viz.

From theguardian.com, "Arctic Sea Ice Delusions" 9.9.2013

I thought I’d pick up this week where I left off in my last post on place and contemporary literature. I was catching up on the news this morning on The Guardian and, several clicks later, I found myself on their Environment page. Two large photos of bright blue ice met me there, one with the headline “Arctic sea ice delusions.” Images of the arctic, especially the dwindling arctic, confront me constantly. I’ve never been above the tree line, though I did live in Vermont for a few lengthy winters, and yet I have a detailed visual construct of its terrain in my head.

Because, like me, most people will never visit the arctic, the imagined version is our only access to it, making representations of it in media and literature that much more powerful. At times I wonder how this visual emphasis on the arctic landscape—ice melt being a key factor in global climate change—affects a person’s understanding of the environment and relationship to place. When a picture like this comes up on one’s news feed, does anyone else have the same, problematic gut reaction that I have? That arctic sea melt is really kind of beautiful? What does it mean to aestheticize environmental degradation? Perhaps it’s something akin to ruin porn, like the photos that have come out of Detroit in recent years.

In Arctric Dreams, the 2001 National Book Award winner, Barry Lopez writes, “As temperate-zone people, we have long been ill-disposed toward deserts and expanses of tundra and ice. They have been wastelands for us; historically we have not cared at all what happened in them or to them.” Lopez writes extensively about the pattern of light and the totally different conception of time that exists in this region; the basic measurement of a single day has no purchase here. Using this extreme example, Lopez makes it apparent that the basic facts of location (longitude and latitude, altitude, weather patterns) have incredible effects on human language and perception. This radical difference might be what attracts the eye and the mind to the arctic vista.

From www.libraryofwater.is

Many writers and artists have been captivated by images of the arctic. I have a distinct memory of the scene early on in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that shows the creature fleeing into an abyss of ice and snow. Since 2007, contemporary writers have had the chance to live in residence in the arctic at the Vatnasafn/Library of Water, Roni Horn’s Icelandic art installation. The writers, chosen by nomination, live in the converted library that contains columns of water collected from glacial melt around Iceland. Past residents include Anne Carson and Rebecca Solnit. Place attachment often has much to do with imagined places and doesn’t require that a person even have been there. The arctic is a huge store of this kind of imaginary attachment, and its significance increases as its size diminishes. If the arctic is headed toward an iceless future, what will happen to its illusory conceptual presence?