00:00:17.160This is not easy research, and it's much easier to homogenize ice or tie it together geographically,
00:00:24.540get a metric for it, glaciers in this area are melting X amount, and then publish it.
00:00:29.480That gives us data that we can hold on to, but it doesn't tell us all that much about the human condition.
00:00:38.240Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Andrew Storrs, sitting in today for Ayana Young.
00:00:44.700Ayana's conversation today is with Dr. M. Jackson.
00:00:48.900Dr. Jackson is a geographer and glaciologist, National Geographic Society explorer,
00:00:54.980TED Fellow, three-time U.S. Fulbright Scholar, and author of their recently released book,
00:01:01.860The Secret Lives of Glaciers. Em earned a doctorate from the University of Oregon
00:01:07.020in Geography and Glaciology, where she examined how climate change transformed people
00:01:13.060and glacier communities in Iceland. Em serves as an Arctic expert for the National Geographic
00:01:20.020Society, holds a Master's of Science degree from the University of Montana, and served as a Peace
00:01:26.460Corps volunteer in Zambia. She's worked for over a decade in the Arctic, chronicling climate change
00:01:33.000and communities, guiding backcountry trips, and exploring glacial systems. Her 2015 memoir,
00:01:40.420While Glaciers Slept, Being Human in a Time of Climate Change, weaves together the parallel
00:01:45.860stories of what happens when the climates of a family and a planet change. Em writes about
00:01:52.360glaciers and people worldwide and lives outside of Eugene, Oregon. Now on to the conversation
00:01:59.480with Ayanna and Dr. Jackson. Well, Em, I just want to start off by thanking you for being on
00:02:06.940the show today. I am really grateful for your work, and also I have a very strong connection
00:02:14.820to glaciers. So this is a conversation that I have been thinking about, dreaming about for the
00:02:21.480last few weeks. And this is the best way to spend my day is talking about this with you. So welcome
00:02:27.780to the show. Thank you so much for having me. So currently our earth has nearly 200,000 glaciers
00:02:35.060moving across its surface. And in the age of the Anthropocene, these glaciers have attained a kind
00:02:41.980of iconic status as this visual reference of what we risk losing due to climate change.
00:02:49.440But in this iconography, glaciers have really been oversimplified and they've just been reduced to
00:02:55.660their relationship, mostly with warming weathers. In your book, The Secret Lives of Glaciers,
00:03:01.780you write, quote, today's single story of glaciers has not been and is not today representative of
00:03:08.880the entirety of the life of a glacier. The life of a glacier that includes individuals, communities,
00:03:15.420culture, scale, negative and positive impacts, geography, place, in short, complexity. Complexity
00:03:23.600has no single story, no presupposed value, no certain future, end quote. Your writing is so
00:03:30.880beautiful and I really love that quote and I'd love if you could begin our conversation by sharing
00:03:36.140why or when you recognize the value in telling the many stories of glaciers and ice.
00:03:42.540And then a second part to that is why are glaciers worth fighting for beyond just scientific
00:03:48.360justification? These are huge, huge questions you're asking. And I love that you're even
00:03:54.760asking them because it tells me that there is consideration for more, that glaciers don't just
00:04:01.980melt that they aren't these these creatures out on our landscape that are already sometimes when
00:04:10.560I talk to people they just say the glaciers are melting and they use this language that's okay
00:04:14.540their conclusion is foregone you know climate change is happening and the glaciers are going
00:04:19.840to go away and I think there's so much more there's so much more to the human spirit to humanity
00:04:27.120we talk about glaciers you said in the beginning of your question we have 200,000 glaciers but if
00:04:35.860you look at the very beginning of my book I say we have 400,000 glaciers there's still discrepancy
00:04:41.220on the number of glaciers I don't count just glaciers and just ice caps I add all forms of
00:04:50.780ice to get a number of 400,000 ice glaciers out there. I include ice streams and cirque glaciers
00:04:57.540and mountain glaciers and valley glaciers and these small tiny little glaciers called glacierettes
00:05:02.620which are usually glaciers that are what oh typically smaller than 0.1 kilometers squared
00:05:09.880but I count them because all ice in my view counts because anywhere glaciers are located
00:05:19.680on this planet. Whether we're talking about glaciers, they're in the Arctic, glaciers in
00:05:24.620Antarctica, glaciers in South America and North America, glaciers up in Alaska or in Asia or in
00:05:30.760Africa or in the Middle East or Europe or everywhere glaciers are located on this planet.
