happening, and far worse things are coming.”

Writing this reflects Jamail’s feelings for a planet that he feels is dying. He quotes Stephen Jenkinson that the appropriate response is grief rather than its “great enemy” hope. Grief, to him, is “a way to honor what we are losing. ...Writing this book is my attempt to bear witness to what we have done to the Earth. I want to make my own amends to the Earth in the precious time we have left. . . .,” he writes. “Each of us must now find our own honest, natural response to the conditions we have brought upon ourselves.” He lauds those who have devoted their lives to protecting the part of Earth closest to their hearts, with a sense of obligation rather than a sense of right. Jamail finds his “deepest conviction and connection to the Earth by communing with the mountains.”

John L. Roeder
The Calhoun School, New York, NY
jlroeder@aol.com