Glacier Image Quotes

So ended the formative period in [his] life, the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of his future identity. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it isn't the same for all of us. Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.

I want to say something else about desire. I really do not know what it is. I experience something which, sometimes, if I pull it apart, I cannot make reason of. The word seems to me to fall apart under the pull and drag of its commodified shapes, under the weight of our artifice and our conceit. It is sometimes impossible to tell what is real from what is manufactured. We live in a world filled with commodified images of desire. Desire clings to widgets, chairs, fridges, cars, perfumes, shoes, jackets, golf clubs, basketballs, telephones, water, soap powder, houses, neighbourhoods. Even god. It clings to an endless list of objects. It clings to the face of television sets and movie screens. It is glaciered in assigned objects, it is petrified in repetitive cliched gestures. Their repetition is tedious, the look and sound of them tedious. We become the repetition despite our best efforts. We become numb. And though against the impressive strength of this I can't hope to say all that desire might be, I wanted to talk about it not as it is sold to us but as one collects it, piece by piece, proceeding through a life. I wanted to say that life, if we are lucky, is a collection of aesthetic experiences as it is a collection of pratical experiences, which may be one and the same sometimes, and which if we are lucky we make a sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together.

Every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings. She tried to convey how it was like travelling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag. It took Ali’s breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling. She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and the muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the callouses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave. Down from the Egypt, eye of the sun, in front of the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death. Ali got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat. In her mind, she imagined Ike sitting in the raft across from her wearing a vast grin while the pyre reflected off the lenses of his glacier glasses. That put a smile on her face. In death, he had become the light. There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a border back to life. It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. Always before, whether he had been gone an hour or a week or much longer – and no matter how many mountains he had left behind – it was, for Ike, an instant that registered in his whole being. Ike was swept with a sense not of departure, but of advent. Not of survival. But of grace.

Obama is also directing the U.S. government to invest billions of dollars in solar and wind energy. In addition, he is using bailout leverage to compel the Detroit auto companies to build small, “green” cars, even though no one in the government has investigated whether consumers are interested in buying small, “green” cars—the Obama administration just believes they should. All these measures, Obama recognizes, are expensive. The cap and trade legislation is estimated to impose an $850 billion burden on the private sector; together with other related measures, the environmental tab will exceed $1 trillion. This would undoubtedly impose a significant financial burden on an already-stressed economy. These measures are billed as necessary to combat global warming. Yet no one really knows if the globe is warming significantly or not, and no one really knows if human beings are the cause of the warming or not. For years people went along with Al Gore’s claim that “the earth has a fever,” a claim illustrated by misleading images of glaciers disappearing, oceans swelling, famines arising, and skies darkening. Apocalypse now! Now we know that the main body of data that provided the basis for these claims appears to have been faked. The Climategate scandal showed that scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were quite willing to manipulate and even suppress data that did not conform to their ideological commitment to global warming.3 The fakers insist that even if you discount the fakery, the data still show.... But who’s in the mood to listen to them now? Independent scientists who have reviewed the facts say that average global temperatures have risen by around 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. Lots of things could have caused that. Besides, if you project further back, the record shows quite a bit of variation: periods of warming, followed by periods of cooling. There was a Medieval Warm Period around 1000 A.D., and a Little Ice Age that occurred several hundred years later. In the past century, the earth warmed slightly from 1900 to 1940, then cooled slightly until the late 1970s, and has resumed warming slightly since then. How about in the past decade or so? Well, if you count from 1998, the earth has cooled in the past dozen years. But the statistic is misleading, since 1998 was an especially hot year. If you count from 1999, the earth has warmed in the intervening period. This statistic is equally misleading, because 1999 was a cool year. This doesn’t mean that temperature change is in the eye of the beholder. It means, in the words of Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, that “all this temperature variability on a wide range of time scales reveals that just about the only thing constant in climate is change.”4

David Breashears is probably best known for his high-altitude cinematography—a world-class climber, he took the IMAX images for the classic film Everest. But one of his most important projects consists of still images like these. He took old pictures of the roof of the world—many from the 1921 Mallory expedition to Everest—and painstakingly found the same vantage points so he could recreate the shots eight decades later. Side by side, what the images showed was an almost unbelievable loss of ice—the scale of these mountains is so huge that it takes a moment to realize that, in the pictures of the Ronbuk Glacier, 400 vertical feet of ice (that’s taller than the Statue of Liberty) has disappeared.

like an image in the rearview mirror, appearing closer than they’ll ever let you actually be again.

Rising sea levels, for instance, “aren’t being driven primarily by glaciers melting,” Wood says, no matter how useful that image may be for environmental activists. The truth is far less sexy. “It is driven mostly by water-warming—literally, the thermal expansion of ocean water as it warms up.” Sea levels are rising, Wood says—and have been for roughly twelve thousand years, since the end of the last ice age. The oceans are about 425 feet higher today, but the bulk of that rise occurred in the first thousand years. In the past century, the seas have risen less than eight inches. As to the future: rather than the catastrophic thirty-foot rise some people have predicted over the next century—good-bye, Florida!—Wood notes that the most authoritative literature on the subject suggests a rise of about one and a half feet by 2100. That’s much less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations. “So it’s a little bit difficult,” he says, “to understand what the purported crisis is about.

She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn't reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed. She imaged accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale.

Across the Americas and Asia, people told stories of hurricanes that destroyed homes and hospitals and took out government services, schools, and businesses. In the past, I had seen images of stranded polar bears and the disappearance of ancient glaciers, but these anecdotal stories from the front lines of climate change suddenly began to match the scientific findings I was reading with increasing concern. It seemed that Mother Earth was trying to tell us something—that depleting the earth’s resources at an ever-accelerating rate would ultimately lead to our own demise.