00:05:37.140They're located in inhabited and historic environments. Where there are glaciers, there are
00:05:43.940people. And the two have been interacting for the entirety of human history, but we haven't paid
00:05:50.080all that much attention to that. What we've done a lot of really well is looked at glaciers from
00:05:56.380a physical science lens where we monitor them and we measure them and we predict them. And we do
00:06:02.540that really, really well. But what we haven't really looked at is how glaciers show up in human
00:06:08.440society, how glaciers affect you and me, whether it's a huge ice cap or it's a tiny, tiny little
00:06:15.900glacierette, that whole range of ice. How does that affect you and me? And how has it been affecting
00:06:22.160all of us throughout human history? If you look at it from that lens, the idea that there is immense
00:06:29.340complexity there, there's so many stories, so many different ways of knowing ice. That starts to make
00:06:37.260sense we start to understand that yes of course there's all this complexity let's unpack it let's
00:06:43.700look at all those stories and then we're gonna know more we're gonna know more about ice but
00:06:48.600we're also gonna know more about ourselves and i think that's pretty powerful i can literally feel
00:06:56.380the glaciers talking through you right now i feel your connectedness to them and a part of the
00:07:04.460complexity that is lost through this reduction is the cultural fabric of glaciers. You had just
00:07:11.280begun to go into that. And I've heard you call folk glaciologies. So I would love if you could
00:07:18.940elaborate on how glaciers have lost their cultural context in dominant and scientific narratives.
00:07:25.120And what is the importance of remembering and revitalizing folk glaciologies?
00:07:30.140Yeah, and I don't know, even today, if the idea of the term, the label folk glaciologies works. And it is such a hard business when you have to go about labeling an entire body of knowledge.
00:07:48.220So I don't know if folk glaciology works. My colleagues and I, we bandied about different terms. Do we say alternative knowledges, indigenous knowledges, more than science knowledges? This gets really hard.
00:08:01.020But what we're trying to move towards is that there are all these different ways of knowing ICE that people from different parts of the world, people from a range of genders, a range of ethnicities and religions, this just immense diversity of people, think about ICE that is both within and outside a Western scientific model of ICE.
00:08:29.600of Western scientific approach to ice, which generally comes from that scientific method,
00:08:35.440which generally goes back to that measuring and monitoring and predicting ice, which gives us
00:08:40.500really good information. But it's not the entirety. It's not the only thing we can learn about ice,
00:08:47.400but it does tend to today define how many people approach ice. It defines what is an approach to
00:08:55.620ice, what is a way of learning about ice and what is not. And it does tend to therefore push away
00:09:01.740anything that might be outside of that. Let me give you an example. For Western scientific
00:09:07.680practices, when you think about glaciers, you're going to monitor and measure and predict them.
00:09:12.560You're not necessarily going to find a value in, say, people who perceive glaciers as sentient,
00:09:20.840glaciers as alive as breathing creatures that might that's pretty outside of that that western
00:09:27.180approach uh i think it's easy if you have that western scientific approach to say well glaciers
00:09:32.780just simply are not alive they don't fit any of the categorizations so that's outside but a lot
00:09:38.980of people who have studied glaciers and studied how people interact with them find evidence of
00:09:45.160perceptions of sentience. A classic example is Julie Crikshink's work from Southeast Alaska and
00:09:52.040British Columbia in the Yukon Territory, where Indigenous people found glaciers not to be these
00:09:58.100passive creatures, but rather these very alive, breathing, interacting phenomenon on the landscape
00:10:05.800that then kind of dictated their social order. My own work in Iceland, not speaking for every
00:10:11.660Icelander, but definitely speaking to some, I found that some Icelanders found glaciers to be
00:10:20.060on some range of alive. And why that might be important, just to give you a more detailed
00:10:26.400example, one person, he took me to the glacier Skäulefelsjöklund, and he told me that he'd
00:10:35.160been coming back to this glacier for most of his life, and that when he was a young boy,
00:10:39.720he had been playing around the glacier while his dad was working and he heard the glacier
00:10:46.240growl at him and he told his dad and his dad explained that the glacier was alive
00:10:51.960and that the glacier knew he was there and ever since that moment my friend had been going back
00:10:58.420to this glacier every year to interact update visit a friend have a coffee and if you look at
00:11:05.320what that actually kind of shows us, it shows a level of care that kind of extends beyond
00:11:11.620our typical interactions with the environment. This glacier was cared for by my friend and by
00:11:20.140many other people who saw glaciers that were alive to them. It extended the level of care.
00:11:26.940People were concerned about what was happening with that ice, about what that glacier's future
00:11:31.900was like, how that glacier monitored their own lives and the lives of those people in the
00:11:37.500community. It was an extension of care that we don't see. So that's a little bit outside of that
00:11:42.720Western scientific model, but it is just as important because it speaks to that human
00:11:47.900experience of living on this planet. Whether you're living with glaciers or you're living
00:11:53.060with forests or oceans or gardens and backyards, how we interact with our environment dictates
00:12:00.500how we care for our environment and what future we want to move into with our environment that's
00:12:06.280why this stuff gets really important i really loved hearing this idea of glaciers being sentient
00:12:13.960because that's something i've actually always felt when i've been able to have the luck to
00:12:19.780spend time with glaciers i've always felt them being alive and so wise and powerful and
00:12:26.360i really can't help but think of glaciers as old growth ice this you know formed by the
00:12:35.620compression of time holding stories and experience and there is indeed a profound
00:12:41.120spiritual dimension to their existence and while i remain completely enamored by their origin in a
00:12:49.340different time they're also still very much alive in this world and present in the landscapes of
00:12:55.880today. And so I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the wisdom of glaciers and what do they
00:13:03.140want to share with us? Or maybe what have they shared with you in these old wisdom ways?
