Dragons of Fortune: Glaciers as Resource Sentinels and Portals

Across cultures and throughout history, glaciers have been considered to be living beings who respond to human activity, sometimes marauding mountain villages, sometimes rebuking moral infractions (Dangles 2020). Animated glaciers could enact violent retribution on those who betrayed them, through surges of ice, engulfing crevasses, or glacial lake outburst floods (Cruikshank 2005).

In the past several decades, changing climatic conditions have altered perceptions of glaciers among observers in the industrial Western world such that glaciers have come to be seen as an endangered species, wasting away and deserving of protection (Carey 2007). Glaciers melting most rapidly in the high elevations of tropical and temperate mountains, with significant implications for the lifeways of local, rural, and Indigenous peoples.

This paper puts the frozen blue humanities – or cryohumanities (Sörlin 2015, 2023) into conversation with studies of extractivism and religion and ecology to examine the ways that the global decline of mountain glaciers – terrestrial seas – sets the stage for enclosure and extraction of economically important resources including water, minerals, and land.

In contrast to the eternally absorptive sea (Liboiron 2021; Patton 2007), the terrestrial seas of glaciers repel and reflect: reflecting heat energy and repelling many seekers because of their remote, treacherous, and shifting surfaces. Glaciers are guardians of marginal high mountain communities in limiting access by outsiders through impassible terrain and undesirable conditions for extraction or commodification. However, glacier extinction in tropical and temperate high mountain regions changes these dynamics, temporarily releasing excess meltwater that may be captured and commodified, and unveiling new lands for mineral prospecting, property speculation, resource extraction, and exploitation.

A multi-national, multidisciplinary team, led by French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) is examining ecological, physical, and socio-cultural consequences of glacier extinction (Dangles et al. 2020). This international consortium includes researchers from IRD in France and Grenoble University, as well as Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, and the National Herbarium of Bolivia, UC San Diego, and CIIS.

Declining and extinct glaciers become terrestrial aqueous extractive zones in multiple ways. First, glacial recession and extinction opens up new spaces for human habitation and industry, including extraction, tourism, herding, and grazing. Further, meltwater from glaciers is enclosed and privatized to manage undependable flows, resulting in increasing concentration for some and increasing marginalization for others. Global fossil fuel and mineral extraction produces the carbon emissions that raise ambient temperatures and cause glacial extinction, creating positive feedback loops that hasten glacial decline, serving the needs of industrialists directing resource extraction. Fossil fuel combustion deposits black carbon (or soot) on glaciers, that decreasing albedo of glaciers and allowing them to absorb more heat, which contributes to warming their surfaces and hastening melting (Hadley and Kirchstetter 2012; Mingle 2015). Extinct glacier exposes dark rock and soil that absorbs more heat that reflective ice, subsequently increasing warming.

This paper examines the global context of declining glaciers as resource sentinels and portal, with specific attention to the contested ontologies and epistemologies of glacier extinction in and around Bolivia’s Milluni Valley, where Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, and Indigenous Aymara cosmovision intermingle and and glacial decline has exacerbated inter and intra-community tensions around resource access. Indigenous Aymara cosmology understands mountains and glaciers as ancestors and guardians, yet glacier extinction creates emergent possibilities for resource extraction and exploitation.

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---. 2023. Resource extraction and arctic communities : the new extractivist paradigm. First edition. ed. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.