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The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold
This book is written out of Gretel Ehrlich’s love for winter—for remote and cold places, and the ways in which winter frees our imagination and invigorates our feet, mind, and soul—and out of the fear that our “democracy of gratification” has irreparably altered the climate. In The Future of Ice, Ehrlich travels to extreme points—from Tierra del Fuego in the south to Spitsbergen, east of Greenland, at the very top of the world—in 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 Ehrlich’s experience of the thrills of cold and also her What will happen to us if we are “deseasoned”? If winter ends, will we survive?
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 Ehrlich’s experience of the thrills of cold and also her What will happen to us if we are “deseasoned”? If winter ends, will we survive?
200 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
15 people are currently reading
415 people want to read
About the author
Gretel Ehrlich
57 books352 followersGretel Ehrlich is an American travel writer, novelist, essayist, and poet born on a horse ranch near Santa Barbara, California and educated at both Bennington College in Vermont and UCLA film school. After working in film for 10 years and following the death of a loved one, she began writing full-time in 1978 while living on a Wyoming ranch where she had been filming. Her first book, The Solace of Open Spaces, is a collection of essays describing her love of the region.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews
December 10, 2023
I read this book, some of which is about Torres del Paine, and I just backpacked the circuit. Most of my visual observations did not ring true with the author's experience.
I think the issue that I have with this author is that her books are perhaps too cathartic for nature books. She likes to talk about the issues she is going through which is okay by me to a small extent and I do like how she can turn a phrase (genuine complement). But as a whole this book didn't generate the imagery I expected and I question the veracity of some of the observations.
2.5 stars. If I hadn't done the exact same circuit and been underwhelmed with her descriptions then maybe 3 to 3.5 stars.
I think the issue that I have with this author is that her books are perhaps too cathartic for nature books. She likes to talk about the issues she is going through which is okay by me to a small extent and I do like how she can turn a phrase (genuine complement). But as a whole this book didn't generate the imagery I expected and I question the veracity of some of the observations.
2.5 stars. If I hadn't done the exact same circuit and been underwhelmed with her descriptions then maybe 3 to 3.5 stars.
September 18, 2012
Comedian Drew Carey joked about spraying aerosol cans outside to hasten global warming during harsh Cleveland winters. The punch line, “Screw the grandkids, I’m cold now,” reveals one of the problems faced by people trying to sound the alarm about climate change: people don’t like cold weather, so the threat of increasing temperatures isn’t as frightening as it should be. To combat this aversion to the cold, Gretel Ehrlich wrote “both an ode and a lament” to winter, The Future of Ice, to spread her passion for the natural world at its most inhospitable, and to draw attention to its precarious position. Where Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth uses PowerPoint slides and cold logic to convince people of the dangers of global warming, Ehrlich weaves a lyrical tale infused with her love of the outdoors and arctic climate. The book is lightly peppered with facts about the environment and global warming, but she is as likely to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson or Japanese poet Muso Soseki as to cite scientific research. More akin to On the Road than Silent Spring, Ehrlich’s essay at times feel like a stream-of-consciousness rant on the joys provided by nature in its most brutal and most fragile state, Wyoming winters and the Arctic and Antarctic poles.
Ehrlich herself is as tough as a Longyearbyren blizzard, having survived a lightning strike and the loss of her fiancé to cancer. She is “cold-hardened,” a woman with “no god, no parents, no children.” She has lost so many friends recently she feels she’s “climbing over bodies.” After spending six months in a tent on the glacial moraine in Wyoming, she travels the world from pole to pole over six months to demonstrate the sheer isolation and devastating beauty of the Earth’s coldest places. An underlying sadness permeates the work, a result no doubt of Ehrlich’s difficult life and her deep concern for the future of humanity. She worries that, “We are unanchored and have no sacred alignment with life.” Midway through, she describes in heartrending detail the death of her dog, Sam, to whom she dedicates the book. The reader gets the sense that without her troubled past, Ehrlich would not have chosen to face some of the most inhospitable climates in the world, or been able to mount such an impassioned plea for the well-being of the planet. Nor could she arouse such bitter contempt for George W. Bush’s environmental and military policies as he plans a war of choice and “cooks the books” on global warming in an EPA report.
Ehrlich laces her personal tragedies and triumphs throughout the book but reveals tantalizingly little about Gary, with whom she is in a “short-term relationship.” He is a kindred spirit, a lover of adventure and the outdoors, and Ehrlich paints a picture of a kind and supportive younger man. He “is alternatively aloof and passionate, but these days more often aloof.” After describing the pain of miscarrying a child, she notes, “I have no children, and I’m with a man who wants them.” She takes solace in Gary’s presence after a nightmare, then wonders if she’ll “ever be able to sleep alone again.” Eight pages later he goes off on his own because he wants to be alone. Ehrlich relays this information journalistically, free from the emotion that fills much of the book. Having grown attached to these characters, the reader wonders how she feels about this, but her use of spare prose in this section may be the answer to that question. The relationship between Ehrlich and Gary is significant, because her views on the environment are so clearly informed by the emotional pain she has experienced throughout her life. Gary may be a salve to heal old injuries, or he may open new wounds; in either event, Ehrlich’s worldview is likely influenced by him, but he is held just a bit too far out of reach for the reader to gain an understanding of what his impact might be.
