Ice will not Suffice

A 06 REWIND T Ice will not suffice HYDERABAD, Sunday, April 9, 2023 hat the earth’s polar regions are not empty and have a life of their own is now a truism. Climate change activists and polar oceanography specialists have cautioned that the polar ice caps are diminishing and this will alter the world in terrifying ways. Ice apparently would finish off the earth, in a scientific realisation of Robert Frost’s poem. Further, the Inuits and Chukchis inhabiting Greenland and the Siberian regions have ingested, along with the animals — including whales, the Greenlanders’ staple diet — huge amounts of chemical pollutants drifting upwards from the USA and Europe through ocean currents into the Arctic waters resulting in massive biological harm for generations to come. The last frontier of clean earth has been breached, the white ice is the site of the earth’s newest precarity. I THINK I KNOW ENOUGH OF HATE TO SAY THAT FOR DESTRUCTION ICE IS ALSO GREAT AND WOULD SUFFICE. — Robert Frost THE PRISTINE WHITENESS OF THE POLES HAS FASCINATED ARTISTS FOR CENTURIES, AND NOW BECOMES SITES OF EARTH’S NEWEST PRECARITY — Pramod K Nayar The pristine whiteness of the icy lands has fascinated artists for some time now, and today, to communicate the sense of urgency to protect the ice caps, artists have set out to capture the beauty of the poles. History of Fragile Ice The first artistic rendering of the icy beauty of Antarctica dates back to the 18th century when William Hodges accompanied James Cook on his 1772 voyage to the region (later Hodges would become famous for his paintings of India, commissioned by Warren Hastings). Hodges painted The Resolution and Adventure, 4 January 1773, taking ice for water, latitude 61 degrees South in 1773, in which he depicted the wall of ice. Hodges captured well the play of sunlight and shade on the large block of ice The Englishman Samuel Gurney Creswell painted Melville Island from Banks Land in 1854, arguably the first images of the Canadian Arctic archipelago. The credit for the first painting of the Inuit encounter with the white man goes to the Inuit, John Sacheuse in his First Communication with the Natives (1819). Sacheuse, later spelt Sackhouse, a Greenlander, had been rescued by an English ship during a storm and subsequently served as an interpreter to the English navy during its quest for the Northwest Passage. Sacheuse’s painting shows Englishmen who had landed at an island in Baffin Bay, Greenland, attempting to establish communications with the Inuits of the region. The French artist Francois-Auguste Biard accompanied the 1838-1840 Arctic expedition, and painted one of the first images of the Inuits hunting walruses in their kayaks in his Greenlanders Hunting Walrus: View of the Polar Sea (1841). Caspar David Friedrich, whose Wanderer above the Sea of Mist (1818) is a celebrated work, also painted The Sea of Ice (1823-24, first titled The Polar Sea), which represented a shipwreck in the Arctic. The Illustrated London News published numerous prints depicting the expeditions to the North Pole: Arctic Life, Cutting a Way Out of the Ice from Winter Quarters (1875) and Preparing to start on a sledge trip in the Arctic (1875). It is my conviction that the life of this little tribe [the Inuits] is doomed … caused partly by themselves, and partly by the misguided endeavors of civilized people … It is sad to think of the fate of my friends who live in what was once a land of plenty, but which is, through the greed of the commercial hunter, becoming a land of frigid desolation. Although Henson could not have anticipated the chemical-induced collapse of polar life, his words and their gloomy prognosis appear to have come true. Contemporary artists like Noble, Julien and Banerjee do not see the landscape and its collapse in isolation from the general anthropogenic causes of climate change. Rather, they locate the history of this collapse in human activities dating back to the periods of discovery, capitalist exploration, exploitation and colonial control. The exploration and mining of the poles, no different from similar processes across the planet since the 15th century, have brought the poles to the edge of disaster. For instance, the Canadian tar sands with their petroleum deposits have driven industries whose toxic wastes have been found in the Arctic waters and marine lifeforms. THE FIRST DEPICTION OF ANTARCTICA’S ICY LANDSCAPE WAS BY WILLIAM HODGES, WHO LATER BECAME AN OFFICIAL PAINTER FOR THE EAST INDIA COMPANY WITH HIS PAINTING ‘THE RESOLUTION AND ADVENTURE, 4 JANUARY 1773’, EXECUTED DURING HIS VOYAGE WITH JAMES COOK Many focused on the European efforts, the labour, involved in the explorations. But they also were images that highlighted the spirit of (European) humanity in not leaving any place on earth untouched — a spirit that, as we now