IN THE QUICKENING: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush explores both the quickening in her own body — the first feeling of the life moving in her belly — and the quickening pace of climate change.
In 2019, Rush embarked on a scientific sea-bound expedition to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, a writer among dozens of scientists. Their journey, via an icebreaker ship, was the first of its kind, bringing together geologists, paleoclimatologists, oceanographers, and a dozen other flavors of scientists to better understand how climate change is affecting a glacier at the end of the world.
Thwaites Glacier is enormous, bigger than the state of Florida and up to 4,000 feet thick. Because of its sheer size and vulnerability to collapse under warming, Thwaites is often referred to as the “Doomsday Glacier.” This one glacier contributes to about 4 percent of global sea-level rise, and whenever it collapses, it will cause global sea levels to increase by more than two feet.
With The Quickening, Rush demonstrates a remarkable ability to weave memoir with metrics. This approach is particularly helpful when writing about climate change, a subject that too often suffers from the dualist separation of the scientific and the personal.
As Rush heads into the wilderness of the Amundsen Sea, she also journeys into her own decision to become a mother. The two journeys, she finds, are intensely interrelated. Rush felt the parallel between glacial retreat and birthing profoundly when witnessing a glacial “calving.” Calving is an event in the lifespan of a glacier where a large piece will break off and collapse, often creating icebergs. While calving is a natural process in the continual disintegration and regeneration of glaciers, as global warming intensifies these events are happening with increased frequency — another aspect of the quickening.
Rush’s experience of glacial calving cracked open her visions of pregnancy, illuminating questions about her own somatic desires to have a child. Glacial calving and human calving are both, on their face, tangibly contributing to climate disasters. One 2017 study tells us that to have a child in a wealthy country is to add an estimated 60 metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere per year. And yet, in both calving and pregnancy, annihilation may beget the animation of something new: “I’ve wondered if the prolific calving we witnessed was a fecund or a fatal act, a birthing ritual or death throes?” she asks. “Transformation or a trauma, calving or collapse? But what if it isn’t one or the other?”
Rush might be asking these questions about her own journey as a mother. Is giving birth in a time of climate change a fecund or fatal act? Is it a hopeful act or a harrowing one?
These questions haunt me as I ponder whether to bring children into the world. Am I damning them to a life lived in the hellscape of climate collapse? Maybe. Am I inviting them into the deep beauty of this world and hoping for a livable future? Maybe.
The Quickening is a book for anyone who can’t find easy answers to these questions. You won’t find them here, but you will find a companion who traveled to the end of the Earth to give birth to a new way of seeing questions of birth, death, and creation in our climate-changed world.
Avery Davis Lamb is an activist, ecologist, and public theologian working at the intersection of Christianity and environmental justice. He is the executive director of Creation Justice, whose mission is to educate, equip and mobilize Christians to protect, restore, and rightly share God's creation.
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