by Dahr Jamail
New Press
3/10/2020, paperback
SKU: 9781620975978
After nearly a decade overseas as a war reporter, the acclaimed journalist Dahr Jamail returned to America to renew his passion for mountaineering, only to find that the slopes he had once climbed have been irrevocably changed by climate disruption. In response, Jamail embarks on a journey to the geographical front lines of this crisis--from Alaska to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, via the Amazon rainforest--in order to discover the consequences to nature and to humans of the loss of ice.
In The End of Ice, we follow Jamail as he scales Denali, the highest peak in North America, dives in the warm crystal waters of the Pacific only to find ghostly coral reefs, and explores the tundra of St. Paul Island where he meets the last subsistence seal hunters of the Bering Sea and witnesses its melting glaciers. Accompanied by climate scientists and people whose families have fished, farmed, and lived in the areas he visits for centuries, Jamail begins to accept the fact that Earth, most likely, is in a hospice situation. Ironically, this allows him to renew his passion for the planet's wild places, cherishing Earth in a way he has never been able to before.
Like no other book, The End of Ice offers a firsthand chronicle--including photographs throughout of Jamail on his journey across the world--of the catastrophic reality of our situation and the incalculable necessity of relishing this vulnerable, fragile planet while we still can.
Reviews:
"This book will help readers understand how ecosystems have been affected by climate change and how inaction has potentially doomed further generations." -- Library Journal
The End of Ice is about developing a stronger connection to nature, which Jamail says many people living in urban areas have lost or left behind." -- Smithsonian.com
"[Jamail] suggests that we must sit with our grief for the ever-diminishing planet; to understand how to proceed, we must acknowledge what we have lost and what we will continue to lose." -- New York Times Book Review
About the Author:
Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq as well as The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption (The New Press). He has won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism and the Izzy Award. He lives in Washington State.