Seventh Lisbon Architecture Triennale

Can one give an account of the upheavals of human cohabitation in the Anthropocene without describing what has gone before? Without the shards of its long history in empire, extraction, and the multiple ways of administering violence?

How can one account for the weight of a city unless one also accounts for the weight of what is abjected from the city, precisely in order for the city to be constituted as a city? The silhouette of a city is constituted by what it abjects, that is, by what the city keepers attempt to cast out, reject, outlaw: certain communities, other species, unwanted matter. Abjection, from the Latin ab-jicere: to expel, cast out. In other words, a city is constituted through the often invisible force of expulsion. But cities are also symptoms of the failure of this ambition. Abjection creates an ambiguity; the abjected haunt the city with the perpetual threat of disruption. As Julia Kristeva writes, “[The abject] is something rejected from which one does not part.”1The Anthropocene invites us to rethink cities, not as singular, bounded entities, but as interconnected processes, webbed into Earth system animacies and connective relations with uncanny kin on a planetary scale. As Amitav Ghosh notes: “In the era of global warming, nothing is really far away.”

On Senegal’s Black Atlantic coast, Dakar was a colonial nodal point in the triangular trade that converted people, property, and resources into commodity capital in the interests of mercantile, monopoly imperialism. Now, on the outskirts of postcolonial Dakar, a massive, brightly-colored mountain of trash has arisen: the waste commons city called Mbeubeuss.3Mbeubeuss is a phantasmagoric conflation of mountain, city, and volcano; a fractal kinscape. Mbeubeuss is a vast, burning mountain of Dakar’s detritus. It is also a city, warrened by an intricate network of roads to and from Dakar, pathways, improvised homes, pig pens, and weigh stations. Mbeubeuss is also akin to an urban volcano, lofting into the atmosphere uncounted tons of carbon, methane, and other emissions, petrochemical pollution, and wood smoke. The waste commons smolders continuously, shrouded in a caul of toxic emissions, ghostly and ghosted.

2 percent of urban residents in developing cities live by foraging waste and trash in dump cities like Mbeubeuss.4For decades, displaced by climate crises, resource wars, the collapse of agriculture, and poverty, thousands of pickers in Mbeubeuss have foraged and forged productive livelihoods—salvaging, sorting, and weighing Dakar’s waste—creating a thriving, self-sustaining, recycling economy. As one picker says, “It’s garbage for ordinary men, but it’s pure gold for us.”5The waste commons city is Dakar’s spectral double, its shadow city, abjected but invisibly bound to the postcolonial city in an uncanny kinship that is material, social, and architectural. “Mbeubeuss is the mirror of Dakar,” says another picker.6

The pickers are specialists. Numbered trucks arrive from Dakar’s suburbs, and the pickers learn which trucks to glean. Some specialize in hats, others in wigs. Some collect doll parts and reassemble them for sale. One picker, Zidane, collects shoes, painstakingly pairs and washes them, to sell on the streets of Dakar. The pickers are the keepers and custodians of the postcolonial city’s rejected memories and matter; connoisseur cartographers of the city’s throw-away culture of commodity surplus. Weighing and sorting, they refuse their abjection, turning waste into economic value, refuse into refuge, and trash into personal souvenirs. Souvenir, in French: “to remember,” from the Latin subvenire: “to come from below.”

But now, enacting versions of the great European enclosures, global modernizing cities are enclosing these open-air trash dump cities and criminalizing waste pickers. The pickers not only collect, sort, and weigh the waste; they implicitly raise the question of how much waste weighs—economically, socially spiritually—and in so doing raise the question of what it means to be a global citizen. Far from living in a chaotic mountain of meaningless waste, the pickers are organizing in Mbeubeuss and other global dump cities against the outlawing of their work. The pickers are transforming things, “refuse” (noun) into agency, “refuse” (verb). What is abjected as refuse becomes reanimated as refuge, as the pickers conjoin with global activists to create transnational kinships and legal networks across global boundaries.