00:13:11.200I'd love that question. And I think I'm going to answer it in two different ways. One just
00:13:15.100personally, and then just one a little bit larger. So thinking about the wisdom of glaciers and
00:13:21.260thinking about what stories they have to tell us. I have found, especially given the last couple of
00:13:28.100years and the complexities of living today, that when I need to think clearly, I go to the ice.
00:13:36.760When I need to be creative, I go to the ice. When I need to sort out a problem, I go to the ice.
00:13:44.980Glaciers for me are a place where I can park my imagination. They are a place where I can
00:13:49.640rest. They are a place where I can energize. When I'm out on the ice, because it's such a sensory
00:13:56.340experience, when you're walking on the ice, you have to be aware of exactly what's in front of
00:14:02.760you. Because there's a lot of danger there. There's also a lot of things to pay attention to
00:14:07.220for sensory, for detail, for beauty. There's the sounds of your crampons walking across crunchy
00:14:14.340ice. There's the sounds of the ice throughout the day as it changes with temperature. So the
00:14:19.480actual sounds on the glacier change depending on what time of day it is there's all the different
00:14:25.320light there's all the different features there's all the different vegetation there's life on ice
00:14:29.460and for me I go there and it sharpens it whittles away all the other things that aren't important
00:14:36.220and makes me focus and so I think some of the wisdom of ice for me personally is that it allows
00:14:43.980me to be more human, more present. But then if you're thinking like, okay, that's one individual,
00:14:49.400but what about a larger scale, more people? What's the stories glaciers can tell us?
00:14:56.500And I think about one particular glacier that serves as a really good example, one glacier out
00:15:02.440of those 400,000 individual glaciers, glacierettes and ice caps out there, one glacier. In Iceland,
00:15:09.680Breda America Yogurt. It's this large glacier that a lot of people have visited because it
00:15:14.140has a large glacier lake in front of it, Yoko Sauron. Big icebergs. It's absolutely stunning.
00:15:21.340And where I usually pop up onto this glacier, it's a place you have all the blue, blue,
00:15:27.340white ice that meets a really gray, scraped clean landscape where the ice is melting away.
00:15:34.140and it's in this large valley. And when I'm walking on that glacier, when I pop up onto
00:15:39.540that glacier, one of the things that really, really stands vivid to my brain is that where
00:15:44.740I'm standing on that ice, a thousand years ago when Iceland was first settled, there was no ice
00:15:50.660there. It used to be a really green and lush valley. But when those first North settlers
00:15:58.000came from Scandinavia and they came to where Brother America Yogelt sits today, they looked
00:16:01.820around in that valley and they didn't see ice all they saw was that lush green valley that birch
00:16:07.560forest and those people they thought they hit jackpot and what they did is they moved in and
00:16:12.480they build families and farms and futures and they lived in that valley for hundreds of years all the
00:16:17.120way up until the little ice age when the climate started to cool and so brave america yogurt started
00:16:23.760to surge forward down this valley and glaciers don't ever move very easily forward or backwards
00:16:30.680They always take a step forward, maybe two steps back, step forward, step another forward, then one back.
00:16:37.380And so in this valley where these Icelanders were living, these early Icelanders, they started to watch this glacier creep towards them and then go backwards and then creep towards them.
00:16:46.700And they had to make decisions every day.
00:16:49.460They had to wake up, look at where that glacier was as it started to come down valley.
00:16:52.940And they had to decide, is today the day that we go or we stay?
00:20:47.260this reminds me of a passage that you you said a couple years ago and i'll quote it
00:21:13.200You said, climate change is not an enemy to be vanquished. It is a phenomenon deeply tied to our daily lived existence. It is part of the conversation our mixed up, beautiful, contrary, and imaginative people must have about who we are as a people and where we want to go, end quote.
00:21:32.820and I was so struck by this passage because it seems really rare that people are able to come
00:21:39.700to this reckoning you know we are in a time where we have to engage with climate change
00:21:45.360and not run away from it although we may migrate we can't escape climate change and just imagining
00:21:54.980this valley that you're speaking of in Iceland and I gosh it really brings up so many questions
00:22:01.020to me, but I kind of have maybe a question around how you were talking about how glaciers
00:22:07.700grow and retreat, grow and retreat. But as we're in this perhaps new stage of climate change where
00:22:15.220it seems like glaciers in a sense are mostly only retreating because climate change is really going
00:22:23.080towards the direction of warming, warming, warming. And what always gets me is although we have all
00:22:28.720these scientific numbers and we see that we're warming the planet, what do we do? We only burn
00:22:34.620more fossil fuels in the face of it. What do we do? We only consume more. What do we do? We only
00:22:38.740create more plastic. So just seeing those numbers that we see the numbers and we see the temperatures
00:22:44.820rising, we're really just burning more than we ever have before. So if we look at that and then
00:22:52.260try to understand the fate of glaciers in this time, what would your prediction be for glaciers
00:22:59.480futures? I mean, of course, I'm sure all 400,000 of them have different fates, but I wonder if the
00:23:05.660majority of them have the same fate, which is melting. It's really hard to look into the future.
