5 - Cryosphere Aesthetics

Summary

Abstract

This essay proposes a mini-toolkit for ‘cryosphere aesthetics’: the conceptual foundations providing a guide for action for positive environmental change. The essay emphasizes the significance of global and intergenerational aesthetics since climate change means that we must take on board transspatial and trans-temporal phenomena and experiences. Also important is cultivating appreciative virtues such as wonder, receptivity, sensitivity, and humility. Given the connections between the earth's systems and global governance and justice in a climate-changed world, this aesthetic-ethical stance should be accompanied by an awareness of “icy geopolitics.” That is, in thinking through how environmental aesthetics and ethics can support the protection of the cryosphere, understanding indigenous communities and nature-society relationships is very important.

Keywords: cryosphere aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, geopolitics, indigenous communities, aesthetic appreciation

Introduction

Human-induced global warming significantly affects the cryosphere – those parts of the earth formed by frozen water: frozen rivers and lakes, sea ice, ice sheets, ice caps, shelf ice, glaciers, snow, and permafrost. These phenomena play a crucial role in our climate, and they are susceptible to changes from global warming. Glacial melt is occurring at an alarming rate, and icebergs are melting and calving much more quickly than scientists had predicted. These and other effects of climate change lead to sea-level rise, avalanches, and weather-related events that harm humans and nonhumans. As we witness change and loss to the cryosphere, aesthetics is important in illuminating and disclosing multisensory aesthetic qualities, meanings, and values of ice and snow.

Many parts of the cryosphere are inaccessible and uninhabitable, while others are home to humans and nonhuman communities. How can aesthetics illuminate various features of remote frozen places and capture more everyday aesthetic experiences of them? In this chapter, I formulate an environmental aesthetics of the cryosphere through a theory that I have called the “integrated aesthetic.” I aim to show the what, why, and how of cryosphere aesthetics by drawing on theoretical and other methods of aesthetics. To conclude the chapter, I offer a “mini-toolkit,” a resource for other disciplines, decision-making, and practice.

Why Explore the Cryosphere Aesthetically?

A richer and broader grasp of the cryosphere for the purposes of an aesthetic exploration must include the lived experience of communities inhabiting regions such as the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland, and other parts of the world.