Her description of the cold often focuses on its dangers and the challenges presented to those who attempt to survive it. Her friend John tells a story about narrowly avoiding a charging moose by jumping off a bridge; he landed unscathed but was horrified to see the moose and her calf follow him off the bridge to their deaths. We hear of homes buried under mountains of snow, of perilous falls down icy slopes, and cattle drowning in frigid waters. She describes Fairbanks, Alaska, at 82 degrees below Fahrenheit, where the town “was encased in a hard fog that crackled like fire,” and it was so cold “a friend’s retina popped out.” After discussing the morbid jokes adventurers make on the trail, she says, “It’s like dying, this healing warmth, this laughter.” Laughter is one way of dealing with these dangerous environments. Ehrlich’s retreat into the cold is itself a survival strategy, her way of dealing with the painful experiences in her life. She calls solitude a “reflex,” but knows that it is fundamentally unhealthy. She pushes herself away from society, preferring to “drink ocean weather instead of wine and dance to the brain’s metronome of transient electrochemical throbs.”
In describing the harshness of sub-zero climates, Ehrlich is careful to point out, “Winter is not just bone-aching cold and white skies.” She loves the “complexities” of the season, such as when “warm winds blasted through” a Wyoming winter, causing steam to rise “up the rock faces of mountains, while veils of gray clouds wafted by.” As a snow cloud blows overhead, “There is unevenness everywhere and union within it.” She tells how ice forms in wolf tracks, making them “shine line dropped coins,” while a polar bear “jumps from the beach to the land, his movements are elastic and effortless.” She talks about snowflakes’ “seeming opacities translate into see-through, cartwheeling membranes that stack up compress into ice mountains; diamond-hard sparks that slice away self-deception.” Moreover, the cold has the ability to strengthen bonds between people, for while “blizzards bring on oblivion, their winds also whisk it away.” The friendships that got her through a harsh winter also helped her cope with her fiancé’s death, so that now, “The hard winter of 1978-79 has turned into something sweet, a raison de’ être, not a reason for suicide.” In fuming about the upcoming war in Iraq, Ehrlich notes how, “Winter teaches us cooperative living, not war.”
Ehrlich manages to speak of science in the same poetic language she uses to describe natural beauty. In discussing the way scientists can use glaciers to gather environmental data on other times periods, she says, “a glacier is an archivist and a historian…when we lose a glacier—and we are losing most of them—we lose history, an eye into the past.” In explaining the ability of ice and snow to reflect heat back into space, she fears the loss of “winter’s white mantle” will turn the earth into a “heat sponge.” She describes a bioluminescent sea sponge, which, “In the abyss…is its own sun.”
She often compares winter to fire, referencing “arctic legends of an earlier time when animals could talk and understand what humans said and ice burned to give heat and ice.” Following the death of her fiancé, “Cold was the crucible from which I had to rise.” While sailing across the Arctic Sea, she describes how “ocean swells…lap the sides of the Noorderlicht like cold flames.” The book ends with the beautiful line, “the winter world is the one where the cold flame of passion is used to set ourselves free from desire.” Through poetic language, emotional descriptions, and heartfelt humanity, Ehrlich’s The Future of Ice should light the cold flame of environmental passion in those who read it.
Ehrlich herself is as tough as a Longyearbyren blizzard, having survived a lightning strike and the loss of her fiancé to cancer. She is “cold-hardened,” a woman with “no god, no parents, no children.” She has lost so many friends recently she feels she’s “climbing over bodies.” After spending six months in a tent on the glacial moraine in Wyoming, she travels the world from pole to pole over six months to demonstrate the sheer isolation and devastating beauty of the Earth’s coldest places. An underlying sadness permeates the work, a result no doubt of Ehrlich’s difficult life and her deep concern for the future of humanity. She worries that, “We are unanchored and have no sacred alignment with life.” Midway through, she describes in heartrending detail the death of her dog, Sam, to whom she dedicates the book. The reader gets the sense that without her troubled past, Ehrlich would not have chosen to face some of the most inhospitable climates in the world, or been able to mount such an impassioned plea for the well-being of the planet. Nor could she arouse such bitter contempt for George W. Bush’s environmental and military policies as he plans a war of choice and “cooks the books” on global warming in an EPA report.
Ehrlich laces her personal tragedies and triumphs throughout the book but reveals tantalizingly little about Gary, with whom she is in a “short-term relationship.” He is a kindred spirit, a lover of adventure and the outdoors, and Ehrlich paints a picture of a kind and supportive younger man. He “is alternatively aloof and passionate, but these days more often aloof.” After describing the pain of miscarrying a child, she notes, “I have no children, and I’m with a man who wants them.” She takes solace in Gary’s presence after a nightmare, then wonders if she’ll “ever be able to sleep alone again.” Eight pages later he goes off on his own because he wants to be alone. Ehrlich relays this information journalistically, free from the emotion that fills much of the book. Having grown attached to these characters, the reader wonders how she feels about this, but her use of spare prose in this section may be the answer to that question. The relationship between Ehrlich and Gary is significant, because her views on the environment are so clearly informed by the emotional pain she has experienced throughout her life. Gary may be a salve to heal old injuries, or he may open new wounds; in either event, Ehrlich’s worldview is likely influenced by him, but he is held just a bit too far out of reach for the reader to gain an understanding of what his impact might be.
