The wide track left by snowmobiles, sleds, and skis did not turn up the hill. I realised if I wanted to reach the top – that place I had spotted from afar, the suspiciously 90º cut-out of forest-less white – I would need to forge my own way. I started to climb directly through the forest. Despite my snow shoes, with every step my feet plunged into the metres-deep snow so that soon I was sweaty and panting. I came upon criss-crossing tracks of animals who had passed through an indeterminate time ago, as snow hadn’t fallen for several days. Prints of paws, reindeer, moose; huge, heavy holes I have no chance of identifying. I tried to follow the tracks when they matched my desired direction in the hope that the somewhat pre-compressed snow would provide sturdier footholds. I soon realised they made no difference, but I still followed where I could, finding it reassuring to walk alongside these memories.

 

Ice helps us understand our past.

 

Snow remembers, holds onto tracks and impressions that we could build stories out of, forged mostly from guesswork but held together with the trace of truth. In Antarctica, snow falls upon snow that will never melt, trapping particles of the atmosphere as it compacts into ice that scientists can then drill out, analyse, and use to understand previous versions of the climate. Ice freezes a moment in time, allows us to rediscover it days or millennia into the future. Like when it offers our ancestors back to us, their skin or fur shrunken but so intact they could almost walk beside us again. When the sudden expulsion of water from a pipe is immortalised as a dramatic icicle. When the river’s flow is held in place, momentary ripples transformed into contours that for once we can stop and consider.

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As I hurriedly climbed, no time to stop and rest, it struck me that I had come here to study the snow, the ice, the cold, but had instead found myself devoting all my attention to the sun, or any other light and warmth. Here in Sápmi, more commonly known as Sweden’s Lappland, I found I must chase the sun. On my first day I had discovered that the daylight lasted longer than expected, but I also knew that the darkness was absolute, so I was keen to reach the top of this hill with enough time to return to my caravan. Back in Uppsala where the days were longer and the air warmer, there had been no need for such a rush: I had calmly lain in the snow to stare up at the sky and listen to the muffled forest.

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Perhaps it was my upbringing in the warm and dry South East of Britain (where snow days were a singular, annual occurrence of chaos and excitement) that had bred in me such a reverence for snow. I always find snow’s inevitable transience begs me to forget any goals and plans, to make the most of this preciously rare moment of a world turned white. Whereas, here within the Arctic Circle, at -17ºC the snow was here to stay. Instead, it was light and warmth that was made transient. If I stood still for the short time it took to get a photograph of the sun’s fleeting flow of untranslatable colours, the life in my fingers would quickly drain away as they became too cold to bend. There was no time to self-indulgently study the ice; it demanded I obsess over the dying light and my dissipating body heat, to fight against stillness moment to moment.

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Ice helps us understand our present.

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Change demands our awareness of time. Ice always exists at the threshold of change as water that has gone through the act of freezing which will – to varying degrees of probability – then go through the act of melting. Ice, then, represents time in its essence, capturing process in its form. Cultures dominated by an icy existence tend to incorporate this essence into their worldview and lifestyle. The Sámi structure their lives around seasonal rhythms of winter snowfall and melt, moving their reindeer herds between mountains and forests accordingly. Therefore their perspective of dasein, of being in the world, is a cyclical understanding of temporality that ‘emphasises the recurring and holistic nature of existence, both in terms of natural resources and the lifecycle of humans’ (Kääpä 2017: 137). In the Polar Regions where the ice never melts, vast featureless landscapes are transformed into a ‘timeless poem’ (Hastrup 2009: 183). Harsh conditions demand moment-to-moment survival tactics from the Inuit, with careful attention to animal migration patterns and ice flows.

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Global heating, along with the industrialised conception of time as a ceaseless, linear progression, is threatening the Sámi’s cyclical narrative and the Inuit’s timeless present. Warmer winters disrupt the Sámi reindeers’ ability to forage for food in seasonal patterns and forestry industries chasing more profit destroy the centuries-long lifecycles of ancient forests. Meanwhile, the march of colonialism upon the Arctic and its melting ice creates a linear narrative of cultural and environmental catastrophe for the Inuit. Primarily because of Capitalism’s determination to endlessly grow regardless of season or limitation, the present has never before been in such a rapid and irreversible state of change.

