The waves that accompany climate grief have been rising and falling within me for many years. — Elizabeth Rush

In The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, author Elizabeth Rush explores what our disassembling world asks of us.

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Today I take a look two morally challenging questions posed by journalist, climate activist, and author Elizabeth Rush:

What does our disassembling world ask of us? How can we continue to live and love while also losing much?

What Rush is talking about — and which is the central message in her book, The Quickening: Creation and Connection at the Ends of the Earth — is the rapid disassembling of our glaciers.

Rush has dedicated her career to reporting on our changing climate and rising sea levels. In 2019, she and 57 others sailed to Antarctica aboard a research icebreaker called Palmer to study Thwaites Glacier. Thwaites, which is bigger than the entire state of Florida, was previously unchartered and believed to be deteriorating at a rapid clip. The purpose of this two-month journey was to learn everything they could about the mysterious glacier, its history, and what its future may look like. Before the voyage, we knew more about what was happening on the moon than what was going on in the Arctic waters below Thwaites.

Rush acknowledges the impact her trip to Thwaites has on the glacier itself: “… the approximately 355,000 gallons of diesel the Palmer will burn through getting to Thwaites and back will melt almost eleven square kilometers of the ice we are here to study and, maybe, to protect.”

Alone, this would be a compelling story, this recounting of a trip to Antarctica aboard a research vessel. Alone, Rush’s interviews with the scientists and the crew that makes the exploration possible would be valuable. Alone, a story written by a female Antarctic explorer is notable. But what she does with this book — in addition to all of that — is take us along the spectacularly complicated journey of contemplating bringing a child into this world that is melting before our eyes.

“Should I have a child,” Rush says, “their greenhouse gas emissions will cause roughly fifty square meters of sea ice to melt every year that they are alive. Just by existing, they will make the world a little less livable for everyone, themselves included.”

In scientific terms written for the layperson like myself, Rush explains that for the first time in 15,000 years, nearly every single glacier on the planet is retreating simultaneously. What’s concerning about this is that glaciers and ice sheets can take hundreds of years to respond to environmental changes, meaning we’ve only just begun to witness Antarctica’s transformation. One thing we do know is that about 20,000 years ago, Antarctica was twice the size it is now and sea levels were approximately 400 feet lower than they are today.

Beyond the scientific findings about glaciers and climate change, the writing in this book is exquisite. How many different ways can one write about the white, icy expanse of a glacier? Many, as it turns out. Rush speaks of “white of dove and river pearl, spackle and baking soda, plaster of Paris and spent cinders.” She writes of “baby blue of seal tracks; stone blue of sky’s reflection. And in the space between the floes, where the nearly frozen water shows, a turquoise so deep it torques all it touches into something new.”

Describing what it was like to finally have Thwaites in front of her eyes (for the journey there was long and interrupted by a medical emergency which required quite a bit of backtracking), Rush says, “what we now gaze upon is fashioned from precipitation that dropped before the rise and fall of Rome, before Jesus or the Buddha were born, before the invention of the alphabet. Before sound became symbol.” And of being taken along “the edges of Thwaite’s unfathomable fracturing, its hemorrhaging heart of milk.”

It is breathtaking.

Throughout stories about the expedition to Thwaites Glacier is also woven Rush’s narrative about wanting — and trying — to get pregnant after returning home. She talks us through her emotional extremes, and then we are brought back to the ship and the crew; to the inhospitable environment cradling the ship in its violent arms; to the two potential feet of sea level rise Thwaites would cause if it disintegrated wholly, which could potentially “destabilize the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, causing global sea levels to jump ten feet or more.”

The Quickening

Rush wrote this book not as a plea to change readers’ behaviors, but because it is important not to look away from this. It’s an issue the author gives us a picture window view of; one we can observe from the safety and, for me — the naiveté — of our homes.

When a glacier births an iceberg, it is called calving. I’d never heard of this term before, nor had I made this simple connection between glaciers and icebergs. In other words: until reading this book, I had never been in a situation in which I needed to know about the process of a glacier shedding an iceberg. This is the privilege of living mid-continent; of not witnessing first-hand the rising sea levels; of not being awakened to what’s really happening to our planet.

In The Quickening, Rush says it occurs to her that how you “interpret the glacier’s movements likely depends on where you stand and what you might gain or lose in a remade world.” The way you or I or Elizabeth Rush interpret Thwaites’s calving depends on our stances, and as it turns out, mine has unknowingly been with my back to Antarctica.

Photo by Philipp Trubchenko on Unsplash

Mothers might recall that fluttery feeling of when you can first feel your baby moving inside of you. It’s called the quickening, and it is a perfect metaphor for this book about climate change and the debate about adding another human to the planet.

Here, Rush brings these polarities together:

“As I stare at the lopsided straggler, this slab of ice so diminished it’s nearly gone, my enchantment with the idea Antarctica’s great glaciers are responding to us, to our actions thousands of miles away, by birthing bergs whose very bodies bear grave warnings all seems wrong. Because, I wonder, how bad must things get for a parent to make such a sacrifice?”

Despite the gravity of Thwaites’s wellbeing and the ripples its deterioration could cause, Rush is not doomsday about any of this. You will not walk away from the book terrified of what will happen (or you might, but that’s not the message, nor do I believe it’s the goal).

So what is our disassembling world — where “ice sheets are splintering, glaciers shrinking, the archives they hold disassembling into the ocean that swirls around them” — asking of us? And how can we continue to live and love while also losing so much? Rush doesn’t answer these questions in the book. Instead, she poses them as considerations as we pay attention or don’t pay attention to our rising sea levels. She doesn’t ask readers not to have any more children; she simply paints a portrait of the current state of Antarctica and leaves us to think critically about it on our own.

“The waves that accompany climate grief have been rising and falling within me for many years,” Rush says.

I suspect those waves will only grow stronger as time passes.

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What I’m reading: Brass: A Novel by Xhenet Aliu; Body Work by Melissa Febos; Sunshine Nails by Mai Nyugen; and Harry Potter e la Pietra Filosofale (I will be reading this book for many more weeks).

Thank you for reading! Love,

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