Her description of the cold often focuses on its dangers and the challenges presented to those who attempt to survive it. Her friend John tells a story about narrowly avoiding a charging moose by jumping off a bridge; he landed unscathed but was horrified to see the moose and her calf follow him off the bridge to their deaths. We hear of homes buried under mountains of snow, of perilous falls down icy slopes, and cattle drowning in frigid waters. She describes Fairbanks, Alaska, at 82 degrees below Fahrenheit, where the town “was encased in a hard fog that crackled like fire,” and it was so cold “a friend’s retina popped out.” After discussing the morbid jokes adventurers make on the trail, she says, “It’s like dying, this healing warmth, this laughter.” Laughter is one way of dealing with these dangerous environments. Ehrlich’s retreat into the cold is itself a survival strategy, her way of dealing with the painful experiences in her life. She calls solitude a “reflex,” but knows that it is fundamentally unhealthy. She pushes herself away from society, preferring to “drink ocean weather instead of wine and dance to the brain’s metronome of transient electrochemical throbs.”
In describing the harshness of sub-zero climates, Ehrlich is careful to point out, “Winter is not just bone-aching cold and white skies.” She loves the “complexities” of the season, such as when “warm winds blasted through” a Wyoming winter, causing steam to rise “up the rock faces of mountains, while veils of gray clouds wafted by.” As a snow cloud blows overhead, “There is unevenness everywhere and union within it.” She tells how ice forms in wolf tracks, making them “shine line dropped coins,” while a polar bear “jumps from the beach to the land, his movements are elastic and effortless.” She talks about snowflakes’ “seeming opacities translate into see-through, cartwheeling membranes that stack up compress into ice mountains; diamond-hard sparks that slice away self-deception.” Moreover, the cold has the ability to strengthen bonds between people, for while “blizzards bring on oblivion, their winds also whisk it away.” The friendships that got her through a harsh winter also helped her cope with her fiancé’s death, so that now, “The hard winter of 1978-79 has turned into something sweet, a raison de’ être, not a reason for suicide.” In fuming about the upcoming war in Iraq, Ehrlich notes how, “Winter teaches us cooperative living, not war.”
Ehrlich manages to speak of science in the same poetic language she uses to describe natural beauty. In discussing the way scientists can use glaciers to gather environmental data on other times periods, she says, “a glacier is an archivist and a historian…when we lose a glacier—and we are losing most of them—we lose history, an eye into the past.” In explaining the ability of ice and snow to reflect heat back into space, she fears the loss of “winter’s white mantle” will turn the earth into a “heat sponge.” She describes a bioluminescent sea sponge, which, “In the abyss…is its own sun.”
She often compares winter to fire, referencing “arctic legends of an earlier time when animals could talk and understand what humans said and ice burned to give heat and ice.” Following the death of her fiancé, “Cold was the crucible from which I had to rise.” While sailing across the Arctic Sea, she describes how “ocean swells…lap the sides of the Noorderlicht like cold flames.” The book ends with the beautiful line, “the winter world is the one where the cold flame of passion is used to set ourselves free from desire.” Through poetic language, emotional descriptions, and heartfelt humanity, Ehrlich’s The Future of Ice should light the cold flame of environmental passion in those who read it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 8, 2025
Gretel Ehrlich lives life on her own terms, making due with very little and yet enjoying an abundance of satisfaction, adventure, sorrow and joy. She is remarkable as a person of immeasurable curiosity about the natural world, climate change, animals, birds, fish, mammals, invertebrates et cetera. There is no limit to her desire to explore the natural world and write about her experiences.
May 20, 2022
Describes nature beautiful and really encapsulates what it is like to spend lengthy periods of time in a cold climate
August 9, 2019
In her introduction to this book, whose subtitle is "A Journey into Cold," Ehrlich describes it as "a book about winter and climate change" and also as "a six-month chronicle of living with cold" (xi). It's a mix of personal narrative/travelogue and facts about melting glaciers and Arctic pollution and disturbed ecosystems, a mix of lyricism and starkness. Ehrlich writes about blizzards in Wyoming and glaciers in the southern Andes and a trip to Spitsbergen on a 150-foot sailboat; she writes about seeing mink and coyotes and swans and geese, about seeing polar bears and whales and dolphins and walruses and sea birds, and about a visit to the Norwegian Polar Institute, where she talks to scientists who study climate change.
