WHILE NATURE'S LIBRARY BURNS
David Buckland* concludes our serialisation of Burning
Ice, Cape Farewell's inspirational book documenting the recent
Arctic explorations of artists, scientists and writers onboard a
100-year old schooner.
Burning Ice, The Cold Library of Ice, Sadness Melts; texts
projected on a glacier wall as the captain manoeuvres the
Noorderlicht to within five meters of ice that has not been exposed
to air for tens of thousands of years. It crumbles, crashing
into the sea, carrying its history, soon to be melted away. A
million years of the history of our planet is locked in ice two
miles down. Once extracted, each tiny bubble releases air
from the Earth's past, telling stories of temperature, carbon
dioxide levels and the possibility of life. This ice we
gently sail, as dawn breaks on a cold morning, is the library of
our past that now, with our irresponsible actions, we are causing
to melt - Burning Ice.
The artists who have travelled as part of the Cape Farewell
expeditions have told personal stories of change; they have made
works on a human scale about what is a global problem. We
have experienced the front line of climate change. In the
High Arctic it is possible to witness just how fast the ice is
melting and the balance of our planet is changing.
On Mars and Saturn the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, a
lifeless gas in a world without life. It is perhaps life
itself on Earth that has orchestrated a cocktail of gases - oxygen,
nitrogen, hydrogen - which breed more life. The cycle of
existence is held in biological balance. Into this blend we are
releasing dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide, fuelling our need
for excess consumption. According to climate scientists, we
are now 20-30 years away from a tipping point. From a point
where more breeds more; the critical point of meltdown when the
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere attracts so much heat that it
becomes a self-propagating continuum, heat to more heat, life to
less life.
I could cheer as we witness another 60,000-ton wall of ice crash
into the sea. It is a spectacular and awe-inspiring event, but my
emotions are not of wonder, but anger. How can we be so
irresponsible, so wasteful with the lives of our children? It
is so unnecessary; we now have the technological and economic
skills to produce the energy we need without threatening the beauty
of the place we inhabit, the beauty and the very possibility of
life itself.
In the last 160 years we have dug up half the carbon resources
nature has carefully hoarded. This process took carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere, stored the excess and maintained the
balance of the gases that breathed life into us, and the startling
biodiversity that forms our unique planet. Now, we burn a ton
of coal, extract a meagre 35 percent of its energy and release over
three tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is a
very dirty exchange, unnecessary, ugly, and unsustainable.
The name 'Cape Farewell' plays with 'farewell,' an expression of
good wishes at parting, which here can evoke a sense of loss and
finality, and the notion of a cape as a place of turning. We
have choices to make. The artwork and texts in the book are
about a way of imagining. Can we save a place in our
imagination, alongside our capacity to conceive of ourselves,
our needs and desires, our familial and societal relationships and
responsibilities, for a larger vision? In our mind's eye, can
we contain a pure biological compulsion towards life that can
overcome our everyday struggles and balance our lives with the
needs of the planet? At times of decision-making we must
strive to preserve the possibility of our lives. It is in our own
self-interest. This can only be achieved if we all engage in
a collective system of sustainability. It is simple; at every
turn reduce the need to pollute the air with carbon dioxide and
convince other to do the same.
I quote the scientist Lynn Margulis in the conclusion to her
book, The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution:
So far the only way in which we humans prove our dominance is by
expansion. We remain brazen, crass and recent, even as we
become more numerous. Our toughness is our delusion. Have we
the intelligence and discipline to resist our tendency to grow
without limit? The planet will not permit our populations to
continue to expand. Runaway populations of bacteria, locusts,
roaches, mice and grass always collapse. Their own wastes
disgust, as crowding and severe shortages ensue. Diseases, as
opportunistically expanding populations of the 'other', follow . .
. We people are just like our planet mates. We cannot put an
end to nature; we can only pose a threat to ourselves.
*David Buckland an artist and the Founder and Director of Cape
Farewell.
Burning Ice is available from www.capefarewell.com.
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