The waste commons activists refuse to be regarded as disposable people in a disposable economy in the era of abandonment. They insist the dumps are a productive commons with rights and resources, citizens and communities, conjoined in global kinships and demanding just transitions to more sustainable futures. Waste pickers are the rejected from which global cities cannot part.

How much does the agency of the abjected weigh? Come to your senses, say the pickers.

The fractal kinship of cities, Earth systems, and volcanos is captured most emblematically in the colossal eruption of the volcanic island of Krakatau in 1883. In the immediate aftermath, Earth system animacies became intimately networked with global cities, media, and infrastructure on an unprecedented, planetary scale. On August 27, 1883, Krakatau exploded in a single cataclysmic blast, unleashing a monster tsunami that killed an estimated 36,000 people.7Krakatau lay between Java and Sumatra in the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the Indian-Australian plate subducts under the Eurasian tectonic plate, splitting the Earth’s crust and unleashing boiling magma. Krakatau also heralded a new global, media era, as news of the faraway eruption made instant, historic headlines, humming through the dark, abyssal oceans from Batavia to Singapore, Sydney, London, Paris, and New York via the newly laid undersea infrastructure of telegraph cables. 

Before 1883, volcanoes appeared remote, alien, and exotic, except for those living nearby the Earth’s magma breaks. Krakatau changed that. The eruption became one of the first, single, globally-consumed media events in history. Overnight, Krakatau connected cities, oceans, and volcanoes through Earth system animacies and circuits of media and telecommunications that encircled the world. Before the successful laying of undersea cables, news took two weeks to travel across the Atlantic by ship. Now, traveling through cable, news arrived in two minutes. When President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, it took two weeks for Europe to hear the news. News of Krakatau was read at breakfast in morning newspapers the following day in cities around the world. 

The pyrotechnic effects of Krakatau streamed around the planet, engaging all the Earth systems: the atmosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. Six cubic miles of pyroclastic ash were blasted into the atmosphere, blotting out the Sun for two days. Ocean tides floated huge chunks of pumice to Madagascar, Zanzibar, and South Africa. The explosion was the loudest sound ever recorded on Earth, loud enough to burst the eardrums of sailors in Sumatra and be heard in Sydney, Diego Garcia, and Singapore. Atmospheric pressure waves pulsed around the planet to Krakatau’s antipodal point, then circled the world seven times. Atmospheric winds carried eerie effects. Blue and green suns were sighted in the tropics. Bizarre sunsets blazed in cities. Global temperatures were lowered for five years.8

In November 1883, William Ashcroft, standing in Chelsea, London, saw spectacular twilight glows, which he captured in his renowned sketches of tumultuous, ruby red and burnished orange shimmers. One sketch looks uncannily like volcanic fountains of fire. In 2004, an astronomer demonstrated that Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream (1893) was inspired by the wild sunsets that he saw when standing at Oslo harbor in 1883.9In his journal, Munch describes “clouds like blood and tongues of fire hung above the blue-black fjord… I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature.”10

But the sunsets mystified scientists. No one connected these vivid twilight shows with the far-away eruption except for Serino Edwards Bishop, an obscure amateur scientist and chaplain in Honolulu.11On September 5, 1883, Bishop witnessed the uncanny, lurid sunsets, and after reading about Krakatau in the newly telegraphed San Francisco Chronicle, connected the two together. Bishop published a request for ship captains to gather data. Bishop was right. Very high, exceedingly fast rivers of wind were carrying Krakatau’s effects around the globe. Sulfuric acid droplets from massive amounts of sulfuric dioxide gas were lofted into the air, then scattered by the Sun into blood red, orange, and yellow streamers of light. Bishop had discovered an aspect of the Earth’s atmosphere hitherto unknown. He called it the “smoke stream”; we now call it the jet stream. Krakatau enlarged scientific perceptions of volcanoes as planetary scale processes, integrating Earth system animacies in ways not hitherto understood. Krakatau shrank the world.

