A review of Dahr Jamail’s The End of Ice
If you’re looking for hope in Dahr Jamail’s new book The End Of Ice, the recommendation that Dr. Harold Wanless gives for Miami is about the closest you’ll find:
“Sea level rise is going to accelerate faster than the models, and it’s not going to stop,” he says. “So the government has to have a plan that includes buyouts. It’s cheaper to buy this area out than it is to maintain the infrastructure.” And before vacating most of the city,
The final thing is cleaning the land before inundation, and this is most important. We should be planning for that, including removing things in the buildings and industrial land that will pollute the marine environment, including low-lying areas in flood-plains. Otherwise we will give our kids a highly polluted new marine environment ….” (From The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, by Dahr Jamail, published by The New Press, January 2019
Is preparing for a new Atlantis a hopeful scenario? Well, it’s all relative. As South Miami mayor Dr. Philip Stoddard puts it, “Frankly, there is worse stuff than sea level rise. Most of the rest of the aspects of climate change are far worse. With sea level rise you can move, as compared to what do you do when the food supply disappears? How do you grow crops? How do we feed people? The answer is, not very well.”
Dahr Jamail is the author of three books growing out of his experience as an unembedded journalist in Iraq. But he says what he learned while researching The End Of Ice shook him even more deeply than did his reporting from Iraq.
He is also an experienced and dedicated mountaineer who has spent a big chunk of his life working with rescue teams on high-altitude glaciers in Alaska. Watching the rapid shrinkage of these glaciers has given him a personal window to the onset of climate disruption. But communion with these starkly beautiful environments also offers him a way to cope with the overwhelmingly frightening prognosis that he hears from climate scientists in the Arctic, the Amazon basin, south Florida and the coral reefs of the South Pacific.
Though most of the book consists of interviews with front-line scientists, a recurring theme is his struggle with despair, depression and a sense of meaningless when confronting what he is learning. For all of us who pay attention to the steadily worsening climate news, his reflections on hope, grief, and humility are an important part of his message.
Suffice it to say that most of his interview subjects think we have already blown our chances of keeping global average temperature rise to 2°C or less – even if, miraculously, all nations meet their Paris Agreement commitments. And if 3°C, 4°C or more of temperature rise has already been set in motion, then some truly devastating positive feedback loops are likely to follow. Two such feedbacks that Jamail discusses are rapid die-offs of forests in both the Amazon and the boreal regions, which would turn these forests into major carbon sources rather than carbon sinks; and the potential for an explosive release of long-frozen methane due to the warming of arctic permafrost.
Even without such feedbacks, many researchers believe that the IPCC reports have been underestimating risks for decades now. As Harold Wanless explains,
There are political games going on in the IPCC and their modelers can’t look beyond the model. The IPCC only uses stuff in refereed journals, which is already four to five years outdated, and they cut off three years early for peer review, so it is at least 10 years outdated ….”
Furthermore, Wanless says, the need for consensus in the IPCC reports results in “lowball projections” skewing the reports and downplaying the seriousness of our predicament.
With each successive IPCC report, the previous predictions are shown to have been too optimistic. The loss of Arctic sea ice is galloping ahead of official projections – “we already reached the amount of Arctic sea ice loss anticipated for 2050 back in 2002.”
(Today’s news offers further confirmation, as a major new report says even in the best-case scenario at least one-third of the Himalayan ice cap will be lost by 2100, while with a 4–5°C global warming, at least two-thirds of this ice will be gone by 2100.)
Unlike the Greenland glaciers or the ice sheets covering Antarctica (which many scientists believe are already on an unstoppable path to melting), mountain-top glaciers don’t hold enough water to play a large part in sea-level rise. These glaciers do, however, play essential roles in their regional ecosystems, and their disappearance will have devastating impacts on biodiversity, agriculture, and political stability for hundreds of millions or billions of people.
Mountain snow caps, Jamail explains, are like water towers – storing water throughout the winter and spring, and gradually releasing cold water into rivers and valleys in summer. The icewater shapes micro-climates as it flows down the hills, providing life-giving conditions for species dependent on cold water. Then it provides drinking water or irrigation water for some of the world’s major agricultural areas in foothills and plains.
If snowpacks melt too early due to winter rains or high spring temperatures, the water is gone long before it is really needed in summer. The consequences will be widespread, Jamail says:
Most people in the United States who don’t live in areas where some or most of their water source is reliant upon glaciers may think melting glaciers won’t impact them. But they would be wrong. Diminishing glaciers in the western United States will impact agriculture, driving up food prices everywhere. And globally, when the millions of people who rely on glaciers for their water and agriculture lose those glaciers, many of these people will have to leave their homes, becoming refugees.”
Jamail ends the book with an extended reflection on death, despair, grieving and gratitude. He finds solace in quiet time gazing at the sunset on the face of a mountain, though that time feels like the precious hours shared at an intimate friend’s deathbed. And he says he has learned to surrender hope: “I came to understand that hope blocked the greater need to grieve, so that was the reason necessitating the surrendering of it.” He adds,
“Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things .… My acceptance of our probable decline opens into a more intimate and heartfelt union with life itself. … I am grieving and yet I have never felt more alive.”
Perhaps each person must answer these questions their own way, and though I have immense respect for Jamail’s work and his conclusions, I cannot say I am ready either to fully embrace hope or to give it up.
Jamail also shares inspiration in the words of Stan Rushworth, an elder of Cherokee descent who relates the lessons imparted by his father. For me these words especially ring true. Rushworth says:
The dire position we’re in now is solid evidence of the fact that the predominant civilization does not have a handle on all the interrelationships between humans and what we call the natural world. If it did, we wouldn’t be facing this dire situation. … We simply do not have a big enough or right-minded enough vision. Because of this, we need to allow for something we cannot understand.
This is not about hope, but more, humility, and carefully considered action within that humility, and much deeper listening.”
Photo at top: Dahr Jamail, photographed by John Fleming, from the cover of The End of Ice
