anyone can remember, politicians and concerned citizens have asked what kind of world are we leaving our children?

Today's guest grappled with just that question in a very personal way, when she journeyed to Antarctica's fragile glaciers to chronicle the work of scientists trying to understand the realities of a changing climate.

She's Elizabeth Rush this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- Our guest this week is a return visitor.

Elizabeth Rush is an author whose 2019 book, "Rising," was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Her most recent book is "The Quickening "Creation and Community at The Ends of the Earth."

Elizabeth, it's so great to have you back, and congratulations.

The book is outstanding.

- Thank you so much.

It's a joy to be here.

- You know, there are a lot of different themes and issues and questions we wanna ask you about the book, but I wanna start with what led you to want to go to Antarctica in the first place?

- Well, my previous book, "Rising," was all about the early impact that sea level rise is having on coastal communities all around the country.

And I felt like as I worked on that book I started to understand that our predictions for just how quickly sea levels were rising were far more varied than I had initially understood.

And as I dug more into that variability, I learned that one of the main reasons that they are so varied is that we have so little information about what's happening in Antarctica, and in particular West Antarctica, with ice sheet retreat and ice sheet loss.

And as I learned more about that sort of uncertainty, I said, I really would like to see the source of the sea level rise up close.

And so I applied for a grant through the National Science Foundation to deploy to Antarctica as an artist.

And I was granted it and ended up going.

- And so you were one of a 57-person expedition that headed for the Thwaites Glacier.

What's the process like once you find out that, yes, you've been selected?

What's that buildup like?

I'm guessing that you had never been on an expedition like that before.

- That's correct.

The whole process of being involved in this expedition was wild from day one.

So in order to go to Antarctica through a government-sponsored mission, you have to physically qualify, and such ensued, so ensued a multiple month-long process through which I had to get EKGs for my heart, go through psychological evaluation, have a pelvic exam, all of these different things to make sure that were I to be sent to Antarctica my physical and mental being wasn't going to clog up the works in any way, shape, or form.

So even months before I deployed I was already on this expedition.

- So this wasn't taking a cruise ship to some destination.

You were going to a place where no one had been before, and there was gonna be no contact.

You were gonna be on this ship with 56 other people.

Did you have any trepidation about that?

I mean just me even asking that question I'm getting chills.

Not good chills either.

- I mean, I still remember my program officer through the National Science Foundation called me, and she asked me, "What's the longest you've ever been on a ship?"

And I told her very confidently, "Five days."

(interviewers laughing) - And she was like, "Well, this is a 50-to-60-day mission."

And I was like, "Okay, great."

And then she paused and she was like, "Where you're going, "it will be harder for us to get help to you "than it will be for us to get help "to someone on the Space Station."

- Oh no.

- Like, you're literally going to a part of the planet no one has ever been to before.

Do you think you're ready?

Do you wanna do it?

And I was very confident.

I was like, "Yes, sure."

And I admit now that I look back that I had no idea what I was getting into.

The idea that you're on this boat with 56 people that you've never met, at some point, someone very early on said to me, "There's no getting off if you don't like us."

(everyone laughing) And that was very true, but somehow that also created very quickly a deep sense of community and responsibility to one another.

If there's a problem you've gotta solve it with your shipmates.

We had a medical emergency, and for a while we had to figure out what to do about that without external help.

There's no Amazon delivery if you forget your secret stash of chocolate bars, so.

- So give us a sampling of who some of the other people were, the other 56.

Not necessarily by name, but occupation, what they were there to do.

Who were these people that you were- - It was a huge cast of characters, and that was something that I was really interested in from the start.

You have your career Antarctic scientists.

I'm thinking about our chief scientist.

I believe it was his 19th or 20th time going to Antarctica.

- Wow.

- And so he had all this sort of lived experience there.

Interestingly, all of the folks who really serviced the boat and maintained the boat, the able-bodied seamen, the overwhelming majority, if not all of them, were from the Philippines.

And one guy had literally been to Antarctica over 20 times in this service position, and he had been sailing on the Palmer, our icebreaker, since it first set sail in 1992 or 1993.

- Wow.

- We had a cook from Jamaica.

We had another cook who was from New Orleans, who, this was his first time leaving the country, his first time on an airplane.

- Oh my- - His first time cooking on a boat.