The Anthropocene is shaped around persistent paradoxes with respect to narratives of agency. In one version, our species is exalted as earth makers and earth breakers. As Stewart Brand put it: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.”12Our extraction of groundwater alone has caused the Earth to tilt even further on its axis.13On the other hand, the extractive practices of petrochemical industries, and the global burning of fossil fuels has brought Earth systems—most critically, the hydrosphere—to the cusp of collapse.14Colossal planetary phenomena—erupting volcanoes, melting glaciers, runaway wildfires, amplified sky rivers and hurricanes, overheating and rising oceans—humble our human hubris and outstrip scientific understanding.

I am flying. Nothing prepares me for the profundity of gazing down into the abyssal, black and scarlet cauldron of an erupting volcano. The ferocious maelstrom of lava waves churn and slosh, as if a giant hand is tipping the caldera back and forth. Immense, iridescent, red-gold bubbles explode and shoot up fountains of fire, all shrouded in eerie, blue plumes. I see one side of the caldera is about to split open. The next day it breaks, and fiery rivers of incandescent lava, seamed with black and gold, purl at immense speed down the valley of cracked, blue-black lava. 

It is August 2022, and I have come to Iceland to see and photograph an erupting volcano for myself. The year before, the Fagradalsfjall (“beautiful valley mountain”) volcano erupted for the first time in 800 years.15Almost overnight, thousands of tourists clambered into airplanes, then stumbled for miles across the jagged lava to witness the volcano erupting. Some went barefoot, some carried children, some slept out overnight, some just sat on the hillside and wept. What enchantment lured this strange pilgrimage? 

A consensual hallucination haunts the Anthropocene. Since the invention of the steam engine, black oil and red fire are the ghosts we do not see. Black oil and fire become obscene: off scene, invisible, untouchable. The exclusion of fire also emerged as a colonial tactic integral to a history of violence against Indigenous peoples and their ecologically sustainable practices of fire management.16An unspoken compact exists between oil companies and consumers that the extractive violence of the oil industry, and its alliance with global militarization, remains unseen. The black blood of oil ceaselessly spilled is kept out of sight, and in exchange for their willful blinding, consumers can expect magical access to the bright flow of petrochemical commodities, toothbrushes, sunglasses, keyboards, every package from Amazon, and tourist seats on airplanes to witness the planet’s last rites.

Erupting volcanoes disrupt this consensual hallucination of willful blinding, as well as the Promethean hubris of Earth mastery. Volcanoes are the essential earth makers and earth breakers of the planet. With new volcanic eruptions, solid ground splits open, exposing the planet’s red entrails, the roiling inferno of hellfire violently and suddenly visible. At the same time, volcanoes are gorgeous fractals, wildly, impossibly beautiful. Erupting volcanoes are also visual paradoxes: liquid fire, flowing rock, burning rivers, melting land, at once exceptionally old and the newest land. The human imagination oscillates, restlessly seeking meaning. To manage the contradictions, apparitions of animacy are often projected onto these unstable phantasmagorias. Hence volcanoes come to inhabit the realm of fetishism.17

Iceland, which was created by volcanoes and forged by ice, captures in miniature the magnitude of these Earth system upheavals in immersive, immediate time.18The most palpable force in Iceland is its volatility. Iceland is in near continuous motion, sliding above an immense volcanic system and a volcanic hotspot. Six of Iceland’s 130 volcanoes are active and topped by glaciers, that improbable, living paradox: the ice cauldron.19Iceland spans the mid-Atlantic ridge, and, like Krakatoa, straddles two tectonic plates, but these are slowly tearing the island apart. Iceland is the only place in the world where the separation of plates is visible on land. Only in Iceland can one stand, as I did later that day, at Silfra, a gash of ancient, translucent glacier water, and toss a basalt pebble from the North American to the Eurasian plate.

The Fagradalsfjall volcano erupted close to Reykjavik and the airport. Part of the complex system underlying the Reykjanes Peninsula, the volcano had awakened from an 800-year slumber, ushering in what scientists now believe might be a new era of volcanism.20As glaciers melt, the land below rises, and magma begins to move upwards in ways not yet fully understood. For nearly a week after my arrival, poisonous gaseous plumes make it too dangerous to go to the volcano. But, finally, there is an opening. 