In the Andes she sees glaciers and thinks about how they've shaped the landscape through which she and her friend/lover are hiking; in Wyoming she goes canoeing with friends in an icy river. She write about winter as when "we go behind the scenes of our own lives" and says this: "Winter is a white vagrancy. There are no days or nights. Just breathing and snow pushing space between thought" (4-5). I like how she writes about how winter means "seclusion, intimacy, ceremony, cabin fever", and how she writes about reading all through the winter in Wyoming, decades ago, just after having lost her fiancé to cancer. (69). I like how she writes about the aftermath of blizzards: "What's left is a swept-out room of stark beauty and clear light" (105).
At one point Ehrlich takes a bus to see the Perito Moreno glacier and writes about how glaciers, built up over time, tell us about the past:
I like how this book looks at time and space, globally and personally, though I sometimes wanted there to be less abstraction/philosophizing and more straight-up description. Still, this was a satisfying read, even (especially?) in the middle of summer, though of course it made me depressed about global warming.
In the Andes she sees glaciers and thinks about how they've shaped the landscape through which she and her friend/lover are hiking; in Wyoming she goes canoeing with friends in an icy river. She write about winter as when "we go behind the scenes of our own lives" and says this: "Winter is a white vagrancy. There are no days or nights. Just breathing and snow pushing space between thought" (4-5). I like how she writes about how winter means "seclusion, intimacy, ceremony, cabin fever", and how she writes about reading all through the winter in Wyoming, decades ago, just after having lost her fiancé to cancer. (69). I like how she writes about the aftermath of blizzards: "What's left is a swept-out room of stark beauty and clear light" (105).
At one point Ehrlich takes a bus to see the Perito Moreno glacier and writes about how glaciers, built up over time, tell us about the past:
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. A glacier is time incarnate, a moving image of time. (53)
I like how this book looks at time and space, globally and personally, though I sometimes wanted there to be less abstraction/philosophizing and more straight-up description. Still, this was a satisfying read, even (especially?) in the middle of summer, though of course it made me depressed about global warming.
November 6, 2018
I love the way this author writes. But I also feel like this book was just a bunch of ramblings and observations interspersed with plugs for global warming. That being said, though, no other author can make ramblings and observations more interesting than her.
Some of my favorite lines from the book (not necessarily for what she is saying but sometimes just for the way she says it):
"When did we begin thinking that weather was something to be rescued from? Why did we trade in our ceremonial lives for the workplace? Is this a natural progression, or a hiccup in human civilization that we'll soon renounce?" (p. 16)
"Here, weather is landscape, and landscape is memory." (p. 23)
"Solitude becomes a reflex. Instead of calling friends when I'm lonely, I shy away from them. On the other hand, solitude is highly overrated. We've romanticized Thoreau's days on Walden Pond, forgetting that he ate with the Emerson's most evenings." (p. 87)
"As water deepens, pieces of ice float with us - - a company of geometric oddities - - triangles, parallelograms, rhomboids. Midriver, they are snagged by a huge willow root like LP records stacked up against a twisted spindle." (p. 109)
"What is the difference between longing and loving? Perhaps this: longing is almost loving and surely losing; love is the constant inconstant, like a burning that is both instantaneous and light-years away." (p. 158)
"Nature is the only true artist, and we are its apprentices." (p. 159)
Some of my favorite lines from the book (not necessarily for what she is saying but sometimes just for the way she says it):
"When did we begin thinking that weather was something to be rescued from? Why did we trade in our ceremonial lives for the workplace? Is this a natural progression, or a hiccup in human civilization that we'll soon renounce?" (p. 16)
"Here, weather is landscape, and landscape is memory." (p. 23)
"Solitude becomes a reflex. Instead of calling friends when I'm lonely, I shy away from them. On the other hand, solitude is highly overrated. We've romanticized Thoreau's days on Walden Pond, forgetting that he ate with the Emerson's most evenings." (p. 87)
"As water deepens, pieces of ice float with us - - a company of geometric oddities - - triangles, parallelograms, rhomboids. Midriver, they are snagged by a huge willow root like LP records stacked up against a twisted spindle." (p. 109)
"What is the difference between longing and loving? Perhaps this: longing is almost loving and surely losing; love is the constant inconstant, like a burning that is both instantaneous and light-years away." (p. 158)
"Nature is the only true artist, and we are its apprentices." (p. 159)
February 11, 2019
Erlich writes poetry with science casually and effortlessly dropped in. In fact, I wasn't surprised at the list of science sites she recommends at the end of this book. Scientists have been warning us about global climate change since at least the 70s and we baby boomers - the ones who wanted to save the world - are leaving a damaged earth to our descendants. So I second it when Erlich writes "To educate yourself about climate change…is easy and simple, and there is no excuse for ignorance." Erlich's poetry was a mixed bag for me. For example, she once describes our sun as one "that is rotting". Well, that's a ways off. Or this: "Finally there's a winter blast, but wind dries it, and snow goes like a dress being torn from a corpse." I read, being lulled along by the poetry, til the needle scratched over the record with that one. But those are uncommon examples. Twice she likens clouds to a feather boa as in this beautiful example: "snow fleas cluster in ditch water and drown. A cloud comes. It caresses the river like a feather boa, then slides across a running ridge top. Fat flakes fall but sun shines through them like a flashlight, one transparency piercing another." Oh, yes, I know that cloud!
