By Dr. Robert Thorson
Last week, even as I enjoyed the first signs of summer’s rising heat, I found myself wincing at the progressive death of our planet’s mountain glaciers. Each summer, a few dozen more melt into nothingness.
There are plenty of practical reasons for keeping glaciers healthy. They are natural reservoirs providing water for communities on every continent. They provide edge habitat for countless species. They help prevent the sea from rising higher and destroying our coastal infrastructure.
But my concern is ethical and aesthetic. My thoughts center on Glacier National Park, which was created to put its glaciers on exhibit. These azure-green jewels are wasting away at faster than a glacial pace. By mid-century, they’ll be gone.
The beautiful landscape of the northern Rocky Mountains will remain. And that’s reason enough for tourists to keep going there. Reason enough for the National Park Service to keep the visitor center bathrooms clean, and the roadside Dumpsters dumped.
But unless there’s a name change, I would be too haunted by the loss to enjoy it. It would be like going to a beautiful gallery without paintings, a natural history museum without exhibits or a stunning theater set without actors.
I would say “shame on us” were I not philosophically inclined to the idea that Homo sapiens are no more and no less natural than any glacier. Biologically, we struggle, we adapt, coal becomes a better brand of firewood, oil becomes a better brand of coal, and the next thing you know the whole world economy is dependent on fossil fuels. And the next thing you know the atmosphere is warming, the temperature is rising especially fast in high elevations and mountain glaciers are dying as a natural consequence of natural selection.
This selfish part of our human nature is blameless. It’s naturally evolved and instinctive, and there’s no shame in that. But also within us is a non-selfish part that reaches beyond kith and kin. That cognitive, ethical part extends to what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “not-me” of the whole planet and beyond. Call it stewardship if you like. We are occupants of the planet, not its owners.
I’m especially concerned about the Nisqually Glacier in Washington’s Mount Rainier National Park, the “church of Nature,” where I got married decades ago. It’s disappearing.
Forty-three years ago, I advocated for passage of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. It linked the aesthetics of appreciating wildlife to the ethics of believing that animals have a non-utilitarian right to exist for their own sakes. It wasn’t enough to merely stop killing critters. We had to make some people mad and tax us all to maintain habitat where organisms could live unmolested.
It’s already too late to bring back the glaciers of Glacier National Park. But it is not too late to halt the pace of mountain glacier destruction elsewhere. The crest of the high Andes between Chile and Argentina is one such place. There, the Argentines passed the National Glacier Act of 2010, which protects that nation’s glaciers for aesthetic, ecological, hydrological and meteorological reasons.
This story is told in the recent book “Glaciers: The Politics of Ice.” It’s written by an environmental attorney named Jorge Daniel Taillant who turned ice-activist when he realized that mining companies were blasting glaciers out of the way. Its final chapter reprints his 2013 scholarly article published in “The Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation” claiming that access to glaciers is a basic human right. The book’s appendix contains the full text of his country’s national glacier protection act.
I’m in solidarity with Taillant in spirit. But I wonder if he isn’t tilting at windmills. The main threat to the world’s mountain glaciers isn’t mining companies wanting them gone, but the world’s inability to shift from fossil fuels to something less dangerous.
When visiting Argentina last week, Barack and Michelle Obama danced the tango. I wonder if they also found time to discuss that nation’s international leadership on glacier protection.