Gretel Ehrlich is a traveler AND a writer.
Although I’m not sure which comes first since she is so exceedingly good at both. I got a copy of her recent book,
The Future of Ice after reading an article a while back in the New Yorker about a trip to Greenland where she
ruminates with furious eloquence on the potential catastrophe of global warming. The people of the North, we know, are
already suffering the consequences of a warming earth. Whether or not this warming is caused by humans (some
conservatives suggest it is not; most of us are like, duh!), you can’t deny the warming is taking place, that lives are
being affected. Ehrlich has the facts at hand. The science is there.
This is a book about the meaning of deep cold to our species, but not just in an evolutionary Darwinian way, but how
the cold creates who we are, how it shapes the earth we live on and how the cold manifests itself in our character and
behavior. You may not dig the message about global warming, but you can’t deny the writing is superb. As for me, I have
a deep fondness for the types of places she describes, the ice sheets, the glaciers, the gaping sprawl of a place like
Greenland. This is a fine book.