January 23, 2024
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.
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.
February 10, 2020
The dreamy and lyrical tone of this writing brings to life the world of cold, winter, and ice in the mind of the reader. Often stream of consciousness descriptions portrays the tinkling sounds of water freezing, the brilliant sparkle of undisturbed snow, and the intimate nature of life among others seeking winter.
August 28, 2021
This is so hard to get thru. I deeply enjoy poetic writing, but so much of this book is poetic to the point of senseless. Sumbling across a chapter where the author is talking about real event interwoven with imagery - I am in love, this is amazing. Yet, these fleeting moments of reality were not enough to keep me grounded in a world where so much doesn't feel real.
What I was most excited for was a discussion of international cultures and how they both related to and are learning to relate to the climate. Im always on board for stories of adventure (even slow eventless adventure), and was pumped to hear of the authors scientific prespective. I was sorely disapointed for how far I got, yet had such a difficult time giving this book up because I had so much hope for the ideas and the imaginative writing. Goes from a 5/5 to a 1.5/5 in a few pages, with my desperate hope for more amazing writing. Perhaps I'll touch this again, but not for a long time
What I was most excited for was a discussion of international cultures and how they both related to and are learning to relate to the climate. Im always on board for stories of adventure (even slow eventless adventure), and was pumped to hear of the authors scientific prespective. I was sorely disapointed for how far I got, yet had such a difficult time giving this book up because I had so much hope for the ideas and the imaginative writing. Goes from a 5/5 to a 1.5/5 in a few pages, with my desperate hope for more amazing writing. Perhaps I'll touch this again, but not for a long time
May 23, 2017
the prelude is really good, but the rest of the book is decent
November 12, 2017
Re-reading this book that was written 13 years ago. In 13 years we have seen the destruction of the glaciers even more so than the author, Gretel Ehrlich, witnessed it then.
800-899-literature
December 9, 2019818.5403
July 14, 2023
i loved this book once i stopped trying to figure it out.
December 14, 2023
Musings on winter, climate change, the cold, and more.
April 9, 2024
“What follows is both ode and lament, a wild-time song and elegy, and a cry for help—not for me, but for the tern, the ice cap, the polar bear, and the Patagonian lenga forest; for the river of weather and the ways it chooses to be born.”
It has taken me a while and opening my mind more to know what it is that prevents me from loving her writing; in her most recent Unsolaced, I realized that I relate quite strongly to her in so many ways, but when she talks about her relationships and cowboy or people stories, I recoil because it is too harsh, too different than her relationships with land. So, if I ignore or skim those, I love love love her writing. There is a thin line between personal memoir and what the landscape teaches, and as hard as I try, everything in me dislikes most of her personal stories.
For this review, I played around with a few layers of meaning, which was at once a meditation for me as well as a snow dance for my beloved Colorado, snowless in record breaking fashion in Denver and very nearly so in mountains, and it worked. Yesterday, as I was driving, snow was blowing off trees and cars that I have only seen here and catching the sunlight in a way that I have only seen here, and sparkled like glitter, as I have only seen here. That is winter where I live, the light and glow of the snow, the electric blues sky that is the truest I have seen, the unbelievable incandescence of native grasses in sunlight. So purely thrilled and solaced as Ehrlich knows.
Found poems:
Too few of us
remember
how to be heartbroken.
Or why we should be.
We don't look,
because
heartbreak
might
imply
failure.
But the opposite is true.
A broken heart is an open heart,
like a flower unfolding
from its calyx, the one
nourishing the other.
Too few of us
remember
how to be heartbroken.
Or why we should be.
We don't look,
because
heartbreak
might
imply
failure.
But the opposite is true.
A broken heart is an open heart,
like a flower unfolding
from its calyx, the one
nourishing the other.
*******************
I like to think of the landscape
not as a fixed place but
as a path that is
unwinding before my eyes,
under my feet.
To see and know a place
is a contemplative act.
It means emptying our minds
and letting what is there,
in all its multiplicity
and endless variety,
come in.
********************
My eyes were drenched–
not with snow or tears but with
the refulgence, the blue glint,
the shiver, the dove-gray snow
flashing iridescence.
Perhaps the place we go to at the end
of life is not the primordial ooze but
ice–layers and layers of
rod-and-cone-shaking beauty.
To see or not to see–that was the
only worthwhile question.
*******************
We go; beauty stays.
That’s what Joseph Brodsky wrote
about his beloved city Venice.
Arctic beauty resides
in its gestures of transience. Up here,
planes of light and darkness
are swords that cut away
illusions of permanence,
they are the feuilles mortes on
which we pen our desperate
message-in-a-bottle: words of rapture
and longing for what we know will disappear.
***********************
The Inuit never made much
of beginnings or endings
and now I knew why. No matter
what you did in winter, how
deep you dove, there was still
no daylight and no comprehension
that came with light. Endings were everywhere,
visible within the invisible, and the timeless days and nights ticked by.