know, also produced dangerous consequences for fragile ecosystems. The ‘man versus Nature’ imagery, with humanity as heroic in harsh environments, that these visual and verbal texts highlighted was built on the assumption that humans and Nature are binaries, distinct categories, when all human life and sociality is in fact embedded in webs of life (a feature and fact commentators have been emphasising since the first decades of the 21st century). This ice, colonised, eroded, photographed, is at risk now, as artists have begun to document, in the footsteps of Hodges. Ice Today The sheer expanse of ice looks pristine in a photograph titled South Pole Antennae Field, until we look closely and see thin shadows of lines across the whiteness. These are, we discover, shadows of the antennae set up at the Scott-Amundsen polar station, Antarctica, captured by Connie Samaras, the photographer, as part of her project, V.A.L.I.S (Vast Active Living Intelligence System). The thin streaks are signs of human habitation, but also symbolically capture, like Samaras’ other image, Buried 1950’s Station showing tiny bits of buildings (remnants of the older station) sticking out from under the snow, the fact that in Antarctica, eventually, the ice will bury everything, wipe out all traces. In the living, breathing space of the poles, a set of antennae disrupt the system. The human constructs are so obviously out of place in the pristine cleanness of the polar snows. Intrusive, ugly and yet powerful, the antennae and the buildings signify control and a stark indifference to the question: should they be there in the first place? nated biphenyls (PCBs), carcinogens produced by industries and banned by the USA in 1979. The problem is: PCBs are not easily expelled from the animal’s body (they are lipid soluble and not water soluble, and so get absorbed by tissues with high fat content). Each walrus, polar bear, seal and whale is carrying within it impossible doses of some of the world’s worst chemicals. When the humans at the top of the food chain eat the animal, they ingest the PCBs too. What is interesting is also that as we go up the food chain, the chemicals magnify in concentration at each step: a phenomenon known as biomagnification. So when the Inuits, Laplanders and others consume walrus meat — essential for their very survival, in terms of the protein content — they are ingesting a massively concentrated dose of PCBs. PCBs ‘permeate everything in the Arctic — its air, snow, ice, fog, soil, seawater and ocean sediment — in all regions, no matter how remote, from Siberia to Greenland’, writes Marla Cone in Silent Snow (an obvious nod to the book that launches 20th century’s environmental movement, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring). The sleeping walruses of Aglert, or for that matter, polar bears, are all toxified bodies, carrying poisons well beyond permissible limits. Capturing the migration patterns and lifestyles of the indigenes of the Arctic, Subhankar Banerjee’s stunning Caribou Migration I depicts ‘Pregnant female caribou from the Porcupine River herd migrating over the Coleen River in the Arctic Refuge, on their way to the coastal plain for calving’. Banerjee also alerts us to the loss of ecosystems of the indigenous people of the region, thanks to the greed of oil companies which are seeking opening of the land to extraction. His edited collection, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point brought together indigenous voices, activists and artists speaking about the dangers faced by walruses and humans as the poles spiral down rapidly. The tipping point of Banerjee’s title, as the new IPCC report tells us, is already here. It is frightening to realise that the erosion of the lifestyle and ecosystems of the Inuits and polar dwellers was predicted at the very moment of their ‘discovery’. Matthew Henson wrote in his 1912 account of the North Pole: THE EXPLORATION AND MINING OF THE POLES ARE NO DIFFERENT FROM SIMILAR PROCESSES ACROSS THE PLANET SINCE THE 15TH CENTURY To shift focus slightly, journeys to the ‘New World’ in the 15th century, the quest for the Northwest passage, expeditions to the Eastern portions of the planet are framing events for the polar expeditions of the 19th and 20th century. But these early movements by Europeans across the earth are also relevant contexts framing the attitude towards Nature that present-day artists locate in the drive to colonise the poles too. As Jason Moore, environmental historian and historical geographer, has noted, the era of human driven climate-and-planetary change, called the Anthropocene, is in fact a Capitalocene where capitalism was an ‘environment-making civilization’. Moore notes: Another artist who captures the fragility of the ice is Joyce Campbell. In a series of photographs titled chillingly, Last Light, Campbell