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Author Dahr Jamail Presents: The End of Ice
April 16, 2019 @ 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm EDT
Join us for a book talk with Dahr Jamail and a great evening of conversation!
After nearly a decade as a war reporter, the acclaimed journalist returns to America to renew his passion for mountaineering, only to find that the slopes he had once climbed have been irrevocably changed by climate disruption.
More about The End of Ice
For his latest book, “The End of Ice” he traveled to the front lines of extreme shifts in habitat and ecology: Denali in Alaska, where glaciers are rapidly melting; the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, where increasingly horrific storms and “large-scale die-offs” decimate the local culture; the Rock Islands of Palau in the western Pacific ocean, where corals experience often fatal “bleaching”; and the Amazon, whose famous biodiversity is threatened by deforestation, warming temperatures, and various other human-caused effects.
The book is assiduously researched, profoundly affecting, and filled with vivid evocations of the natural world. Jamail’s deep love of nature blazes through his crisp, elegant prose, and he ably illuminates less-discussed aspects of climate disruption, like the Alexandrium toxin, a “marine dinoflagellate” responsible for the mass deaths of birds and fish, and white pine blister rust, “one of the single largest threats to trees in the continental United States.”
The constant assessment of Earth’s grim status can be a tad repetitive, but perhaps that’s the point, as Jamail infuses the book with a sense of reluctant futility. Near the end, he writes that he has surrendered his hope that “bludgeoning people with scientific reports about increasingly dire predictions of the future would wake them up about the planetary crisis we find ourselves in.”
Now, he grieves, which “is a way of honoring what we are losing.”A passionate, emotional ode to the wonders of our dying planet and to those who, hopelessly or not, dedicate their lives to trying to save it.
Advance Praise for The End of Ice
“Assiduously researched, profoundly affecting, and filled with vivid evocations of the natural world. Jamail’s deep love of nature blazes through his crisp, elegant prose, and he ably illuminates less-discussed aspects of climate disruption…. A passionate, emotional ode to the wonders of our dying planet and to those who, hopelessly or not, dedicate their lives to trying to save it.” -Kirkus Reviews
“In a sane world The End of Ice would be the end of lame excuses that climate change is too abstract to get worked up about. From the Arctic to the Amazon, from doomed Miami to the Great Barrier Reef, Dahr Jamail brings every frontier in our on-going calamity into close focus. The losses are tangible. And so is the grief. This is more than a good book. It is a wise one.” -William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness and The Last Unicorn
“Jamail’s stories—of journey, expertise, and compassion—ensure that we can look at the sometimes failing sometimes triumphing world we inhabit with love. For many, this love will be accompanied by shame for our own failings and misguided triumphs over the living beings, lands, waters, and ices we live among. No matter the wounds—those of the planet’s or our own human sufferings—The End of Ice guides us toward experiencing these rapidly shifting spaces as sanctuaries, places to remind ourselves we are alive and among the living. We can’t imagine yet what the new world will look like, the one we are creating by carving away at and poisoning the first world we were given, the one that will ultimately go on in our absence, but this book will help us begin to take notice of it, as it is already arriving. I am grateful for this gift of wonder and contemplation that Jamail has given us, and the opportunity to slow for a moment and take in the immensity of my own life and participation in the existence we all share. This earth was our first teacher, and though we haven’t listened well, we have time yet to hear its song.” -Natalie Diaz, poet, Native language activist and author of When My Brother Was An Aztec and the forthcoming Postcolonial Love Poem, Graywolf Press 2020.
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