Readings - Interview: Creating Community at the Ends of the Earth

BAMS spoke with Elizabeth Rush about her new book, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth. Rush is also the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her work has appeared in a wide range of publications from The New York Times to Orion and Guernica. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Rush lives with her husband and son in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.

BAMS: Why write this book?
Rush: I had been writing about climate change’s early impacts on vulnerable coastal communities for nearly a decade. During that time, I visited with hundreds of flood survivors, many of whom had lost family members and homes. I listened to their stories so that I might learn from them—and better communicate—how to navigate this time of profound transformation. I wasn’t as interested in the science behind the phenomenon as I was in the way our transforming coastline makes us feel. In many cases residents’ bodies were their barometers, telling them that climate change was already with us, now, in the present tense. That there was considerable variability in the future rate of sea level rise was something I had come to accept. Would there be three feet of rise or six by century’s end? No one knew, and I, like those I interviewed, had to learn to live with this uncertainty.

But then I read an article about Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica and became uncomfortable again. It turns out that at the time, many of our sea level rise models didn’t take Thwaites into account because we have next to no observational data from it; nothing to base the models on. Thwaites alone contains enough ice to raise global sea levels two feet, and it acts as a kind of cork to the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which if we lost it could cause global sea levels to jump 10 feet or more. When I learned about Thwaites I decided to apply for the Antarctic Artists and Writers Fellowship, run by the National Science Foundation. I was granted a berth on the first boat in human history to travel right up to the calving edge of Thwaites. It was such an honor! But it also meant delaying my own plans to get pregnant since pregnant people aren’t allowed to deploy on government-run icebreakers in the Antarctic. The Quickening is really oriented around these two seemingly opposed themes: glacial disintegration and the desire to bring new life into the world. 

BAMS: Who is it for?
Rush: I think all different kinds of readers will find something for them in the text: there is a lot of climate science littered throughout with a focus on ice sheet dynamics, glaciology, and paleoclimate reconstruction; for folks who are interested in an Antarctic adventure story, it’s got a healthy amount of venturing into the unknown; I also think of it as a feminist response to the Antarctic cannon, which tends to be dominated by tales of derring-do and a particular kind of masculine posturing; finally, I think of myself as a poet first and so the text is certainly preoccupied with language and finding language that helps us navigate this profound moment of planetary transformation. I have been told by lots of readers that they didn’t really want to read a book about glacial collapse in Antarctica (because of their already high levels of climate anxiety), but they found The Quickening offered unexpected solace, community, and a sense of hope. 

BAMS: What obstacles did you face?
Rush: Oh gosh, so many. I went into the project with a very particular intention: I wanted to write a story in which the ice itself is an actor, shaping human civilization just as we shape it. There has certainly been a turn toward recognizing the animacy of the more-than-human world in the humanities over the past decade or so, and I was really energized by the possibility that Thwaites could be the central character in this book. And I do think the ice is drawing us into conversation with it by breaking apart. But I can count on my fingers the number of days I spent alongside Thwaites, I can calculate the number of hours I was under its spell. Which is to say my direct contact with Thwaites is but a teeny tiny blip in glacial time. I had to recognize, with a certain sense of humility, that whatever Thwaites is currently saying is far more layered and complex than what I was able to hear during the week I spent in her shadow. This is also why we need to fund long-term ecological research in the Antarctic (which is both extremely expensive and not terribly valued because it cannot produce data at rates fast enough to match, for instance, the punishing demands of tenure-track clock). Only when we get information, year after year, about ocean temperature and ice sheet mass and seafloor sediment accretion (among so many other markers) will we begin to understand just how rapidly Thwaites is deteriorating now and just how fast it might move in the future. 

BAMS: What did you learn?
Rush: I learned a lot about the extraordinary communities that deep field research helps to forge. By the end of my 54 days onboard the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer (a research icebreaker the length of a football field), I felt as though many of my shipmates had transformed into family. It was so incredible to be in such a remote and physically stunning setting and to have to work together with people who just a few weeks prior I had never met, in order to get the seemingly unthinkable done—sedating and tagging elephant seals, digging for ancient penguin bones on a remote island chain in –30° weather, conducting and transcribing over 200 interviews which would become the archive on which the book is built. And sometimes you make mistakes, but you have no choice but to be accountable for your errors and then move on. Bastien, a physical oceanographer on board, put it this way, “You make a mistake, and you lose 10% of your data, but if you waste your time moaning about it then you lose 20.” I think there is a valuable lesson in there for all of us fighting for a more livable future climate. 

BAMS: What surprised you?
Rush: I was surprised by how little I missed when away from home for nearly three months. Mostly I missed reading in bed next to my husband. Everything else I could kind of do without. 

BAMS: What are the implications of this work?
Rush: Honestly, I hope readers who feel like they are alone in the question about whether to bring a child into the world find a sense of community in the book’s pages. I also hope it helps women and people of color recognize themselves as having a place in Antarctic research and the stories we tell about the last continent. Finally, I hope it can help us recognize Antarctica not as a harbinger of doom but offering human civilization an opportunity to transform, and not just for the worse, in response to the ice’s increasing movements. 

BAMS: Where do you go from here?
Rush: I just started work on a new book project titled These Andes, which is about bicultural family-making on an imperiled planet. One of the main issues with writing about the environment in a meaningful way is that it often demands deep engagement in a single place over a long period of time. While my father’s father farmed potatoes in central Ohio, that kind of rootedness is nothing I have experienced in my life. I have lived in five countries, on both coasts of the United States, in New York City and in a small postindustrial mill town in Maine. I am married to a man who immigrated to the United States from Colombia when he was 26. His grandfather was the mayor of Cartagena at the turn of the last century, and much of his extended family remains on the Caribbean coast. Together we have become profoundly dislocated from the places and people that reared us. These days we spend almost as much time in Bogotá as we do in Providence. But it never feels like enough in either space for our roots to grow deep into this soil. 

Just over three years ago, I gave birth to a boy whose home is here and there; who has inherited two places, both of them unstable (economically, financially, environmentally) in their own ways. His birth has made me wonder whether our definition of home is changing, shifting away from a place that offers physical refuge to something else? These Andes will address this question. Or so I hope! It is still very much a zygote of a book, but I will be in Colombia for all of the next academic year carrying out the research that I hope will bring it to fruition.

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