Once I see the volcano’s eerie apparitions of animacy, I cannot unsee them. A giant cyclops with a burning, blood-red eye glares up at me, clawing itself out of Earth’s crust with gnarled fists of fire. Further down the lava valley, a blackened monster, smoke pluming from its eye, devours the land in its open maw. The following year, I listen to recordings of a new volcano that erupts near the small town of Grindavik. I hear an unearthly sound, like a maddened monster hurling itself up against the crust’s ceiling, banging and crashing, creaking and knocking. Knock-KNOCK. Knock-KNOCK. Come to your senses, says the volcano. 

How does one account for these apparitions of animacy? I know perfectly well there is no lava monster beneath Grindavik. But once I hear it, I cannot unhear it. The volcano undoes my senses. Instead of my capturing the volcano in photographs, the volcano captures me in entanglements of animacy and enchantment. 

Indeed, for centuries, humans, in different ways, have perceived glaciers and volcanoes as both animate and animating, co-existing with humans in close kinship and reciprocity, not always benign. The Little Ice Age (1300–1850), which was perhaps precipitated by global cooling caused by the Samalas volcano mega-eruption in 1257, had dire impacts on medieval Europe.21The colder weather of the late sixteenth century also threatened communities in the Alps as glaciers swallowed their villages and meadows. Terrified locals rushed into glacier mouths with swords and crucifixes drawn; priests preached sermons and sprinkled holy water at glacier mouths.22Julie Cruikshank also records how glaciers have profound meanings in Tlingit, Athapaskan, and other Indigenous cultures, which regard glaciers as embodying a worldview of humans and nature as mutually shaping and sustaining the inhabited world.23

Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi) calls for a new “grammar of animacy.”24The names we give glaciers in English—“snout,” “tongue,” “calve”—contain traces of this animacy. Kimmerer notes that the English language is comparatively thin on verb forms. Many Indigenous languages are, by contrast, verb-rich. Mountains, glaciers, volcanos are verbs, not nouns. Given time, rocks travel, glaciers speak volumes, marshes migrate, forests commune in subterranean fungal whispers. The question of Indigeneity is often seen by colonizers as a relation to past time. Rather, Indigeneity expresses a relation to immersive social space: relations of kinship, community and collaboration, reciprocity, respect, and gratitude for the sensuous, surrounding world. Tim Ingold calls this a “dwelling perspective.”25As Kimmerer notes: “In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital or natural resources. But to our people (land) was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our non-human kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us… In the eyes of the federal government, that was a threat.”26

Iceland and Louisiana lie some 6,000 miles apart and are rarely connected. But they are planetary kinscapes, as oil and gas industry extractions and the global burning of fossil fuels bring the Earth’s hydrosphere to the cusp of collapse.

In August 2022, I find myself standing inside an ice cave under a massive glacier that lies atop an active volcano in Iceland’s Katla Cave. Honed by howling Arctic winds, seamed with black volcanic ash, the cave is frozen in glassy waves, emerald and aquamarine, and the numinous azure of crystalized deep time. I have the uncanny feeling I am standing inside a living being, animate and animating. I place my hand on its emerald scales and think of the red hands painted on cave walls 40,000 years ago. My Irish kin call places like this “thin places,” ait tanai, liminal spaces where the membrane between the human world and another world beyond is ethereal and transparent: a portal.26I put my ear to the ice. I can hear the creature breathe. Come to your senses, says the glacier.