***********************
Winter is a time when we see into things.
One minute, life is so much mush; in the next it comes clear.
We break through ice to come on more ice,
one translucent door opening onto another.
The construct of a single snowflake belies winter's
genius: how seeming opacities translate into see-through,
cartwheeling membranes that stack up and compress
into ice mountains; diamond-hard sparks that slice away
self-deception. If blizzards bring on oblivion,
their winds also whisk it away.
What's left is a swept-out room
of stark beauty and clear light.
****************************
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 lose 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. Bit by bit,
glacier by glacier, rib by rib, we're living the Fall.
It has taken me a while and opening my mind more to know what it is that prevents me from loving her writing; in her most recent Unsolaced, I realized that I relate quite strongly to her in so many ways, but when she talks about her relationships and cowboy or people stories, I recoil because it is too harsh, too different than her relationships with land. So, if I ignore or skim those, I love love love her writing. There is a thin line between personal memoir and what the landscape teaches, and as hard as I try, everything in me dislikes most of her personal stories.
For this review, I played around with a few layers of meaning, which was at once a meditation for me as well as a snow dance for my beloved Colorado, snowless in record breaking fashion in Denver and very nearly so in mountains, and it worked. Yesterday, as I was driving, snow was blowing off trees and cars that I have only seen here and catching the sunlight in a way that I have only seen here, and sparkled like glitter, as I have only seen here. That is winter where I live, the light and glow of the snow, the electric blues sky that is the truest I have seen, the unbelievable incandescence of native grasses in sunlight. So purely thrilled and solaced as Ehrlich knows.
Found poems:
Too few of us
remember
how to be heartbroken.
Or why we should be.
We don't look,
because
heartbreak
might
imply
failure.
But the opposite is true.
A broken heart is an open heart,
like a flower unfolding
from its calyx, the one
nourishing the other.
Too few of us
remember
how to be heartbroken.
Or why we should be.
We don't look,
because
heartbreak
might
imply
failure.
But the opposite is true.
A broken heart is an open heart,
like a flower unfolding
from its calyx, the one
nourishing the other.
*******************
I like to think of the landscape
not as a fixed place but
as a path that is
unwinding before my eyes,
under my feet.
To see and know a place
is a contemplative act.
It means emptying our minds
and letting what is there,
in all its multiplicity
and endless variety,
come in.
********************
My eyes were drenched–
not with snow or tears but with
the refulgence, the blue glint,
the shiver, the dove-gray snow
flashing iridescence.
Perhaps the place we go to at the end
of life is not the primordial ooze but
ice–layers and layers of
rod-and-cone-shaking beauty.
To see or not to see–that was the
only worthwhile question.
*******************
We go; beauty stays.
That’s what Joseph Brodsky wrote
about his beloved city Venice.
Arctic beauty resides
in its gestures of transience. Up here,
planes of light and darkness
are swords that cut away
illusions of permanence,
they are the feuilles mortes on
which we pen our desperate
message-in-a-bottle: words of rapture
and longing for what we know will disappear.
***********************
The Inuit never made much
of beginnings or endings
and now I knew why. No matter
what you did in winter, how
deep you dove, there was still
no daylight and no comprehension
that came with light. Endings were everywhere,
visible within the invisible, and the timeless days and nights ticked by.
***********************
Winter is a time when we see into things.
One minute, life is so much mush; in the next it comes clear.
We break through ice to come on more ice,
one translucent door opening onto another.
The construct of a single snowflake belies winter's
genius: how seeming opacities translate into see-through,
cartwheeling membranes that stack up and compress
into ice mountains; diamond-hard sparks that slice away
self-deception. If blizzards bring on oblivion,
their winds also whisk it away.
What's left is a swept-out room
of stark beauty and clear light.
****************************
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 lose 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. Bit by bit,
glacier by glacier, rib by rib, we're living the Fall.
January 11, 2024
Hmmm so I have mixed feelings about this book. I think the title is very misleading because I was expecting something much more scientific about ice, but this is actually a very poetic memoir about the authors travels at the poles. It is so poetic that I honestly did not really enjoy it, but I would recommend this to people who don’t like nonfiction normally! Similar vibes to Robert Macfarlane‘s Underland, which I also found much too poetic and not scientific enough for my tastes.
September 14, 2008
It is not like I forgot that Gretel Erhlich existed. I knew she had published new books since her book about being struck by lightning (A Match to the Heart), I just hadn't read anything by her for a really long time.
What a mistake. Now I will have to go back to find the books I haven't read. Ehrlich is a superb writer. She has a way with words that made me want to read The Future of Ice out loud. From the beginning of the book until the end I was so envious. I have no desire to write for publication, but who wouldn't be jealous of Ehrlich's phrasing. Listen to this:
"All I know is this - and maybe I don't know it at all: The inner world is the one where the cold flame of passion is used to set ourselves free from desire."
The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold was published in 2004. It was a wake-up call about the possible end of winter and what that would do for our world. Ehrlich was one among many who were talking about global warming long before Gore. I don't object to Al Gore's books, but they are not as beautiful as this one.
