Mark Carey

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Mark Carey | The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species | Environmental History, 12.3 | The History Cooperative

the history of ice: how GLACIERS BECAME AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, glaciers have become both a key icon for global warming and a type of endangered species. But to understand why glaciers are so inexorably tied to global warming and why people lament the loss of ice, it is necessary to look beyond climate science and glacier melting—to turn additionally to culture, history, and power relations. Probing historical views of glaciers demonstrates that the recent emergence of an "endangered glacier" narrative stemmed from various glacier perspectives dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: glaciers as menace, scientific laboratories, sublime scenery, recreation sites, places to explore and conquer, and symbols of wilderness. By encompassing so many diverse meanings, glacier and global warming discourse can thus offer a platform to implement historical ideologies about nature, science, imperialism, race, recreation, wilderness, and global power dynamics.

"But glaciers, dear friend—ice is only another form of terrestrial love."¹

John Muir

ON SEPTEMBER 2, 1997, Vice President Al Gore delivered a speech from an unusual location, relying on his Secret Service agents to protect him from grizzly bears rather than urban hecklers. Hiking several miles into Montana's Glacier National Park, the vice president stood beneath the melting Grinnell Glacier to speak about climate change and to pledge the Clinton administration's commitment to "reverse the trend of global warming." By 1997, Gore noted, the Grinnell Glacier had retreated approximately 3,100 feet from its location in 1850. It provided a compelling theater, not to mention a beautiful backdrop, for Gore to identify tangible consequences of global warming. He pointed out that the park had lost three-quarters of the 150 glaciers it had in 1850. Worse, the vice president warned solemnly that if trends persist as scientists predict, Glacier National Park will have no glaciers at all by 2030. Lamenting this tragic loss of majestic ice, Gore stressed that the fate of glaciers in Glacier only represented a small part of a broader phenomenon: Global warming was destroying environments and societies on every continent.²

Figure 1. Grinnell Glacier, Glacier National Park, Montana, 1910

Photo by Fred Kiser, courtesy of Glacier National Park Archives.
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