I stop to take a photo of a massive shard of thin ice hanging like a scimitar over the mouth of the cave, melting icewater beading down. Then I follow the others ahead of me into a dark tunnel. I feel it first: a thrumming under my feet, a shudder in the ice. Without warning, a torrent of glacier water explodes towards me out of the ice wall, turns, and churns wildly alongside the narrow ice ledge that I have to cross, edging the tunnel. One slip of my crampons, and I will tumble into the icy maelstrom, smashed back and forth, swallowed into the glacial abyss. Panic jolts through me. Clinging to the thin, wet rope ringed into the ice wall, I teeter along the narrow ledge. As I emerge on the other side into blinding sunlight, “a memory flashes up at a moment of danger.”27

Earlier that summer, I was driving south from New Orleans to Isle de Jean Charles, a half-drowned island in the southern wetlands of Louisiana, the fastest drowning land on Earth. I turn onto Island Road. On either side, the water is smooth as silk. Then, without warning, the marsh weeds on one side lift, as if a cruise ship or a giant sea creature, has just passed by. A wave rises up, crests, and pours a flood of frothing, golden-brown water across the road. Then another wave rises, larger, and in an instant the road is inundated. I skid the car to a halt. Far ahead, a commotion. Fishermen are turning their trucks in the road. As one races past, he yells out the window: “Go! Go! GO!” I know better. One foot of water can lift a car. But I get out and stand spellbound in the warm, rising water. A black snake clings to my ankle, then is ripped away. A tiny turtle tumbles by. “Go!” yell the men. I get back in the car and I feel the tugging tide. I look in the rearview mirror. Behind me the road has vanished, even the yellow line, and I am all at sea. I reverse blindly through the rising waters. Come to your senses, says the ocean.

Unable to cross to the island, I take to the sky. My pilot, Charlie Hammond, takes me out over Isle de Jean Charles. I am flying. As we ascend, the island seems to be flying too—a half-hallucinatory bird, eyes pointing to the far horizon. One wing seems caught in melt from the faraway ice caps. The island bird breathes water. 

What I did not know, then, was that my fanciful sense of the island drowning under melting ice is in fact borne out by science. Iceland is intimately kinned with Louisiana. Scientists tell us the melting Arctic ice is causing sea level rise in the southern hemisphere.28Glaciers have mass, and therefore have gravity, and pull nearby oceans towards them.29Now as Iceland and Greenland’s glaciers melt, gravity lessens, and oceans rise higher in the south. The melting ice I saw in Katla Cave might well have been flooding Island Road.30

Ghosh makes the prescient point that for most of human history, people were wary of marshy coastlands. Colonial empires unleashed what Ghosh calls “the great derangement,” a radical estrangement from environments that was “a kind of madness.”31Future megacities like New Orleans, Mumbai, Chennai, Jakarta, Guangzhou, New York, and Miami were built on fluid lands, deltas, and land forms shaped by glacial activity; an imperial folly now revealed as catastrophic. More than 300 million people are predicted to be displaced by rising oceans over the coming decades.

Across the world, cities are sinking. How much does New Orleans weigh? New Orleans lies fifteen feet below sea level. The city is sinking under its own urban weight, as well as into wetlands. The wetlands themselves are sinking due to the extraction of groundwater and oil, the ravages of oil companies slicing and dicing the marshlands into canals, and the howling hurricanes amplified by burning fossil fuels. The word “time” derives from the word “tide.”32Come a few decades, New Orleans might well be named New Atlantis. Iceland and Louisiana, skeined by fire, undone by heat, frayed by floods, are apparitions of our future watery worlds.

Melting glaciers are the most visible witnesses and warnings of an overheating planet. Small events have epochal effects. High above the Vatnajokull ice cap in Iceland, a snowflake sifts softly down. A snowflake is an exquisite fractal. Every crystalline snowflake has six starry points, but no snowflake is the same. The snowflake alights on a vast ice sheet. It is an ordinary snowflake, but it is also a tipping point. How much does a snowflake weigh? Enough for something extraordinary to happen. As the snowflake spirals onto the ice, the massive ice sheet begins to creak and groan, then slowly shudders into motion. A glacier is born. A glacier is a fractal accumulation of compressed snow. It moves downwards under its own weight, creating mountains, carving out ravines, grinding rocks into glacial flour, until it reaches the glacial sand plain, where it divides into a fretwork of fractal rivers and melts into the sea.