00:23:13.600and there are so many unknowns especially with increasing climatic changes so we do have some
00:23:23.020good evidence today that shows us as as some ice is melting in some places especially ice that is
00:23:30.360located on top of volcanoes we might have more volcanic activity which might mean more aerosols
00:23:37.340in our atmosphere, which might mean a temporary cooling. There are so many variables and so many
00:23:44.380new technologies. And so it's really hard to say, and I try to stay away from, the future is this.
00:23:50.240Right now, unequivocally, the trend is we're losing our world to ice. It is melting quicker
00:23:57.180today than it has ever melted in human history before. And we have really good evidence that
00:24:02.280says that's what's happening. Is this a reversible trend? I think it depends on geography and scale
00:24:09.100and where. Can our glaciers grow again? It depends again on geography and scale, and I'm not trying
00:24:16.440to be vague. There are just too many variables to control for, and I don't ever want to say
00:24:21.520we're moving into a world without ice because I don't want to be fatalistic, and I don't want to
00:24:29.400say that this is our future. This is our concrete future, because it also then makes it inevitable
00:24:34.060future. It also then says this is where we're going and there's no way to change course.
00:24:39.480I think there are a lot of ways to change course, and there's a lot of places that are working on
00:24:43.540that. But if we took all the variables off the table and said, what are we doing and what's the
00:24:49.220future we're moving into? If nothing changes, then we're going to be losing the majority of our ice.
00:24:54.960And I think we have to have some really important conversations about what that might mean. Because the quote that you read at the beginning of your question about what's happening with our world today, we know that climatic changes are happening everywhere.
00:25:13.100They're happening at all geographies, all times, at all scales.
00:25:20.700Why are we still working on immense natural resource extraction, living in a world of plastic?
00:25:26.540Why are we continuing a life we know is unhealthy?
00:25:29.560And I think it really comes back down to how we talk about climate change.
00:25:33.480And this is another lesson we can get from glaciers.
00:25:36.960This is another great lesson that you can learn a lot about in my new book, The Secret Lives of Glaciers.
00:25:43.100it comes down to value. So if you just looked just on the south coast of Iceland and said,
00:25:50.460what's the value of glaciers there and what's happening? Well, we know at different rates and
00:25:55.680speeds, all the glaciers on the south coast are in some form of recession. How that recession works
00:26:00.960is very different depending on the individual glacier. And I won't get into it right this
00:26:05.400moment. But the important bit is if you talk to people and you say, what's happening with the
00:26:11.060glaciers and what's this experience like for you and this is glacier is this good or bad we tend
00:26:16.220to have a global narrative that glaciers are melting and this is bad you talk to people on
00:26:20.120the south coast of iceland some of them say you know what's going to happen when iceland loses
00:26:26.060all its ice can you still be icelandic without ice so people are afraid they're losing their
00:26:31.440identity as icelanders other people look at all that melting ice and they say especially older
00:26:36.380icelanders they say this is the very best thing that can happen because for years those glaciers
00:26:40.660they grew and they retreated and they grew and they retreated and they destroyed our farms and
00:26:44.040our families and our futures so looking at the ice melting for the very first time some people
00:26:48.680say they feel safe this is a really good thing for them other people they they say you know
00:26:55.360especially fishermen they look at the glaciers melting and they say that this can cause some
00:27:00.560real economic hardship in this area because there's a there's a harbor there that all the
00:27:05.560fishermen use they bring their boats in and out and so as the ice is melting that harbor is getting
00:27:10.620shallower and shallower. It's something called isostatic rebound. If you imagine a sponge in
00:27:14.760your hand, press that sponge down with your hand. When you take your hand away, that sponge, it
00:27:18.480springs right on back up. Same thing happening to the land. Glaciers, when they're really big,
00:27:22.840they press the land down. When the glaciers get smaller, in that land, it springs right on back
00:27:27.980up. So this harbor that's on the south coast of Iceland, the glaciers are melting. So the land is
00:27:32.560springing back up, which means that harbor is getting shallower. The boats can't come in and
00:27:36.640out. What's going to happen there? So they say it's really bad that the glaciers are melting.
00:27:40.280the fishermen do but then a last one talk to a lot of people there who are now in tourism they
00:27:46.200say the glaciers are melting people are coming from all over the world to see the ice before
00:27:50.360it's gone last chance tourism so they look at their bank accounts which are filling up
00:27:54.840and they say i have economic stability i'm rich now that the glaciers are melting because i'm
00:28:00.600doing all these different tourism activities and opening restaurants and hotels they say this is
00:28:04.660good. So it's the same phenomenon. It's glacier change. But there's all these different values
00:28:10.240that associate with it. And this is such an important thing to talk about, because I think
00:28:15.720this is why we don't really engage with climate change at a larger level, why we continue to grab
00:28:21.580oil, why we live with all this plastic. When we have talked about climate change, we've often had
00:28:27.280a value-based conversation that says climate change is bad. But we don't really add that
00:28:33.040complexity. We don't add what are and can be short-term benefits. And I'm not getting into
00:28:39.500climate denial. What I'm saying is that to some people, the change of the environment can give
00:28:45.240them a short-term benefit. It could bring that increased tourism. That is just as much a part
00:28:50.800of environmental change as a perceived negative impact, such as, say, isostatic rebound.