caught the cracks and fissures in the ice. Structures that predate the human and protect the globe are dwindling and may not last even as long as humanity, the images in Lower Wright Glacier and other Campbell photographs suggest. In another, Ice Ghoul, Campbell captures melting ice that had taken on the shape of a yawning mouth, a ghoulish effect that gestured toward the dying of the land. Roni Horn in her Library of Water series created an installation work of identical glass columns holding melted ice from 24 major Icelandic glaciers, where the glaciers themselves are melting. MANY LITHOGRAPHS AND PAINTINGS FROM THE LATE 19TH CENTURY HIGHLIGHTED EUROPEAN ADVENTURISM, HEROISM AND LABOUR IN TAMING NATURE, WHETHER IN THE JUNGLES OF AFRICA OR THE ICY LANDSCAPE OF THE POLES In like fashion Andrew Lovesey photographed bits and pieces of the Arctic glaciers floating in the sea showing their slow but steady erosion. He titled the images tellingly, What Happens in the Arctic Does Not Stay in the Arctic, and thus suggested that the consequences of the polar ice melting will be felt worldwide and not just in the Arctic. Others like Anne Noble juxtaposed the ice and the seas with the image of a ship’s deck full of empty chairs — clearly a tourist ship, but now empty, a forerunner to the emptying of the land, and maybe the planet itself, of humanity. While everyone is familiar with the hero Robert Peary, discoverer of the North Pole, what is not known to most is that Peary’s last kilometres to the Pole were undertaken on a sled pulled by a black man (by then Peary had lost many toes to frost bite and could not walk), Matthew Henson. Years later, Henson would publish his own account, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (1912), opening his travelogue with: Today there is a more general knowledge of Commander Peary … and a vague understanding of the fact that Commander Peary’s sole companion from the realm of civilization, when he stood at the North Pole, was Matthew A. Henson, a Colored Man… Henson becomes the subject of Isaac Julien’s True North film and installation project (20042008) where the actress Vanessa Myrie plays the role of Henson. It also documents the four Inuits who accompanied Peary-Henson: Egingwah, Ootah, Ooqueah and Seegloo. With this, Julien makes a political point about European explorations itself: that the ‘true’ North was not just European but involved multiple races and ethnicities that have been elided from historical narratives, even as the Inuit world itself is beginning to disappear. Taken together, the artists draw attention to the disaster pending at the earth’s poles. Ice, which provides 75% of earth’s fresh water and keeps the earth’s temperatures at human levels, is diminishing. This loss is what chills artists into putting their craft to the task of capturing the erosion of ice in projects such as Vanishing Ice. Walruses, Whales, Men In one of the iconic texts of world literature, a walrus ponderously states: “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — Of cabbages — and kings — And why the sea is boiling hot — And whether pigs have wings.” But what of the walruses themselves? Katja Aglert in her Walruses Asleep on Moen Island, Svalbard, Norway literally caught the walruses napping. But the walruses have been caught napping in another sense too. As have the whales. The walruses of the Arctic Circle carry huge amounts of polychlori- Over centuries, feudal Europe had deforested large expanses of western and central Europe … After 1450, however, comparable deforestation occurred in decades, not centuries. One example may suffice. In medieval Picardy (northeastern France), it took 200 years to clear 12,000 hectares of forest, beginning in the twelfth century … Four centuries later, in northeastern Brazil at the height of the sugar boom in the 1650s, 12,000 hectares of forest were cleared in a single year. Nor was Brazil exceptional. In the same period, the Vistula Basin was cleared on a scale and at a speed between 5 and 10 times greater than anything seen in medieval Europe This commodification of Nature has reached its apotheosis in the processes that now decimate the walruses, the whales and the ice that protects the earth. Mining destroyed the poles at an unprecedented rate until international moratoriums stopped these. But the upwardly drifting chemicals damage the Arctic and Antarctic seas even now. Contemporary artists’ rendering of the icy landscapes tells us that the world will end because the ice will simply not suffice. (The author is Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK) Printed and Published by Damodar Rao Divakonda, on behalf of Telangana Publications Pvt. Ltd., Printed At Telangana Publications Pvt Ltd, H.Nos. 9-87/3, 9-87/3/1, Thumkunta Muncipality, Dist. 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