Big thanks to Biblioklept reader (and frequent commenter) ccllyyddee, who sent me his copy of Gretel Ehrlich’s The Future of Ice. I dipped into it a bit this weekend; Ehrlich seems to be walking that strange line between the physical and metaphysical. A description from her website–
In this gripping circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle, Gretel Ehrlich paints a vivid portrait of the indigenous cultures that inhabit the starkly beautiful boreal landscape surrounding the Arctic Ocean, an ice-bound wilderness that includes northern Siberia, northwestern Greenland, Canada’s vast Nunavut, and northern Alaska. Ehrlich’s expedition, supported by the National Geographic Society, documents what remains of these cultures, specifically the similarities and differences among them, including hunting traditions, shamanic and ceremonial practices, languages and legends—the ways in which they have survived, or have been assimilated, and how they are adapting to the impact of climate change on their ice-age cultures.
Ehrlich is fascinated by what she calls the ecology of culture—the ways in which the human presence of indigenous Arctic people is intricately interwoven with land, rock, river, sea, and ice. Depicting human-caused climate change as only the latest and most destructive of the ills and abuses first peoples have been suffering for 250 years, Ehrlich’s haunting and lovely prose portrays ancient tribes and traditions on the edge of extinction and captures the austere beauty of their various lifeways in the frozen dreamscape of the world they have always known.
Biblioklept 
I must look out for this book. Some years ago I read This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, which I remember vividly and with affection.
LikeLike
Looks like a good read. Added to the list.
LikeLike
Count me as a (wanna-be) Vermonter who is desperately missing actual winter in on this book.
LikeLike
Ms. Ehrlich is a full-blooded human with passion for the earth and its beings. She was a student of Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan abbott who established a Buddhist college in Boulder. These are Tantric practitioners of dimensional shifting, inner heat, and lots of other phenomena, ‘mere tricks’, as they call them. In ‘The Future of Ice’, she relates her summers spent in Glacier National Park in Montana and a trip to the ends of South America and reports on the progress of climate warming. Her creative style flows between ecstatic descriptions of nature and every day life such as taking care of her dog, or birthing a cow in -40 degree conditions at her ranch in Montana. She spends months camping on glaciers. I look forward to reading about her adventures with the natives around the north pole, in ‘This Cold Heaven’.
LikeLike