The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption

by Dahr Jamail

Overview

As seen in The New York Times, Men's Journal, Smithsonian.com, and The Guardian

The author who Jeremy Scahill calls the "quintessential unembedded reporter" visits "hot spots" around the world in a global quest to discover how we will cope with our planet's changing ecosystems

After nearly a decade overseas as a war reporter, the acclaimed journalist Dahr Jamail returned 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. In response, Jamail embarks on a journey to the geographical front lines of this crisis—from Alaska to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, via the Amazon rainforest—in order to discover the consequences to nature and to humans of the loss of ice.

In The End of Ice, we follow Jamail as he scales Denali, the highest peak in North America, dives in the warm crystal waters of the Pacific only to find ghostly coral reefs, and explores the tundra of St. Paul Island where he meets the last subsistence seal hunters of the Bering Sea and witnesses its melting glaciers. Accompanied by climate scientists and people whose families have fished, farmed, and lived in the areas he visits for centuries, Jamail begins to accept the fact that Earth, most likely, is in a hospice situation. Ironically, this allows him to renew his passion for the planet's wild places, cherishing Earth in a way he has never been able to before.

Like no other book, The End of Ice offers a firsthand chronicle—including photographs throughout of Jamail on his journey across the world—of the catastrophic reality of our situation and the incalculable necessity of relishing this vulnerable, fragile planet while we still can.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620972342
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	01/15/2019
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Dahr Jamail is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq as well as The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption and (with Stan Rushworth) We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth (both from The New Press). He has won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism and the Izzy Award. He lives in Washington State.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Denali 11

2 Time Becomes Unfrozen 27

3 The Canary in the Coal Mine 53

4 Farewell Coral 75

5 The Coming Atlantis 101

6 The Fate of the Forests 133

7 The Fuses Are Lit 157

8 The End at the Top of the World 181

Conclusion: Presence 209

Epilogue 227

Acknowledgments 241

Notes 245

Index 265

Editorial Reviews

Too often climate coverage errs on the cautious side, suggesting that this or that may come to pass. The End of Ice illustrates with an almost overwhelming string of statistics that for many of the world's glaciers, coral reefs and ancient forests, the end is already here.

The New York Times Book Review - Elizabeth Rush

Praise for The End of Ice:
Included in Smithsonian magazine's "Ten Best Science Books of 2019"
A Publishers Weekly "Top 10 Science Picks" for Fall 2018

"[Jamail] suggests that we must sit with our grief for the ever-diminishing planet; to understand how to proceed, we must acknowledge what we have lost and what we will continue to lose."
—New York Times Book Review

"The End of Ice is about developing a stronger connection to nature, which Jamail says many people living in urban areas have lost or left behind."
—Smithsonian.com

"Jamail commits to educating others on the plight of the planet, in hopes a younger generation can delay the inevitable."
—Men's Journal

"A reader seeking a single book about the current state of our warming world should find THE END OF ICE an ideal summary."
—Anchorage Daily News

"Enlightening, heartbreaking, and necessary."
—Booklist

"This book will help readers understand how ecosystems have been affected by climate change and how inaction has potentially doomed further generations."
—Library Journal

"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 ongoing 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: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest and The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest Creatures

"What a strange and compelling paradox this book offers: to fall in love with the Earth and all that we are losing, to let our hearts open to the deepest grief, and then trust that our grieving opens us to profound love. When what we love is lost, our grief honors the loss and cracks open our hearts to live fully in the present moment, which is joyous. Thank you, Dahr Jamail, for this gift."
—Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science and Who Do We Choose to Be?

Praise for Dahr Jamail:
"A superb journalist, in the most honorable tradition of that craft."
—Howard Zinn

From the Publisher

2018-10-02

A war journalist and mountaineering aficionado chronicles his global travels to witness the stakes of humanity's greatest battle: the destruction of our planet.

Award-winning journalist Jamail (The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2009, etc.) began covering climate disruption—the term he prefers over the more common "climate change"—in 2010 and has since "published more than one hundred articles" on the subject. For his latest book, 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.

Kirkus Reviews

There's urgency in narrator Tom Parks's voice as he ticks off the names of cities that may be underwater by 2050: New York, Miami, Tokyo, Mumbai. The loss of glaciers isn't our only problem as the seas become more acidic, creating toxic algae blooms and endangering the food chain. Dahr Jamail blends interviews, studies, and statistics with his own experiences mountain climbing in Alaska. Parks narrates the author’s personal stories in a reflective tone with a touch of sadness as Jamail considers the future while amid the grand peaks. It's a tone that makes the stories of Alaskan hunters who are reluctant to further risk their environment hit home. Jamail calls on listeners to experience the natural world while they still can as he laments the lack of political action. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2019 - AudioFile