00:28:58.280What it all is, though, is it is part of a shared experience of our environment changing.
00:29:03.640What happens to all the people that live, say, in the middle of the United States that are watching their gardens come in a little bit earlier and are secretly thrilled about that?
00:29:15.680They know it's probably because of climate change, but hey, their gardens are in a little bit earlier or they might have warmer temperatures or they might have more beautiful birds that are coming in.
00:29:24.520They might perceive a positive benefit to whatever change is occurring. And if we don't allow for a conversation around climate change that says there are short-term benefits, short-term disadvantages, there are all these complex values that can be built into what is a shared experience.
00:29:46.440what unites all of us is that we are having environmental change and we need to be having
00:29:52.620a conversation that says how do we learn to recognize that change outside of a value how do
00:29:57.860we all see what is happening and then begin to work with that regardless of what that value might
00:30:04.480be if we just consistently leave a reduced conversation about climate change that says
00:30:10.640climate change is bad we need to stop it or resource extraction is bad we need to stop it
00:30:17.820or glacier change is bad we need to stop it we will never move forward with these things we have
00:30:23.660to have these messy dirty long-term complex conversations about what is happening and we
00:30:30.520have to allow for geography and scale and time that the changes that are happening in one place
00:30:35.240are radically different than they are in another place. And that also then pushes those local
00:30:40.680solutions, those local communities to act. Oh, I have so many thoughts spurring from
00:30:47.280your response. I'm thinking about wanting to learn more about how communities are engaging.
00:30:55.320You know, I've come across stories of communities who are farming glaciers and even creating ice
00:30:59.840stupas to provide stable sources of water during periods of drought and then there's yeah yeah yeah
00:31:07.100that is i have written a lot about that and here's what's so important about that that kind of ties
00:31:12.300through the thread of the conversation we're having right now are glaciers alive well you
00:31:17.580look at a western scientific model and no and can you breed glaciers well western scientific model
00:31:22.920No. But you go to these parts of the Karakorum and the Hindu Kush, where for centuries, local villagers, local glacier farmers, they identified a range of genders of glaciers.
00:31:36.340They knew that a female glacier was a glacier that was blue and surged and gave off a lot of water.
00:31:42.900And a male glacier was this glacier with a lot more soil and sediments on it, moved slowly, didn't give off as much water.
00:31:49.160And they knew that they could take chunks from male glaciers and female glaciers and bring them together and with lots of ritual, build a brand new glacier.
00:32:14.380But from a Western scientific model, where's the value in information like that?
00:32:18.360That's some of the most easily and first dismissed information.
00:32:23.800But we can take that information, those indigenous technologies, and apply them today.
00:32:29.340Today, a lot of areas that are drought-stricken because of increasing climatic changes,
00:32:35.720these places would serve well to have an artificial glacier.
00:32:40.600This is water and snow that is held vertically, so you don't need to have a reservoir.
00:32:46.680And you can then build these huge things. The technology is all over the internet. A lot of places around the world are doing this now. And you can then have a little bit of water that you can control in between going from the rainy season, dry season, dry season to rainy season, any drought, you have controllable water.
00:33:04.960It's an amazing technology that we wouldn't know anything about, except for if we looked a little bit harder at these indigenous knowledges, these alternative knowledges, these folk knowledges.
00:33:16.040They're so powerful because they can help us learn to live in a really changing world.
00:33:26.600I really want to hear more about the gender of glaciers because that is something that's absolutely not talked about in Western science and also these technologies of – I mean, it is.
00:33:39.780It's fascinating and there's so much hope for solutions in there if we were to only, as a Western society, give TEK or traditional ecological knowledge value in this dominant culture.
00:33:53.560But, you know, speaking of this dominant culture, I see a lot of dominance around glaciers, glacier science, glacier exploration.
00:34:06.220I have spent some really wonderful quality time in southeast Alaska and beyond in the Yukon and further north of Alaska creating another project that we'll be releasing sometime this year.0.53
00:34:20.400and it's amazing how many glaciers are named after white men and it just it's fascinating
00:34:29.160because the ways in which polar and mountain exploration have furthered colonial capitalist
00:34:35.300and imperialist projects is really a lesser discussed side of glaciology the article you
00:34:43.280co-authored glaciers gender and science it outlined several glaring examples of this
00:34:49.720including that the united states militarized presence in the polar regions during the cold
00:34:55.080war era and british and american attitudes around arctic exploration in the 19th century
00:35:00.640and then you also included how in 2009 former cia director r james wolsey testified before the house
00:35:08.380of Representatives that the melting of Andean glaciers would pose a, quote, security threat
00:35:25.940But of course, you know, the question of why do we think it's important to center these
00:35:31.280conversations or how can rethinking the field of glaciology broaden our concepts of the
00:35:37.300environment, our relationship to it or with it. I mean, you've discussed that in a lot of senses
00:35:42.780already threading throughout our conversation, but I think if we just go by this male-dominated
00:35:51.700exploration version of glaciers and the dominant culture's version of glacial science,
00:36:00.480it cuts out so much of the story. And I know that's a lot of what we've been talking about,
00:36:05.500But I feel and I felt very called to bring that up because, like I said, even going into Glacier Bay this summer and hearing the stories from Tlingit elders in Huna and the pain they felt over having to leave Glacier Bay when the glaciers grew and then wanting to come back but realizing that that land had been colonized and they were no longer welcome there.0.60
00:36:31.560And then just seeing the John Muir Glacier and all these white male glaciers that really have no story or respect for what was and what still is in these areas.0.63
00:36:51.640And if you want to, you know, speak more to that, because I know you've done so much work around this.