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I had been right to be suspicious of this perfectly perpendicular patch of white on the hillside – the forest had been clear-cut, all trees in the area uniformly cut down. One tree at the edge even bore a plastic wreath courtesy of forestry company SCA (Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget), like it had been bestowed a medal for its service. I had wanted to come to this place because of the way it glowed pink under the Polar Circle’s permanent sunrise and sunset. The unblemished white had created an alluring canvas that covered the scars of the destroyed trees. Even up-close, looking down the slope from the crest of the hill, the only trace of the cut trees were slight mounds in the snow, easily ignored or unnoticed. As I warily eyed the dark, possibly blizzard-threatening clouds, I remembered the unusually hot summer I arrived to when I first came to Sweden, how I had swum daily in the nearby lake. I knew logically that these industry-cleared trees were connected to my memories of sunbathing in August’s unexpected heatwave, were connected to the caravan owner’s warnings about the lake’s thin ice due to the uncharacteristically warm winter. The connection felt somewhat distant, muffled beneath the pristine snow; after all, I had crossed the lake just fine.

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Ice helps us understand our potential, our choices, our future.

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In the wider narrative of the climate crisis it can be difficult to understand that mere lifestyles have agency to cause such unprecedented changes in (what are for most people) faraway places. The very existence of ice can make global warming seem ludicrous, like when it let me walk on a lake, or, as reasoned by Donald Trump in 2013, “I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing – global warming is a total, and very expensive hoax.” But each step I took on that lake was cautious, and when I listen to Sámi people describe their difficulties with melting snow I connect it to the increasing flooding of the Thames in London. And as much as the snow covered the scars of the trees, it also made that calculated clear-cut all the more stark on the hillside.

 

There’s no denying that framing what ice tells us about our changing climate is a tricky balance, but there’s a reason ice has become such a central symbol to the Anthropocene. Within environmental activist movements there has been a growing call to highlight the “human side” of the narrative, to move away from the classic image of the bedraggled polar bear and intangible narratives of lost sea ice. But by helping us understand our past, ice reveals how our present is defined by time; the Anthropocene has made the linear narrative of irreversible change dominant, as ice is doomed to melt but never again re-freeze. Not only that, it’s a problem that connects us all, connects us to those faraway places, for melting ice leads to rising sea levels, a phenomenon that threatens every continent and island in the world. Ice in the Anthropocene evokes a sense of planetary (dis)harmony that environmental movements should not be quick to abandon – “the seas are rising and so are we”.

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When Ok in Iceland melted so substantially that in 2019 it was declassified as a glacier, it was given a monument titled ‘A Letter to the Future’. Explaining that Ok’s declassification is expected to be the first of many, the letter states “we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” Ok’s plaque does what its ice no longer can: it preserves the past, it vitalises the present, and it calls to our futures. Perhaps what feels most painful about this monument, therefore, is how the ice cannot tell its own story, and that the story is increasingly being defined by one particular future. The story of ice as it exists currently bears the unmistakable tracks of the Anthropocene – or more specifically, the Capitalocene, a term which underscores the effects of Capitalist endeavours on the climate instead of conceptualising humanity as a singular homogenous force. As much as we are all implicated in the effects of melting ice, we are not all equally to blame for the cause. Capitalism’s conception of time as a linear progress of infinite and uninterrupted growth is infecting the cycles of the world. The lifecycles of trees are cut short for industrial profit while production pushes up levels of CO2 so that the lakes are struggling with their yearly freeze and polar ice now only recedes. Ice, as both reality and symbol of the Capitalocene, exposes the brutality of obsessions with progress, asking us instead to remember the natural cycles of existence as we try to choose our planet’s future.

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References and further reading

• Arctic Indigenous Perspectives S01E05 (6 Jan 2020) Barents Press Sweden Projects: Available at: https://www.barentspressprojects.com/arctic-conversation-podcast-1/2020/1/6/episode-5

• Campbell, Nancy. (2018) The library of ice: readings from a cold climate. London: Scribner.

• Haraway, Donna. (2015) Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin, Environmental Humanities. Duke University Press. Available at: https://doaj.org

• Hastrup, K. 2009. The nomadic landscape: People in a changing Arctic environment. Danish Journal of Geography 109(2): 181-189.

• Ingold, Tim. 1993. The Temporality of the Landscape. World Archaeology 25:152–174.

• Kääpä, Pieari. 2017. ‘Cyclical Conceptualizations of Time: Ecocritical Perspectives on Sámi Film Culture’ In: S. Monani and J. Adamson, eds. Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos. Routledge: Taylor and Francis.

• Malm, Andreas. (2016) Fossil capital: the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. London New York: Verso.

• Åsfjäll, L. (2020) ‘Kampen om skogen – nu växer rörelserna för att bevara och inte avverka’, Blankspot, 25 December. Available at: https://blankspot.se/kampen-om-skogen-nu-vaxer-rorelserna-for-att-bevara-och-inte-avverka/