Ice Humanities is an emerging field of study that examines cultural, discursive, narrative, and creative dimensions of ice. To complement and augment the strong emphasis on natural science approaches to ice, and recognizing the complexity of human relationships with the cryosphere, “ice humanities” researchers show that glaciers, snow, permafrost, sea ice, and icebergs are as much cultural and social as about the physical characteristics of ice, temperature, and precipitation.
What’s more, the way societies represent and discuss ice produces power, which helps certain social groups—and extractive capitalist systems—at the expense of others. Understanding the human and cultural dimensions of ice helps illuminate social-environmental systems more broadly, while also offering context and direction for climate mitigation and adaptation.
Carey’s training in environmental history (History Ph.D. from UC Davis) forms a crucial dimension of and foundation for this environmental humanities work in the Glacier Lab, while geo-humanities is another approach that merges human geography with storytelling, culture, and the humanities. Overall, History — and the humanities more broadly — offers an often-overlooked way to examine climate change, the cryosphere, coasts and the ocean, and other human-environmental interactions.
Glacier Lab research has been working on these aspects of ice humanities for nearly two decades, especially since Carey’s 2007 article on “how glaciers became an endangered species” that showed the intersection of culture, power, and ice narratives.
Other selected ice humanities publications include:
Zachary Provant and Mark Carey, “Who is Killing the Glaciers? From Glacier Funerals to Glacier Autopsies,” Edge Effects (3 Nov. 2022).
Hayley Brazier and Mark Carey, “Boundaries of Place and Time at the Edge of the Polar Oceans,” in The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions, eds., Adrian Howkins and Peder Roberts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 726-748.
Mark Carey, Jordan Barton, and Sam Flanzer, “Glacier Protection Campaigns – What Do They Really Save?” in Ice Humanities: Living, Working, and Thinking in a Melting World, eds., Klaus Dodds and Sverker Sörlin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 89-109.
Holly Moulton, Mark Carey, Christian Huggel, and Alina Motschmann, “Narratives of ice loss: New approaches to shrinking glaciers and climate change adaptation,” Geoforum 125 (2021): 47-56.
Mark Carey, “The Trouble with Climate Change and National Parks,” Forest History Today 23, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 57-67.