00:36:56.580I think that this is a conversation that is really pertinent to the Me Too movement, to this very strong, elevated sense of the era and the time that we're living in today.
00:37:13.160And there's, you know, science is such a nebulous term.
00:37:18.300And when I'm talking about science, I'm talking mainly about physical sciences and talking about glaciology here.
00:37:26.340But particularly to glaciology, I mean, if you look at this paper that we wrote, right, Glaciers, Gender, and Science, I wrote with my lab, this is a summary paper.
00:37:39.360And we went through a lot of data and we found that glaciology is dominated and has been dominated by men and masculine practices.
00:37:48.020And we supported all of this with really hard data.
00:37:50.700And we found that this shapes basically who gets to do glacier research, what questions are asked about glaciers, what methods are used, what policy proposals are suggested, who gets to fund and receive funding for glacier research, how the public imagines glacier research.
00:38:08.640And it goes kind of this idea that it's this masculine thing that to do glacier research, you need to be out in the dangerous field in Greenland or in Alaska or in Antarctica.
00:38:19.640You need to be doing this manly, heroic fieldwork, you know, this physically demanding work, which tends to be this very publicly imagined rough and tough man.
00:38:33.120And you get rewarded for that hard work when you get a glacier named after you.
00:38:37.920and you get all this funding. And I have found this to be not true on the ground today. I have
00:38:47.760found that while we look at historic practices of glaciology and you see women and indigenous
00:38:52.360people and non-Western white men, absolutely they're silenced or excluded or marginalized.
00:38:58.080Today, there are so many women out there. There are so many indigenous people out there. There
00:39:02.860There are so many non-Western white men out there working with ice, even if you don't see that in those traditional masculine spaces of women getting PhDs in glaciology and publishing in glaciological journals and that kind of thing.
00:39:19.840Women, Indigenous people, non-Western white men are out there understanding, investigating, working with ice in all kinds of ways.
00:39:29.440It's really quite an exciting time to be there.
00:39:32.080I just want them to get more attention. I want their work to be out there because it just isn't.
00:39:39.140Every time we see pictures of glaciers or we see stories of glaciers, it comes back to that really simplistic masculine narrative.
00:39:47.340And you see usually a solo man out on the ice by himself. And that's not how work is done today.
00:39:53.220I'm doing a lot of work right now in Iceland. I'm doing a new project looking specifically at women and ice in Iceland.
00:39:59.520And one of the interesting things about the increase of tourism there is that a lot more women have become glacier guides.
00:40:07.080And so they've gone through all that classic glacier guide training.
00:40:12.160But you can spot women out on glaciers really easy because they don't have as much gear as men do.
00:40:21.820And I have interviewed so many of these women.
00:40:24.300And what they tell me is, you know, they have got all the certifications.
00:40:27.480they know exactly how to rescue someone if they fall into a crevasse but they go out there with
00:40:32.960the minimal amount of gear necessary and they find that many of their male colleagues go out
00:40:39.140on the ice with the maximum amount of gear necessary so you have this performance of
00:40:45.500masculinity out on the ice where you see many of these female glacier guides they're out there1.00
00:40:51.220they're they interact with the ice they tend to spend a lot more time in the foreground of a1.00
00:40:54.960glacier where there's a lot of interesting different features and vegetation and they have
00:40:59.480just not that huge performance. And then you're out there with a lot of male glacier guides and
00:41:04.260they are, they are geared to the, to the teeth with this, these immense loads of things that
00:41:09.900aren't necessary, but does kind of then, um, authorize that narrative that they have all this
00:41:15.420gear. It's, it's, I think we're going on a little bit of a tangent here, but it's such a clear
00:41:20.880visual of how we still believe and think about ice today and how someone can interact with ice
00:41:26.820what happens if you are interested in researching glaciers and you're not fully able-bodied
00:41:34.280what happens if you are interested in researching glaciers and you come from a place in the world
00:41:40.160that doesn't give you access to say a western scientific research institute do you just not
00:41:46.360if you physically can't be out on a glacier does that preclude you now you can't study ice
00:41:50.860or perhaps you're geographically bound in a space where now you can't study ice because you don't
00:41:55.760have access to, say, Harvard. I don't think those are true to how the world works today. I think
00:42:02.240somebody who maybe doesn't have full ability, isn't fully mobile, can study ice in a lot of
00:42:08.200different ways. I think that if we start looking at what does it mean to be a glaciologist today,
00:42:13.440the answer is how do we absolutely include as many people and viewpoints and geographies and
00:42:19.580perspectives so that it is not this narrow masculine view, but rather this much more
00:42:24.280inclusive practice that says, if we're thinking about ice, let's look at it from as many different
00:42:30.020ways as possible. And that's all allowed, authorized, and included.