So I was really surprised by kind of the wide array of people who made it on this mission.

It wasn't just glaciologists and paleoclimatologists.

- So you mentioned this diverse and intriguing cast that you find yourself with.

But in the book, when you lay out the cast, the last member of the cast that you mentioned is Thwaites Glacier itself.

- Yeah.

- What's so special about it?

- Thwaites Glacier, I like to say, is really like the character that sets the whole play in motion, that sets the whole book in motion.

And that's because it's the widest glacier in the world.

It's one of the largest glaciers in the world.

And the overwhelming majority of Thwaites rests on land that's pushed below sea level, in part, because of the glacier's weight.

And so warm water is working its way under the floating ice shelf at the front of Thwaites, eating away at it from beneath and causing it to enter a period of rapid decline.

If we lose Thwaites Glacier global sea levels will rise two feet or more.

But it also acts as a kind of cork to the entirety of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

And there's concern that if we lose Thwaites we could lose the entire ice sheet, and that would cause global sea levels to rise 10 feet or more.

So it really is like the biggest wild card in our sea level rise modeling scenarios.

And it's also so remote.

It's in this corner of Antarctica that's so far away from the few research bases that we have in Antarctica that no one had ever before been to the place where the glacier discharges ice into the sea.

And no one's been back since.

We were really lucky the year that we went to be able to really work directly in front of the glacier.

- So you were there in 2019.

We're taping this in 2023, and nobody's been back since?

- No...

They've tried, and of course, you had a year where there was very little Antarctic science 'cause of the pandemic, but every year the sea ice conditions have not cooperated.

- Wow.

- So we're still the only mission to have ever made it there.

- Wow.

- So no one has ever been to that glacier except for your- - To get really specific it's where the glacier meets the sea.

So people have been on top of it.

The first person to be on top of it was Charlie Bentley in the 50s.

But that dynamic, the ocean-ice interface, we're the only people to have ever been there.

- So the book gets into community, it gets into representation, it gets into obviously scientific research, it gets into writing, it gets into motherhood, a lot of themes, which, by the way, are brought together brilliantly in the book.

Did those themes emerge as you were taking this voyage and trip?

Or were you thinking about them before or a combination of the two?

- Well I can tell you, as I got interested in Antarctica as a place that I might wanna visit as a writer, I started to delve into the history of representations of Antarctica and writing.

That's what writers do.

And I remember going to the library, and I just pulled out a bunch of books that looked interesting, and I was surprised that the selection is small.

The first person to see Antarctica saw it in 1820.

It's a little over 200 years ago.

So anything that human beings have written about direct interactions in Antarctica has been written in the last two centuries.

And so that's not actually like a large canon to pull from.

So I pulled out some books from the library.

I got back to my office.

I probably had like 20 books.

And I quickly realized that of those 20 books only two were written by women, none were written by a person of color, and one of the books was written by a woman about Shackleton, which it's like half the books about Antarctica are written about Shackleton.

So I went into the mission knowing that I didn't wanna reproduce the kinds of stories of male conquest that tend to define the stories that circulate around Antarctica.

But I didn't really know how I was gonna do that.

I've always been an interviewer, and so I knew that I was gonna interview a lot of people on the boat.

I suspected that I would write somehow about motherhood, because I went on this mission at a point in my life where I wanted to have a child.

And I was curious what that desire would, how that desire would change alongside this changing glacier.

So I kind of knew some of the shapes of the themes, but I didn't know how they would manifest.

It felt sorta dangerous to want to write about motherhood but not being pregnant at the time, hoping to become pregnant.

- You know, one of the things that struck me, so we know the climate is getting hotter.

Warmer is not really a sufficient description of it.

It's getting hotter, and with a whole host of consequences that flow from that.

And we often think of that as it's a function just of human activity.

In the book, though, you seem to make the case that the climate is really a dialogue between people and nature and Antarctica in the specific case.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

- Yes, I do think, when I think also about those Antarctic stories, for instance, so many of them are about human beings conquering the South Pole, being the first to touch this part of Antarctica or that part of Antarctica.

And that's such a limiting way to think about our human relationship with the more than human world.

I think that we're in this kind of never ending dance where what we call nature impacts us and how we live and we impact nature.

To put perhaps a finer point on it, to think about that in the context of Antarctica I remember asking the chief scientist on board... And I felt kind of silly asking it.

