Prologue: Earthly Indifference

IN AN AGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE, even nature writers, such as Macfarlane, sometimes encounter a profound sense of nature’s indifference. The “black ice” he describes is the ancient progeny of a Greenland glacier calving prematurely due to climate change. One hundred thousand years in the making, and weighing “hundreds of thousands of tons,” the blue-white front of the glacier that had crashed down into ocean waters suddenly and shockingly resurfaces as a vast, black, metallic mass, a huge displaced alien “something,” “that has come from so deep down in time that it has lost all color” (Macfarlane 2019, 377). This preternaturally dark mountain of ice surges up, displacing and shedding its watery contours into a world now entirely altered: a revelation of immense, yet previously unacknowledged, material powers. And yet, even as this manifestation of sublime alienation subsides, it will begin to melt away, leaving no identifiable trace, except, perhaps, an almost imperceptible addition to rising sea levels. What, if anything, can this apparition mean? Who could say? A consequence of “anthropogenic” climate change, a sign of the times, perhaps even of the end of “our” time here on earth? Even the most objective climate science might be tempted to read it as a portent.

How different this seems from the ice grains, caught in their dazzling and entrancing play with bright sunlight, encroaching and sparkling on the windowpane. How different from the foot-deep snow that, for today at least, before it, too, liquefies with spring’s rising temperatures, blankets the land. Yet both poles, the apparently homely and the experientially unheimlich—the uncanny and alienating—are created through more, or less, mediated encounters with ostensibly the same life-giving substance. Part of the issue here, then, is how to say anything intelligible about the mutability and multiplicitous agency of material forms; their vastly different experiential effects; the atmospheres they create and destroy; and even their resistance to being appropriated, colonized, ordered, explained, or assimilated, by human language itself. For where the window’s ice crystals joyfully distract, the iceberg’s appearance momentarily threatens to overwhelm and dissolve the anthropocentric tales modernity tells of its power and progress, words that, for centuries now, have striven to make the world nothing but an object of our possession.

Here was a region where matter drove language aside. Ice left language beached. The object refused its profile. Ice would not mean, nor would rock or light, and so this was a weird realm, in the old strong sense of weird—a terrain that could not be communicated in human terms or forms. (Macfarlane 2019, 381)

Notice that Macfarlane does not, in any way, dismiss this manifestation as meaningless. On the contrary, the iceberg is hugely significant, but its significance emerges in its sudden disruption of the sense of our own importance, our centrality in the stories we tell, the words we constantly employ to make the world meaningful to us. It sunders the already fraying warp and weft of language that had served to weave together a modern world we had assumed was ours to shape and master. It is these narratives, and not the berg itself, that now begin to appear (as tales told by fools) all “sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Shakespeare 1953, 553).

From a distance (whether geographic, textual, theoretical, or temporal), the calving glacier might certainly be taken to exemplify anthropogenic climate change, yet experientially, being-there at that moment, the berg’s world-changing reemergence is an event (in a Heideggerian [1989]1 sense) that exposes the profound limits to human understanding and the facile assumption that all that really matters lies within “our” purview. The berg shatters any illusion that all meaning can be contained and expressed in (modern) human language and subverts the assumption that it is what “we” do and say that bestows meaning on a pliant earth. This event also challenges the dominant modern presumption that nature, in its indifferent objectivity, can have no possible message for us.

If, for Heidegger (1977a, 213), “language is the house of Being,” then we might say that the berg refuses to be domesticated. The berg’s appearance is a shock to the system and to every frame of reference. Its appearance is prodigious (Burns 2002), a freak of nature, and hence simultaneously natural and unnatural, an expression of an age long past and of eons yet to unfold without us. It is abnormal in refusing our categorizations, in exhibiting its incompatibility with our mundane expectations, a momentous revelation of anthropic precarity. The iceberg weirds us out through its forceful revelation of the material and temporal immensity of nature; it reveals, almost instantaneously, the manifest absurdity of every human life and the inevitability of humanity’s eventual extinction.

Later, of course, as witnesses after the event, we are drawn to relate (ourselves to) this revelation. For if the berg insists on being experienced coldly, nihilistically, even despairingly, then to voice this is still to recuperate it in its relation to human being, if only in a narrative that warns of our own existential insignificance, our impending approach toward “the last syllable of recorded time” (Shakespeare 1953, 553). This recuperation, however, no longer suggests the universal inclusivity of human semiosis, the God-like ability of human language (Benjamin 1991; Smith 2001) to express everything that matters. Rather, it signifies that the earth far exceeds our abilities to hold it, momentarily frozen, in the halting flows of words and images. Moreover, despite modernity’s “progressive” disenchantment of the world (Weber 1964), the earth can still, on occasion, encourage us to take everything that then appears and affects us as a significant moment in the changing contexts of our lives. In this materio-semiotic sense, the earth might, perhaps, be considered insistently providential, its intrusions “telling,” although what we are told about our own situation is often far from comforting.

Profound experiences of earthly indifference, epitomized by climate change and instantiated in fracturing and melting glaciers, raging wildfires, pests, and pandemics, are the new abnormal. In this sense, what the iceberg might tell us is that assumptions of theological providence and its successor, progress, are both untenable. If this prodigious event is not a message for humanity from God, it is certainly not a mark of human progress either. These anthropocentric imaginaries can no longer, if they ever did, provide the overarching ideational and material context of our lives, nor can they any longer underpin our presumptions about our place and future here “on” (or rather as composing a temporary part of) earth. Yet, despite this unpredictability, the earth still provides, and for far more than just humans, in far more, albeit sometimes uncanny, anarchic, weird, unfathomable, and episodic ways. If the world is no longer a matter of divine providence, of design and intent to succor humanity, nature as such still offers other forms of provisional ecologies that some can continue to inhabit. Alienated or not, we are all, and all remain, earthlings.