EVERY POLITICAL LEADER on the planet should be stuck aboard a jet and taken north to see the Greenland ice sheet—it would be well worth the carbon emissions to show them just how fast climate change is now happening.
Case in point: I was aboard a boat en route to the Qaterlait glacier in August when I looked up at the GPS unit above the captain’s head. It showed an icon of the boat, steaming rapidly across ... solid land. That’s because when the chart was drawn a decade ago, the bay we were crossing didn’t exist: It was still solid ice.
I had the great fortune of journeying to the ice sheet with two young poets—a Greenlander named Aka Niviâna and a native of the Marshall Islands, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner. These two remarkable women were at opposite ends of the same story—as the ice melted, the traditional life of Greenlanders was beginning to disappear. And the water that poured into the oceans is now drowning low-lying islands such as the Marshalls.
So it was no great surprise that the poem these two had written—and were filmed performing atop the great ice sheet—was angry at times. It was a fury that came from long and bitter history—the Marshalls were the site of U.S. atom bomb tests after World War II, and Bikini Atoll remains uninhabitable, while the U.S. left nuclear waste lying around the ice when it abandoned the 30 bases it built in Greenland.
The very same beasts
That now decide
Who should live
And who should die ...
We demand that the world see beyond
SUVs, ACs, their pre-package convenience
Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief
That tomorrow will never happen
Of course, climate change is different, the first crisis that—though it affects the most vulnerable first and hardest—will eventually come for us all.
Let me bring my home to yours
Let’s watch as Miami, New York,
Shanghai, Amsterdam, London
Rio de Janeiro and Osaka
Try to breathe underwater ...
None of us is immune.
The scientists on this expedition confirmed every detail about the ongoing crisis, but they too watched the poets with a certain awe. Alun Hubbard, a Welsh scientist, conceded there were limits to what instruments could explain. “It’s just gobsmacking looking at the trauma of the landscape,” he said. “I just couldn’t register the scale of how the ice sheet had changed in my head.”
But artists can register scale—they can transpose the fact of melting ice to inundated homes and bewildered lives, gauge it against long history and lost future. Science and economics have no real way to value the fact that people have lived for millennia in a certain rhythm—have eaten the food and sung the songs of certain places that are now disappearing. This is a cost only art can measure, and it makes sense that the units of that measurement are sadness and fury. And also, remarkably, hope. Their poem—shouted into the chill wind—ended like this:
Life in all forms demands
The same respect we all give to money ...
So each and every one of us
Has to decide
If we
Will
Rise
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, is the author most recently of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
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