The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold

This book is written out of Gretel Ehrlichs love for winterfor remote and cold places, and the ways in which winter frees our imagination and invigorates our feet, mind, and souland out of the fear that our “democracy of gratification” has irreparably altered the climate. In The Future of Ice, Ehrlich travels to extreme pointsfrom Tierra del Fuego in the south to Spitsbergen, east of Greenland, at the very top of the worldin her quest to understand the complex, primal nature of cold.

Over the course of a year, Ehrlich and her cold-loving canine companion experience firsthand the myriad expressions of cold, and she gives us marvelous histories of wind, water, snow, and ice, of ocean currents and weather cycles. Ehrlich explores how our very awareness, our consciousness, is animated and enlivened by the archaic rhythms and erupting oscillations of weather. As she writes, “Weather streamed into my nose, mouth, eyes, and ears and circulated inside my brain. . . . A gust can shove one impulse into another; a blizzard erases a line of action; a sandstorm permeates inspiration; rain is a form of sleep. Lightning makes scratch marks on brains; hail gouges out a nesting place, melts, and waters the seed of an idea that can germinate into idiocy, a joke, or genius.” We share Ehrlichs experience of the thrills of cold and also her questions: What will happen to us if we are “deseasoned”? If winter ends, will we survive?

"In this lyrical meditation on deep cold and its potential demise through global warming, Ehrlich (The Solace of Open Spaces; This Cold Heaven) backpacks among the glaciers of the southern Andes, winters in a Wyoming cabin and sails with the research ship Noorderlicht to the Greenland ice pack. Her prose is as sharply observed as poetry and nearly as compressed, and her narrative favors short scenes as fragmented as the breaking ice sheets she encounters. Though it occasionally dips into underpowered assertion ('We're spoiled because we've been living in an interglacial paradise for twenty thousand years'), it often soars to the sublime ('We are made of weather and our thoughts stream from the braid work of stillness and storms'). Ehrlich includes plenty of facts (the area covered by glaciers has diminished by 75% since 1850; increased meltwater from Greenland may actually make Europe colder), but her book is less about science than about sensation: loneliness and the relentless circling of the snowed-in mind; the rumbling of a glacier as its azure ice crumbles away; the whistling, ululating calls of the bearded seal. It does not lay out the workings of global warming nor attempt to provide blueprints for how to rescue what we are losing. It stands, instead, as a passionate elegy to what is melting away. Agent, Liz Darhansoff at Darhansoff, Verrill & Feldman." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

To understand the complex, primal nature of cold, Ehrlich traveled to extreme points, from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic circle. In this volume she reports on her experiences of the many expressions of cold--wind, water, snow and ice--and describes the history of these elements and of ocean currents and weather cycles. She attempts to uncover through her experiences the quintessential connection between humans and the physical world.
Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Gretel Ehrlich is the author of This Cold Heaven (available in paperback from Vintage Books) and The Solace of Open Spaces, among other works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She divides her time between California and Wyoming.