Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World

by Jonathan Mingle

Overview

High in the Himalayan valley of Zanskar in northwest India sits a village as isolated as the legendary Shangri-La. Long fed by runoff from glaciers and lofty snowfields, Kumik—a settlement of thirty nine mud brick homes—has survived and thrived in one of the world's most challenging settings for a thousand years. But now its people confront an existential threat: chronic, crippling drought, which leaves the village canal dry and threatens to end their ancient culture of farming and animal husbandry.

Fire and Ice weaves together the story of Kumik's inspiring response to this calamity with the story of black carbon. Black carbon from inefficient fires - the particulate residue that makes soot dark - is the second largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide. It's also a key ingredient of the air pollution that public health experts regard as humanity's greatest environmental health risk worldwide: soot-laden smoke from household hearth fires and outdoor sources combine to kill over seven million people around the world every year.
Jonathan Mingle describes the joys and struggles of daily life in the Zanskar Valley, where villagers are buffeted by powerful environmental and economic forces, while also tracing black carbon's dark fingerprints outward from Kumik and around the world. Mingle investigates its impacts on snow, ice, and water from Mt. Everest to California, and the silent health epidemic it fuels from New York to New Delhi. Combining cultural history, detailed reportage, climate and energy science and dramatic storytelling, Fire and Ice is a profound examination of the global challenges of averting climate chaos and lifting billions out of energy poverty and water scarcity.
Can Kumik's people come together to reinvent fire, harness what remains of their life-sustaining ice, and reinvigorate their traditions of solidarity, in time to save themselves? Can the rest of us rise to the same challenge? Fire and Ice connects these questions with the work of enterprising scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and activists around the world, in a narrative that combines mythology, reason, humor, persistence, and hope in a race against a global clock.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250029508
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/24/2015
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	901,389
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Mingle's writing on the environment, climate and development has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The Boston Globe, and other publications. He is a former Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism, a recipient of the American Alpine Club's Zach Martin Breaking Barriers Award, and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group. He lives in Vermont.

Table of Contents

Prologue: A Hearth Tale

Part I: The Question of Kumik

1. The Curse
2. Our Dark Materials
3. Water Connection, Fire Connection

Part II: The World, Burning

4. The Road to Shangri-La
5. The Burdens of Fire
6. Water Towers Falling

Part III: The Fire Brigade

7. In Search of Phunsukh Wangdu
8. Now We're Cooking with Gas!
9. The View from Sultan Largo

Epilogue: Carrying Embers

Editorial Reviews

01/26/2015
Though soot may seem to be “relatively harmless, a minor irritant, a small price to pay for the fire’s warmth and light,” environment writer Mingle shows us otherwise in this fascinating work. He details the detrimental effects of black carbon on health and the environment and its contributions to climate change, focusing in particular on Kumik, a village “in the sparsely populated, arid mountain reaches of northwest India.” Villagers there light wood or dung fires to cook with and to heat their homes, doing so out of necessity in the absence of gas or electricity. Their stoves are a significant air pollutant and respiratory hazard. Snowfall in Kumik has also declined in recent decades, and locals “often out of water by mid-August, sometimes sooner, in the critical weeks before the harvest.” Pollution, global warming, and water shortages are not unrelated. All this matters, Mingle contends, because something similar has been happening in places such as California’s Central Valley, a major agricultural region whose water happens to be among the most highly polluted in the U.S. The parallels are remarkable, and readers who might not have given much thought about a remote Indian village will understand its contemporary relevance. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Fire and Ice is top-notch on the ground reporting on one more piece of the global environmental puzzle—a particularly tragic piece, and one that we should work hard to solve for so many profound reasons.” —Bill McKibben, author of Wandering Home

“Fire and Ice wonderfully captures the human face of the impact of traditional cooking fires and fuels on the lives of individuals, made vibrant in this environmental travelogue that encompasses and connects the lives of villagers in a remote Himalayan village, to scientists, political officials and policy makers stretching from New Delhi to startup dot.com companies to the negotiating chambers of the United Nations.” —Daniel Kammen, Professor of Energy, University of California, Berkeley