I suggested cold for the BAM challenge because by August I am tired of Virginia summers. I was not sorry to find my self in some of the coldest places on this planet with Ehrlich. However, I did not expect to be so moved by my BAM choice. Thank you Gretel Ehrlich, for writing with such passion about your winter experiences.
What a mistake. Now I will have to go back to find the books I haven't read. Ehrlich is a superb writer. She has a way with words that made me want to read The Future of Ice out loud. From the beginning of the book until the end I was so envious. I have no desire to write for publication, but who wouldn't be jealous of Ehrlich's phrasing. Listen to this:
"All I know is this - and maybe I don't know it at all: The inner world is the one where the cold flame of passion is used to set ourselves free from desire."
The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold was published in 2004. It was a wake-up call about the possible end of winter and what that would do for our world. Ehrlich was one among many who were talking about global warming long before Gore. I don't object to Al Gore's books, but they are not as beautiful as this one.
I suggested cold for the BAM challenge because by August I am tired of Virginia summers. I was not sorry to find my self in some of the coldest places on this planet with Ehrlich. However, I did not expect to be so moved by my BAM choice. Thank you Gretel Ehrlich, for writing with such passion about your winter experiences.
August 2, 2007
The Future of Ice follows nature writer Gretel Ehrlich over one year as she travels around the world, from glaciers in Tierra del Fuego (Chile), to a farm in Wyoming, to the Arctic Circle, searching for, and living in, winter. This marvelous, crisp, novel is filled with deft anecdotes along the way, as Ehrlich contemplates the possibility of the world becoming “deseasoned” due to global warming. Her narrative is a lesson in eloquence; part lament, part memoir, part environmental politic: “Rain shatters and strutters; guanacos graze. Patchworks of ice – the remains of hanging glaciers – rot away before our eyes. Snow squalls fall flat like bedsheets.” Often terrifying in the premonition of destruction (the shocking discovery of a palm tree in Switzerland, the ever-diminishing glaciers), there yet remains the glimmer of hope that preservation may be possible if humanity can ever change its ways. The novel is Ehrlich’s attempt to find justification for the depreciation: “Accumulation and ablation, to get and to give: these are the balancing acts of any human or glacier.” While the events Ehrlich describes are striking and elegiac, her message is profound and frightening – without winter, what becomes of the world?
July 29, 2012
NO SPOILERS!! The author takes on some of her travels around the world in some beautifully cold places - the Arctic, Wyoming, S. America, etc. During the story, she talks about the relationship humans have with cold, ice and snow and what those things can teach us. She spends a great deal of time pontificating about glaciers and what they can teach us about life, love, economics, etc. In addition, how humans are changing the environment through our own actions (global warming, climate change) and the detrimental effects we're having. She is definitely a proponent of man-made global warming. The majority of the book's writing is spent by the author pontificating and spiritualizing about the human condition and it's relationship to all things cold. This took me by surprise as I assumed the book would be more experiential based and science-related. Although the writing was excellent, insightful and thought-provoking, this wasn't the book I expected…thus the 3 stars. I think that if this is something you may be interested in, then this book is for you. BOTTOM LINE: I liked it but it wasn't what I expected.
May 7, 2016
Има ли фенове на Gretel Ehrlich? Или поне някой да я е чувал? Не? Е, тогава ще споделя съвсем кратко мнение за тази нейна книга. Купих си я съвсем случайно - привлече ме уникалната корица, която на всичкото отгоре е и твърда. Заглавието само по себе си събуди интереса ми. Темата за глобалното затопляне винаги ми е била много на сърце и това беше още една причина да разгледам по-подробно за какво става въпрос. Само с един бърз поглед ми направи впечатление интересният похват, който използва авторката - къси, красиви и абстрактни изречения, често пълни с разнообразни изрази. Описанията ѝ на природата са нетрадиционни, понякога забавни, понякога тъжни, но винаги искрени. Сега, след като вече прочетох творбата, в мен останаха приятни чувства от зимните приключния, които изживях, четейки книгата. Смятам, че със сигурност обогатих познанията си по английски, биология и обичане на живота. И за да не е само прехвалване ще сложа и някой и друг цитат, който ми хареса:
„If the path is whatever passes, no end in itself, why are we walking in a circle? Why don't we just stand?"
"The winter world is the one where the cold flame of passion is used to set ourselves free from desire."
„If the path is whatever passes, no end in itself, why are we walking in a circle? Why don't we just stand?"
"The winter world is the one where the cold flame of passion is used to set ourselves free from desire."
February 4, 2010
It seems like Gretel Ehrlich has led such a beautiful life. Lonely at times, painful at times, but quiet and far-reaching and beautiful. She is associated with open spaces, mountains, sea. Montana, Wyoming, Northern California. Greenland. Now all of these cold places. Tierra del Fuego! How extraordinary! How can I live my life more like hers? She went to film school at UCLA, then "worked in film" for ten years. After the death of her fiance, she moved to a sheep ranch in Wyoming, where she stayed, beginning to write full-time. She was hit by lightning, then took to traveling. How to live my life more like hers.