00:42:36.020What's happening with glacial scientists is really fascinating. And it's not shocking,
00:42:42.480of course, because we see it manifest this toxic masculinity in really every part of the world.
00:42:48.620And I was even reading about how it wasn't until the 1990s that the British even allowed women to spend the winter in Antarctica, or that in 1987, Elizabeth Morris had to talk to all the researchers' wives to ensure that she would not hit on their husbands while conducting research in the field.
00:43:08.780So, I mean, it's unbelievably ridiculous, really, what women have had to deal with just to be able to be valued in the field of glaciology.
00:43:22.400And I think this is a very important piece of the history of how glaciers have been looked at.
00:43:28.540And, of course, these other ways of knowing, ways of seeing glaciers have been left out of the canon.
00:43:36.180And that's what most people then hear about. So I think it's really an important topic to touch on.
00:43:44.080Incredibly important. I think that if we go back to the initial idea that glaciers are one of our most visible manifestations of global climatic changes, and people worldwide are going to have to learn how to live with, adapt, mitigate, and stop global climatic changes,
00:44:04.520then we have to start looking at how people live with ice right that's just a real basic spot it
00:44:10.820doesn't preclude oceans rivers forests but it's a real basic starting point to look at
00:44:15.080and if we then start to build walls if we start to build parameters again around what we can and
00:44:23.020cannot study when it comes to ice we limit ourselves if we're saying that glaciers are
00:44:28.460some of the most visible evidence of climatic changes and we need to understand how glaciers
00:44:32.020respond we need to then say everything's included we can't do this malarkey where the british what
00:44:39.140they didn't allow women to overwinter in antarctica until the early 1990s right because of gender
00:44:45.460women can't do x that's just ridiculous i don't have time for that i don't have time for people
00:44:51.120who say if you are an artist who's trying to figure out uh different sounds on glaciers well0.99
00:44:57.620guess what that's not glaciology we don't have time for you i don't that's all just ridiculous
00:45:01.980right now, if we're trying to understand how to live with and stop climatic changes, we need to
00:45:07.760say everything's in right now, regardless of your discipline, regardless of your perspective,
00:45:13.180your ability, your gender, your ethnicity, where you are in the world. Everything is in. We need
00:45:19.340all knowledges and all brains put together because that's the only way we're going to understand
00:45:22.860glaciers. That's the only way we're going to understand climatic changes. That is the only
00:45:26.880way we're going to move into a better future. Yeah. And it, it also kind of reminds me of this
00:45:33.440idea of what science has done so far, which is to me, very extractive science, kind of this
00:45:39.760similar to some anthropologists who simply collect the data they need, and then they leave without
00:45:44.940really engaging in the communities they claim to be experts in. So I, I think what you're saying
00:45:51.340is so right on that deepening our relationship with place, with communities who have been living
00:45:56.720with the ice deepening our our channels of connection with the ice in very different ways
00:46:04.080than what's allowed in the scientific canon those are the ways in which we're going to find true
00:46:10.680knowledge about where we're at now where we're moving into the future what are the things that
00:46:16.320we can do and and i want to get back to this this uh gendering of the ice and you had just started
00:46:23.100to touch on how the blue ice was female and the more harder ice giving less water with the with
00:46:32.560the soil or dirt on top was male ice I and and I'm probably not saying that exactly right because
00:46:38.260this is a totally new concept for me but I'd really love to learn more about that because
00:46:43.040I've spent time with glaciers and I've definitely noticed the difference in these ice I mean the
00:46:47.620blue ice is so spectacular like it's like a jewel it's unbelievably beautiful and I wondered how
00:46:53.940is it this color and then I've gone to the tops and I've seen how the the soot gets on you know
00:46:59.840the tops of the glaciers and the bubbles of carbon stored in the ice and there's so much
00:47:05.220variation in a glacier and so I'd love to just hear more of your experiences there and maybe if
00:47:11.460you could break that down for us so that we could start to kind of visualize and get a better
00:47:16.160understanding of the complexity of just what the ice represents and all the different ways that it
00:47:21.940manifests. Yeah, absolutely. So that's what I think is fascinating about glaciers is that,
00:47:29.020you know, dependent on the communities that are living with ice, dependent on where we are in the
00:47:33.400world, people have different relationships with ice. And that relationship might be a relationship
00:47:39.580of sentience, where there's some perceived aliveness. And we see that in a lot of places
00:47:45.580where there's ice. There might be perceptions of gender, where some communities see glaciers in
00:47:53.580different ranges of gender. If you were to scale a little bit up and out of that and try to think
00:47:58.780about what that means, it means that people are looking at glaciers and identifying individuals
00:48:04.440and then identifying characteristics and traits and all of these different things. We have this
00:48:09.400word, glaciers. And we often talk about glaciers doing this or glaciers doing that. But that
00:48:16.920doesn't actually match what's happening on the ground. We have these 400,000 glaciers,
00:48:22.700glacier ice caps, and glaciers all are different. They're individuals, just like you and I and all
00:48:32.200people are going to interact and respond to stresses, respond to heartbreak, respond to a
00:48:38.700happy movie or a sad movie in different ways. So too do glaciers. Glaciers respond to what's
00:48:45.200happening around them, increasing air temperatures, land temperatures, ocean temperatures, increasing
00:48:50.880a landslide, all these different things, increasing climatic changes. They respond in different ways.