I am flying. My pilot, Aaron, is taking me over Breiðamerkurjökull, the main outlet glacier of the vast Vatnajokull ice cap, which is now catastrophically melting.33Far below lies an unearthly landscape. The icy tongue of the glacier is thinning. The snout has retreated twenty miles in a single person’s lifetime. Aaron tells me that the glacier’s lagoon, Jökulsárlón, now stretches twenty miles under the glacier, undoing it from below. We fly deeper into Breiðamerkurjökull and I cannot shake my sense of the glacier’s animacy. I see strange eyes looking at me everywhere from the ice. As I enter the glacier, it enters me. It seems animal and animate. I want to reach down and touch it. The glacier feels as close as skin, as close as kin.

Then Aaron takes me to the glacial rivers. Nothing prepares me for the unearthly beauty of the intricately braided latticework of ice rivers. Nothing prepares me for a beauty so abstract in its fractal forms, yet so immanent, sensuous, and alive. Water desires water and seeks the quickest way down. Close to the glacier, the melting ice water fans out across the vast sand plain to the ocean. The glacier shape-shifts into a magical, intricate phantasmagoria of meandering glacial rivers, interweaving and under-flowing, forking and fretting. Some strands look like blue, finely braided basket weaving; some like speeding demons with slanted eyes full of intent; some like blue-white lightning, electric and intensely alive. The river melds with the underlying sedimentary layers of glacial flour, laid down century after century by the glacier. Closer to the ocean, the river slows and spreads in vast swathes of coffee-colored, silt-laden water, startling against the green-black ocean. Then the glacier is gone.

The glacier’s freshwater turns to saltwater, becomes dense and sinks, and sets out on its long journey down to the west coast of Africa, where it slowly warms, rises, and turns towards the Gulf of Mexico, where at least one current surely crosses Island Road. Then the great ocean current turns north again towards the Arctic ice. This vast, oceanic system of overturning and upwelling water is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the dynamic ocean pump that keeps the planet’s climate stable, and which, scientists worry, should it slow and stall, as it has in past epochs, would unleash global havoc.

Perhaps the glacial rivers’ beauty rises from their uncanny abstraction, the patterns intricately weaving and repeating in fractal forms of symmetry and difference. Nature abounds in fractals. Icebergs, glaciers, volcanos, and cities are all fractals. I can see the veins of a leaf in the palm of my hand, and a phantom tree in a delta. Humans can find fractals hauntingly beautiful; they inhabit the mysterious realm between the known and the unknown, oscillating between symmetry and difference in a dimension strange to us. Scientists now know that fractals are present in the innermost, intimate heart of the atom.34

Icelanders, like many Indigenous people, have an intimate awareness of the entangled kinship of earth, climate, and ecological and human prosperity. There are seventy words for snow in Icelandic. But the Arctic ice domes and glaciers have shrunk to their smallest size in recorded history, melting four times faster than anywhere else on Earth, and seven times faster than in the 1990s. The most northern Arctic town of Svalbard is melting seven times faster than anywhere. Changes that took thousands of years now take place in a single generation. By century’s end, Iceland may well be iceless; Glacier Park could have no glaciers. The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro are already nearly gone. 

Of all the challenges facing the planet there is none so great as our use and abuse of water. 70 percent of Earth is covered in water, but less than 3 percent of that is fresh water. And only 0.007 percent of water is drinkable. One billion people have no clean water at all. Together with the Antarctic, Greenland’s ice sheet contains 68 percent of all freshwater on Earth.35Himalayan glaciers regulate the water supply to a quarter of all humanity. Glaciers and ice caps are not only the sentinels and harbingers of the overheating planet. They are also the planet’s indispensable freshwater repositories, without which most of humanity cannot survive. The ice sheets are also our giant mirrors, reflecting the Sun’s heat (in a process called albedo) and cooling the Earth. As the ice sheets melt, they unleash immense social and ecological havoc. As I stood in Katla Cave in 2022, one third of Pakistan lay underwater, much of which came from glaciers melting. The great melt of Greenland has been called the greatest geological change to reshape the planet in human history.36 It is possible, says Tobias Owen. “No ice. No us.”37 