I was like, "Do you think Antarctica shapes us?"

And I thought that he would sort of dismiss my question as like humanistic sorcery.

(interviewers laughing) And he thought about it for a minute and he was like, "Well, I don't think it's a coincidence "that our particular kind of human civilization, "which is so coastal oriented, "arises in this moment of incredible climate stability, "and in particular stability in Antarctica.

"If you look outside "of the last 6,000 years of human history "sea levels rise multiple feet per century frequently.

"That flux is really common, "but the last 6,000 years have been sort of "climatically stable in Antarctica, "and so that's led us to have a kind of "warped idea of how non-static our coastline is.

"So we built all these civilizations "alongside the water's edge, "in part 'cause Antarctica's kinda holding still."

And he's like, "And Antarctica's gonna start "moving more quickly.

"It is moving more quickly, "and it's gonna re-change... "It's gonna change the shape of our maps all over the world, "and we're kinda not ready for that.

"We kind of don't understand "how profound an influence it has on us.

"It sits at the bottom of the planet.

"Very few people get there, but it shapes us every day."

- So taking a larger view, what is the planet telling us now?

Telling us about the planet, telling us about people who live on the planet, other beings, life forms that live on the planet.

What should we be hearing?

- It's so hard.

I went into this mission thinking I was gonna see a glacier fall apart and thinking that I would somehow receive the message that the glacier was sending me.

And we spent a total, sea ice conditions worked such that we spent a total of like one week directly in front of the western ice shelf of Thwaites.

At the start of that week the ice shelf was this smooth, pristine, pretty solid wall of ice.

We sailed along the front of it.

It was 100 miles long.

And by the end of the week what was open water and a solid sheet of ice had transformed into hundreds of icebergs surrounding us, such that we had to flee the study area really quickly, because it became really dangerous to sail there.

And I didn't know it at the time, but we were literally witnessing this massive ice shelf collapse all around us.

But because I had, none of us had any experience there we couldn't even really see that it was happening.

Like we didn't know what rapid change would look like.

And so, when I think of your question, I think of the fact that I went on this mission wanting to receive a message from Thwaites, wanting to be in dialogue with it, and I realized how hubristic that was of me, because I had no experience there.

How could I think that I could just like show up and that it would talk directly to me and I'd go home and convey some message.

It's like, in order to really understand what a non-human entity is saying, I think, demands that we spend our lives in close conversation with that thing or that place.

And there's a depth of experience in Antarctica that I just don't have.

We can certainly surmise that the planet is saying slow down, use less, let's move away from fossil fuels.

I think that in an abstract sense, that's all very clear.

But also trying to have a a deeper one-on-one relationship with a non-human entity I think just takes time above all else.

I'm more attuned to the changes happening in the Narraganset Bay, 'cause I live here, than I am to what's happening in Antarctica.

- You know, so we last had you on the show, we checked the dates, it was February 4th, 2020.

So about literally a month before the world shutdown because of the pandemic.

And I think if we think back about that period of February, we're like, yeah we knew that there was something going on on the other side of the world, we heard the warnings, we were being told to prepare, but it wasn't here yet.

And I don't think any of us had any idea about what was about to transpire on a global scale and even in our own communities.

- No, no kidding.

- So have you thought about that parallel with climate change?

Sort of the experience we had with the pandemic and sort of the communal responsibility and the individual actions and how that translates to this moment with climate as well?

- Absolutely, I mean, I think that, in many ways what happened in the pandemic exposed really large scale structural inequality in our society, and many of those same inequalities are at the base of our underlying challenges with climate change adaptation.

And so I think, it just happened on a much faster timescale.

But I both take inspiration from the pandemic and I also think heed it as a word of warning, like can human beings adapt fundamentally how we live on a dime?

Absolutely.

Do we need to make those kinds of large-scale adaptations to fully address climate change?

Also absolutely.

Are we having a tremendously hard time understanding that the climate is changing and it will demand those things of us, and the sooner we can make the changes the better off we're gonna do?

Absolutely.

So I think it is a warning, in that sense, for us, that this summer we're living through devastating flooding in Vermont, devastating heat waves, wildfire smoke from Canada that's drifting into Rhode Island.

We're starting to collectively feel the lived experience of the climate changing.

Can we translate that into action?