00:48:56.720No glacier responds the same way to the same thing. They're very unique individuals and people
00:49:02.800and communities can then build in culture and society around that. We have some examples
00:49:11.420from different places in the world, from Southeast Alaska and from Greenland and from Iceland,
00:49:17.380from the Karakoram. But what I can tell you is if we have such a diverse set of examples from just
00:49:23.460these few places, and we know the glaciers all over the world, let's find more examples of that.
00:49:29.080There are so many glaciers out there and there's just a few people looking at this stuff. We need more people looking at this stuff. But here's the thing. You can't just go up to somebody in a community, especially as a Western researcher, and say, do you think glaciers are alive? Or is that glacier a man or a woman? You can't do that.
00:49:49.760A lot of the people that I spoke with in Iceland about glaciers being sentient, this is a series of conversations over years because a lot of people, they are aware of global narratives of glaciers.
00:50:03.800So if you really want to get in, if you want to find out what is happening on the ground, this is long term, messy and dirty research.
00:50:13.580You have to be there for a long time. You have to be away from your family, from your friends, from your community as you're out there.
00:50:21.080It's also very expensive research and it doesn't fit an easy model.
00:50:26.260A lot of our funding models today are back to that masculine system, especially in Western science, where you're going to go and you're going to be there for X amount of days and you're going to get X amount of data and you're going to publish it in X amount of journals.
00:50:41.680The kind of stuff that I do, where I spend years in communities, I've been very lucky to get funding through the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the National Geographic.
00:50:51.560But I'm always looking for funding. I'm always trying to pay to be there even longer. Because the longer I'm there, the more I learn about how a community perceives individual glaciers, the more I learn about how an individual community reacts to individual change, which then, if you scale all the way up, tells us about how people worldwide live with climate change today.
00:51:14.500but this is not easy research and it's much easier to homogenize ice or tie it together
00:51:21.660geographically get a metric for it glaciers in this area are melting x amount and then publish
00:51:27.140it that gives us data that we can hold on to but it doesn't tell us all that much about the human
00:51:33.240condition and that's what i do and it's really really hard long-term work and it doesn't fit
00:51:40.440neatly into a lot of places, but I think it really shows that complexity.
00:53:29.000Wow. And this conversation has been so beautiful. And the way that you understand the world and climate change and the Anthropocene and glaciers and communities and culture and knowledge and science and the way you interweave them so thoughtfully is gorgeous.
00:53:53.780It's just it's it's delightful. It's delicious. I can't I really am so grateful for your vision and your follow through with your vision. I think that's also been a big takeaway for me.
00:54:06.500And I would love to open this up and ask if there's anything that you want to share with us that we haven't already mentioned or whether it's about your work or something that you feel is really important for us to walk away with.
00:54:25.600I'd love to give you the space to go in whatever direction you feel is needed.
00:54:31.820I think something really important to think about is that our future is not set I think with social
00:54:39.960media I think with the news and all these things it's so easy to hear all these very genuine very
00:54:47.200true negative stories and these are these are happening and I think it's incredible that we
00:54:54.760become so aware of them but it can be really disabling to constantly bear the weight of this
00:55:00.660and I think one way to navigate with that is to be aware that our future is not set that we have
00:55:05.440the ability to really shape the future we move into in the world we want to live in and how we
00:55:11.080want to live what our community looks like we do have a great deal of agency in a lot of different
00:55:17.320scales and so I think holding on to that holding on to some form of power as individual as it might
00:55:25.980sound or as collective as it might sound. It's one way to kind of push back. I cannot control
00:55:33.500the future of glaciers, but I can help the future of glaciers. I can continue educating people
00:55:40.860not only about the metrics of ice, but all the ways that ice shows up in our life.
00:55:45.960That's one area for me. I think we all need advocates. I'm a glacier advocate. So for all
00:55:51.980of your listeners I think it's important to wonder what are you going to be an advocate for
00:55:56.540is it going to be in something in your backyard in your environment is it going to be forests
00:56:01.800or birds or clouds or what is it and hopefully it's something you're passionate about or who
00:56:08.260is it is it a person is it a group of people is it is it structures what is it because if we become
00:56:14.320advocates for these things we become helpers towards these things and if all of us are doing
00:56:20.820this we have the ability to make a better future but it it's a hard thing to ask right now because
00:56:27.280I think so many of us feel so disabled with all the negative news out there I just ask that your
00:56:32.940listeners grab that thing they care about become that advocate and move forward with it because
00:56:39.040we really need it right now it's a future that I want to live and I'm trying to make better and I