“To the unfolding drama of climate change Jonathan Mingle brings something new to worry about — black carbon, the tiny particles from a billion cooking fires that absorb the sun's heat and are melting the great glaciers in the Himalayas which regulate the water flow in the mighty rivers that feed half of Asia. Mingle's marvelous and original book, Fire and Ice, is no gloomy tale but a story of intellectual, scientific and human adventure among the Zanskaris on the roof of the world, where Mingle unfolds the beautiful simplicity of the problem, and of what to do about it.” —Thomas Powers, author of The Killing of Crazy Horse and Heisenberg's War

“A searching, sobering, sometimes-scary look at an overlooked carrier of climate change…If you weren't worried about climate change before, this is just the book to kindle your angst. A promising debut.” —Kirkus

“Fascinating…readers who might not have given much thought about a remote Indian village will understand its contemporary relevance.” —Publishers Weekly

“An intriguing look at...the portrayal of the impact of carbon pollution on a small village and the worldwide ripples.” —Booklist

“A compelling case for how we can clear our skies.” —Mother Jones

“Fire and Ice is a lyrical tale about life in the coldest places at a time when the earth itself is warming. Author Jonathan Mingle takes the reader to a hearth in the high Himalaya, to join one community within one ancient culture as its citizens respond to climate change. The villagers' story, not to mention the soot from their cookstoves, resounds through the mountains and encircles the world.” —Dava Sobel, author of Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, and The Planets

From the Publisher

02/15/2015
Mingle, who writes about environmental issues for online magazine Slate, explores the topic of black carbon (soot), a product of combustion in transportation, manufacturing, and fires for cooking and heating. A more immediate threat to the environment than carbon dioxide, black carbon, scientists believe, causes changes in weather patterns and accelerates melting of glaciers people depend on for drinking water and crop irrigation. Most important, it is a health hazard, causing millions of premature deaths each year, especially among the women and children of the developing world. Mingle tells the story of Kumik, India, a tiny mountain village that has been in existence for 1,000 years and whose residents are moving the entire village down the mountain owing to a lack of water from the diminishing glaciers. Intertwined with this tale is scientific documentation on the dangers of black carbon and anecdotal evidence from the villagers. Mingle also offers possible solutions for the reduction of black carbon, while he shows how it affects people all over the world. VERDICT This fascinating, well-researched look at the problem of black carbon through the microcosm of a village and its residents is narrative nonfiction at its best.—Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove P.L., IL

Library Journal

2015-01-05
A searching, sobering, sometimes-scary look at an overlooked carrier of climate change.Since time immemorial, humans have been burning fires. As science journalist Mingle notes in this earnest first book, at some point during the day, each of us will spark a fire of some kind, burning coal and other substances to fuel our cellphones and cook our food. "We can turn wood, coal, and even our own waste into gas that becomes heat and light and motion and the thrumming binary dreams of supercomputers," he writes, or overwrites; the narrative sometimes has the onrushing quality of a melting glacier. All these fires produce black carbon, something that, Mingle writes, is very real and very dangerous; the melting glaciers are liquefying in good measure because of the soot that is its measurable and visible manifestation. The best parts of the book are the on-the-ground reports, beginning in a remote Himalayan village and ending in the halls of the Capitol. It's not for nothing that James Inhofe, the leading climate change skeptic in the U.S. Senate, has co-sponsored legislation to study and police the world's rising mountains of soot, acting as "simultaneously a flagrant climate [change] denier and a black carbon hawk." Conversely, the weakest parts of the narrative are obvious and too-long bits of filler: We don't really need another retelling of the myth of Prometheus, for instance, to know that fire can have adverse effects. Still, Mingle is a solid interpreter of complex science, explaining, for example, how soot generated far away has deleterious results at the North Pole—says one of his sources, "reducing Arctic black carbon concentrations sooner rather than later is the most efficient way that we know of to retard Arctic warming"—and the workings of the Asian monsoon, which is also feeling the weight of too much particulate pollution. If you weren't worried about climate change before, this is just the book to kindle your angst. A promising debut.

Kirkus Reviews