That's kind of the open question.

- So one of the profound questions you grapple with in the book is whether it is ethical to bring children into this world.

And you're not the only person to grapple with that.

I've read a number of stories where people have decided, no, we can't do that.

And others, of course, have decided, yes, we should.

Talk about that.

Talk about that question and where you came down on it.

I think we know where you came down on it, but go ahead.

- You know, I sometimes think of my generation and the generation directly younger than myself as living through a kind of impossible era.

We hear, and we're facing an impossible question, is it still okay to have a child?

Phoenix is 120 degrees today.

Is it okay to have a child?

Vermont is drowning.

Is it okay to have a child?

We have all this particulate matter in the air.

Is it okay to have a child?

And that question is an ethical question, what impact will my child have on the planet?

But it's also about what impact is the planet gonna have on my child?

And in many ways, what happens in the next 10 to 15 years of human history, of human life right now, will fundamentally determine the shape of the world that child lives in.

And yet we have to make a decision today, not knowing what that world's gonna look like, about whether or not our generation wants to have children.

And I think for me there's not a right answer.

This book is not about telling other people how to act.

It's more about creating a space to say we're all facing this really impossible question right now.

What are ways to think through it?

What are ways to live it in a meaningful way in community with others?

'Cause I think, certainly when I started feeling anxiety around having a kid, I didn't have a lot of people to talk to about that.

So I wanted to create a space to explore that question in the book.

- Elizabeth, did the journey change you?

Or did being part of this expedition change you?

- It did in that I felt on this boat that everyone was there for a purpose and we were all working collectively towards a shared goal to generate as much information as humanly possible about this place in as little time as as possible.

And everyone tried and everyone made mistakes.

And when you made a mistake, it was awful.

You couldn't get off the boat.

There were times when I made huge screw ups, and man did I wish myself off that boat, just to not have to see the scientists who data I lost or other dynamics that were difficult on the boat, but there was no getting off the boat.

And so you really had to recognize your error, apologize, and keep working and keep moving.

And, to me that felt like a really important lesson to learn around what it means to be truly responsible to one another in a meaningful way.

So I think that I learned about the ways in which community can be sort of tied together around a shared purpose.

And also that those communities are not sacrosanct.

That they can fall apart, too.

That they'll end and then you'll come together around a different shared purpose.

But it's certainly some of the most meaningful months of my life as an adult.

There's a lesson in there for climate change action, for sure.

- So it's not a book about what to do about the climate crisis, but obviously you have thoughts.

Give us what your thoughts are, what the average person could be doing, and and what governments and other legislative bodies can be doing.

- I just read a really great book by, co-authored by Rhode Island State Senator Megan Cowman, whom you should have on the show if you haven't already had her, called "Conceivable Futures."

And she talks a lot about what it means to build a world worth living in.

And something that really stuck with me from that book is I think we have a lot of recommendations around climate change, about how people can become involved in activist sort of groups to get together and work with other people to affect change.

And I think that's great, but that can also feel really intimidating for a lot of folks.

I think it can feel like a heavy lift.

One of the things she says is we're not gonna solve it alone.

Collective action is what's gonna get us the results that we need.

But we can also think in a more expansive way about the groups that we're already part of.

She's like, your synagogue, your kids' basketball team, your first grader's PTO group.

Like what are the groups that we're already a part of?

And how can we introduce climate change into those spaces and think about how they can affect change on the climate even though they're not climate spaces?

So can you start like a carpool or can you get your kids' school to go meatless on Mondays?

I like that she kind of meets people where they're at and says, get together with other people to talk about the climate and then to try to make a more group impact on climate, but at a local level.

- We've got about 20 seconds left.

- [Elizabeth] Okay.

- This was your first trip to Antarctica?

- Yes.

- Will you ever go back?

- When I crossed back over the Southern Ocean, I knew that I would never go back.

I thought that it was such a stunning place, and the only way that I could justify going was that I would spend five years writing a book about the expedition that I had been a part of.

I can't imagine going to this place that is so pristine and seemingly untouched for any other reason than that.

And I can't imagine spending another five years writing another book of Antarctica.

- Well, we're glad that you did, we're glad that you wrote about it, and we're glad that you spent some time with us.

She's Elizabeth Rush.

The book is "The Quickening," and it's a remarkable read.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square" you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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