Cultures and Concepts of Ice: Listening for Other Narratives in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is marked not only by significant environmental changes massively distributed in space and time but also by a substantial proliferation of scientific data. From Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to growing extinction lists, there is neither a shortage of environmental crises nor data to serve as official evidence of crises. As crucial as these data are, however, questions remain as to how science data-driven approaches police the boundaries of what counts as evidence and risk marginalizing other ways of encountering, knowing, and narrating environmental change. In this article, we address how certain narratives are not being told, or heard, amid European-American climate discourses. Drawing on nature–society studies, political ecology, and environmental philosophy, this article focuses on how prevailing discussions around glacier recession ignore the cultural and conceptual consequences of glacier loss. As glaciers become increasingly iconized in the Anthropocene, they become more detached from cultural and conceptual contexts. Such detachment overlooks how the fate of glaciers is not only a matter of quantifiable loss but is also implicated in everyday encounters, generational experiences, and stories spun at the nexus of ice and culture(s).