On my first trip to Iceland, driving through Reykjavik, I pass Hofði, the white house where in 1986 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev convened a meeting often seen as heralding the fall of communism.38In 1987, a year after Reagan and Gorbachev’s meeting, Margaret Thatcher hailed the ascendancy of neoliberalism with her famous declaration: “There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women.”39 A year later, in 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, delivered his historic address calling for global action to recognize and collectively combat the accelerating crisis of global warming.40

The colossal tragedy of our time is that the accelerating collapse of the planet’s Earth systems from the global burning of fossil fuels has collided with the accelerating collapse of political systems able to foster social policies of community, kinship, cooperation, and social support. With the global expansion of autocracies and the ascendance of corporo-fascism in the United States, we are left bereft of sufficient political means to protect the fundamental cycles of life.

There is good reason, for one, to challenge the narrative that climate change is the universal cause of global warming and its attendant calamities. Climate change is a consequence, not the cause, of planetary havoc. The meme of climate change as the abstract, stand-in cause of planetary havoc has, almost overnight, become acceptable, even to the overlords of the fossil fuel industries. Seeing climate change as a universal cause of planetary breakdown is what I call a camouflage narrative, one that conceals the fossil fuel industries’ primary culpability, and obscures the burning of fossil fuels as the primary causal agency of Earth systems breakdown. The political effect of the “missing perpetrator”—an abstract cause without name, face, or price tag—benefits the oil companies. We need to change the narrative. Earth systems breakdown can only be halted by halting the burning of fossil fuels and their emissions.

On what abacus can we count the collapsing glaciers, the runaway wildfires, the flooded but not yet drowned? For years we have been counting: numbers of oil spilled, numbers of methane released, the numbers of people forced to move, or forced not to move. We are like children counting on our fingers in the dark, trying to ward off the shapeless face of something dreadful that has been unleashed and that we cannot fully understand.

All these numbers speed across the retina like a nightmare ticker tape, too fast to be turned into visible scenes, too fast to be imaginatively absorbed. A flickering double vision marks much coverage of environmental crises. Calamities unfold through the mono-eye of the mainstream media, or the blinking eye of the internet, which reveals disasters in intermittent flashes and intimations. Something terrible is happening; that much is sure, but what? Official stories fail to offer meaningful narratives. So people develop double vision, anxiety and an inability to mourn. Some say: “I can’t bear to look at those glaciers.” As if looking away is the very sign of compassion. But looking away only becomes another form of blindness.

We need new narratives, new images, new political strategies. We must come to our senses, in all senses of the phrase, so that the past does not continue to wound the present. Volcanoes and glaciers invite renewed attention to Earth’s animacy and sentient ecologies. Thinking with glaciers and volcanoes, living with fire and water, not against them, invites a radical perspective of new responsibilities, ones that open to an assemblage of entanglements of which humans are only one filament. We must conjoin beauty and trouble with the generosity of Earth’s animacies. Marianne Nicolson, artist activist of the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations, tells me how important beauty is for Indigenous people.41“Beauty is not a denial of difficulty,” she says. “Beauty is the entry point into the trouble.”42

There is a special word for this perilous time: “beholden.” That is, an ethics of kinship, of being beholden, of holding others, and knowing that one will in turn be held. Volcanoes and glaciers are not only apparitions and portents of loss; they are harbingers of radical transformation that invite us to chart new atlases of our drowning world and new cartographies of kinship. I have come to believe that if we begin with what we love, we give grief and mourning its fullness. Grief makes us kin with what we mourn, and out of that kinship, radical transformation will more likely rise up. Not only for ourselves, but for the strange kin who will walk the future planet in our footsteps. 

After my flight up the glaciers, I return to my car, and I stop at Diamond Beach, Jökulsárlón, where the glacier melts into icebergs that float out to sea. An iceberg drifts by, lit by radiant shafts of the sinking sun, ignited into a glowing, depthless blue, angelic in the last light. I pull my car over, spellbound. I lift my camera. Then I lower it, recalling Seamus Heaney’s 1996 poem “Postscript”: 

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.43