Conception of Nature
Trail of dust from a huge boulder. They’d occasionally break free and run down the slopes, and this one was about 30 feet ahead of me and would have made minced meat of myself.
I came to this glacier after watching a UAF summer lecture by a local painter, Klara Maisch, who was presenting her field painting process. Even in -30F this girl will go out and paint (but only with oils because acrylics will freeze), staying multiple days in a location to capture all the detail. Amazing. And shameful for me, as I so often huddle next to the car’s heater vents as I wait for the light to change before dashing outside to set up the tripod and camera.
While I found all her process fascinating, what stuck me most profoundly was how fast one of the magnificent glaciers she painted is receding. She said it will be gone soon, possibly even in the next decade. And she said that up to half of the world’s glaciers could disappear by the end of the century. One of my biggest takeaway from my travels is how the climate has destabilized everywhere, from temperature snaps in Texas, droughts in California, and frozen pipes in Atlanta. I think it will be a windy and unpredictable world in the future, blowing ash and climate refugees around. This July is on track to be the hottest month on record in 120,000 years, and nowhere else on Earth is it warming faster than in the circumpolar arctic.
Energized by the end of the world again, I left work criminally earlier on this Friday afternoon and headed out to Gulkana Glacier. The little Civic tussled with the dirt road through the Alaska Range for a long while before I had made it to the trailhead. And for another long while after, I walked the glacier’s stony drainage channel where the forest gradually turned to shrub which turned to sparse glacial moraine. And after a long walk, I came across something close to the glacier that I hadn’t expected : a spruce sapling. And in that moment it became painfully clear that the end of this glacier isn’t conjecture. I can see it happening here, with the forest creeping upwards and constant sound of rushing melt-water draining from this place. The little sapling will probably become a mother tree, the harbinger of the forest. I wanted to tear it from the ground, but I know that we planted it with our indifference.
Across my travels from almost losing fingers in Texas, to the wind of Alaska, to freezing pipes in Atlanta, I’ve seen how we’ve destabilized the climate. I think collectively, we look at our cities and our neighborhoods and feel a sense of accomplishment in our creations. I’ve passed thousands of miles of development, the result of countless deals, contracts, schemes, plans. But we’ve destroyed far more along that journey than we’ve created. From the gifts of stardust and abiogenesis we’ve razed the natural order as we build commuter towns and offices, drive bland SUV’s, take cruises, and built an American Great Wall of manicured lawns and fences, all at an unsustainable rate. We’ve mass-cultivated palm oil where the Amazon rain forest used to be and grown endless rows of corn in the corn belt that stretches across the Midwest. There were 2 billion people in the world in the time of our great grandparents, and from Dickensian poverty into an era of growing abundance we’ve fucked our way to 8.
And I think this remarkable homogeneity will doom us.
Not only homogeneity of the land, but of ourselves. A contagion of cultural assimilation runs rampant, like in Indian boarding schools of the 19th and 20th centuries. This isn’t anything new; watch videos of 1930’s New York City and you’ll see that everyone wore identical hats. But these hats are troublesome in what they reveal about us. We’re complacent and complicit, dismissing the notion that we could change anything ourselves as we buy whatever is on sale online or what our neighbors have that we envy. I wouldn’t be so presumptions to think I'm the only one that can see the metaphorical sun set because everyone says they want to save the land. But so often I think it's only a ruse and they all feign tolerance and altruism. I pass hundreds of cars every time I commute on my bicycle around town, picking up aluminum cans along the way in a bag in my backpack. So I think that we're all actors, all little imps and demons sticking gum on the underside of the pew at Sunday Mass while holding in a butt plug. We’re deviants in this reckless madness we’ve conjured, and this is all one giant cat orgy of decadence as we march inexorably forward towards the dark cloud on the horizon. I like to think whatever great catastrophe is coming our way will ultimately usher in a greater good, like the plague and the fall of Constantinople, thinning the population of Europe and concentrating its great minds together. That woeful combination resulted in the Italian renaissance. But my mind’s eye is blind to seeing a green and thus a great future. It requires faith in those that I truly believe never smelled a flower and possesses no conception of nature.
But then I look around at the draining glacier and the ending ice age and this great slab of ice inching into annihilation, and I think - do I possess a conception of nature? I’m ignorant too. And if I can forget how amazing this is, how can I expect anyone else to appreciate it? I should wear a hat, too.