This book, specifically, isn't the most cohesive of her essay collections, but it's much better than almost everything else out there in the genre. Hence the "perfect" review for what I suppose I consider an imperfect collection.
And isn't this interview lovely?
http://www.identitytheory.com/people/...
This book, specifically, isn't the most cohesive of her essay collections, but it's much better than almost everything else out there in the genre. Hence the "perfect" review for what I suppose I consider an imperfect collection.
And isn't this interview lovely?
http://www.identitytheory.com/people/...
March 16, 2009
Ehrlich's lovesong to winter, The Future of Ice is part travelogue, part prose-poetry, part memoir of a year in winter. Provoked by the idea that climate change and a warming planet might swallow winter, Ehrlich travels from pole to pole -- from the southern end of the world, Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia, to lonely islands in the Arctic -- to consider winter. She hikes Torres del Paine, waits out a moose in a cabin in Wyoming, and survives a turbulent boat ride in the Norwegian Arctic. The prose is beautifully poetic and Ehrlich's relationship with the cold informs everything. She writes of what we will lose if we continue to waste and destroy; instead of preaching green or proclaiming apocalypse, it is instead a portrait of winter, a reminder of what we stand to lose, of life in ice and snow and cold.
Read
April 28, 2012I must be getting old, because I have less patience for this kind of thing than I used to. I love nature writing, I love the concept, and I was looking forward to this book, but I feel disappointed. Environmentalist commentary is grafted awkwardly onto an obsession with the beauty of cold places. Her arguments are non-specific and have all been made before. She offers no solutions.
When she is standing on back of a glacier, I don't feel any awe. Just jealousy that she got to be there and not me. When I read her accounts, she tells me where she went but doesn't bring me with her. She avoids talking about herself and her feelings as much as possible, depending on poetic descriptions to create emotion. It's pretty, but I didn't get much from this book.
When she is standing on back of a glacier, I don't feel any awe. Just jealousy that she got to be there and not me. When I read her accounts, she tells me where she went but doesn't bring me with her. She avoids talking about herself and her feelings as much as possible, depending on poetic descriptions to create emotion. It's pretty, but I didn't get much from this book.
February 13, 2009
This book makes me long for Winter. Ehrlich's poetic writing style brings a unique outlook to the cold months in various places on the planet. From her home into Wyoming, to the depths of the Arctic circle - Ehrlich makes it clear that winter is disappearing. Being in Colorado in February, this fact hits close to home as we have hardly had any cold this year. She also continually points out that we are damaging the planet beyond repair, and that we must realize what we are loosing before its gone.
A quick read that is very worth reading.
Started: February 9, 2009
Finished: February 11, 2009
A quick read that is very worth reading.
Started: February 9, 2009
Finished: February 11, 2009
February 17, 2013
Another serendipitous find: was searching the shelves for Librarian's picks. This is lushly written, sensitive, poetic, imaginative. A writer's journey, not a scientist's. I'm in a winter phase right now: saw Herzog's Encounters at the end of the World and find myself wanting to know more about extreme people in extreme conditions. Also interested in environmental issues, of course, and this fits that bill to a nicety. She's a little precious sometimes, but I'm finding it easy to read in bits and pieces.
January 12, 2008
Lyrical, evocative, intimate. This book travels with her as she explores what cold means to us in these days as we question the changes we are witnessing in climate. I saw her and David Buckland speak in Chicago in November and her breadth of knowledge and adventure and courage were clear and led me to seek out her writing. Within the extreme quiet of snow and ice which runs beneath this book, a sense of her intelligent grappling with the world and with grief melts and freezes in turn.
January 12, 2009
This book deals more with nature than science, so the publisher categorized it correctly. Gretel Ehrlich has a grasp of scientific data regarding climate change, but she tends to tread softly on the subject, and the narrative is dragged down by non-connecting thoughts. The chapters carry an ethereal taste, not altogether inappropriate for the subject matter.
For ice fans, I'd suggest Joanna Kavenna's search for the mythical nordic land of Thule, THE ICE MUSEUM.
For ice fans, I'd suggest Joanna Kavenna's search for the mythical nordic land of Thule, THE ICE MUSEUM.
February 16, 2009
I've loved several of Ehrlich's other books (esp. The Solace of Open Spaces) and think she is a gorgeous writer. I like The Future of Ice most when she talked about her own experiences, like hiking in South America or living in her cabin in remote Montana. But the parts where she waxes poetic on the symbolism of ice and water (which I'm sure was the original theme for this book) did not grip me as much. Still, I will continue to look forward to more from Ehrlich.
January 9, 2012
Alternate title: Cold, Desolate Places and the People Who Love Them. This book is nothing if not highly poetic and personal. The contrast between the stark, frigid imagery and mentions of a past miscarriage, death of a loved one, and time spent in a coma is as jarring as the extreme cold she chronicles. This book was a gift from the author and gave me a lot of insight into her history and how it may have shaped her as a person.
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