Final Words

In the preceding chapters of this book, we’ve traveled through a world of ice that was probably largely uncharted for most of us. Hopefully, we’ve learned a little bit about these fantastic frozen natural resources that play such a fundamental role in the sustainability and balance of our global ecosystem. Glaciers are melting. They are in danger because we have placed them in danger and, as such, we need to take note of and responsibility for this vulnerability, not only to protect glaciers but also to protect the very essence of our global habitat. Glaciers have been unprotected because they are obscure, removed, alien to our daily lives, located in far away places that are for the most part inhospitable to our way of life. And yet, they are a fundamental and integral part of our way of life. With modern tools like the Internet and programs like Google Earth, we can get closer to these fabulous vulnerable resources, to learn about them and work to protect them. The world is challenged today to address global climate change. If we envision a sustainable and harmonious environment in our future, we must progressively move away from fossil fuels and introduce a more balanced and sustainable mix of energy sources grounded on renewable energy. We must find solutions to generating, harnessing, transporting, and managing renewable energies, and we must progressively phase out oil and gas from our daily lives. It is possible; it just takes personal and collective conviction to set ourselves in motion to achieve this goal. Glaciers are a majestic resource, inspiring awe and wonder in a world of frozen beauty that awaits our discovery but that also alerts us to our excesses and indifference. We are losing our glaciers because we have ignored the extreme vulnerability of our planetary ecosystem, and we now must face difficult decisions about policy, consumption, and lifestyle changes that shake the foundations of our society. Global climate change for many seems intangible.

Amazing Glacier Stuff

This chapter is about what glaciers—and particularly what glacial and periglacial melt—mean to people and communities around the world. We often don’t realize that people interact daily with glaciers. Some go to visit and hike on glaciers or to photograph them for their magnificent beauty. Some ski on glaciers. Others extract water from glaciers for personal and industrial use. Others fear glaciers for their potent fury and destruction. People and communities are adapting to climate change and its impacts on glaciers, sometimes without even knowing it. Others are very aware of glacier vulnerability and are taking measures to address the changing cryosphere. They are mitigating circumstances and are adapting to impacts. In this chapter, we share stories and facts about glaciers and periglacial environments, which most people are probably unfamiliar with, and we explain how lives in these environments are changing due to climate change. Few people have heard of glacier tsunamis, but they exist, they’re real, they’re ferocious, and they can kill. Scientists call them glacier lake outburst floods (GLOFs). And as climate change deepens, more and more GLOF phenomena can be expected. Imagine you live at the foot of a mountain range like the Rocky Mountains, the Himalayas, or the Central Andes. On a nice sunny day, you can see the snow-capped mountains in the distance, maybe 20 or 30 km (12–18 mi) out, maybe even more. You are sitting at home when all of a sudden you feel shaking and hear a rumble. People start screaming. You look out the window and see people running frantically and erratically about. Then a woman yells, “The mountain! It’s coming! Run!” Imagine a large glacier the size of a dozen or so city blocks, perched atop a mountain. It’s 180 meters thick (600 ft), which is as tall as a sixty-story building. Below it, time and climate have formed a lake, a glacier lake occupying the same spot where the glacier once rested, pushing rock and earth out and forward as the glacier flowed downhill when it was solidly frozen and healthy.

What Is a Glacier?

It’s mind-boggling (and a bit scary) to consider that while most of our planet’s surface is covered with water, only about 2–3% of this water is actually freshwater—that is, water that we can drink. That means that most of the world’s water (about 98%) is of no use for human consumption or for agriculture. But perhaps a more startling statistic that few actually realize is that of this minuscule percentage of water that is actually apt for consumption, three-fourths of it is packed away in dense millenary ice located in the polar ice caps; this is water that we will probably never see in fresh liquid form. Except for documentaries we see occasionally on television about fearsome adventurers who traveled to Antarctica or to the ice sheets of the North Pole, most of us have never ventured (and probably never will) to the North or South Pole where this ice is located. These are rather inhospitable places of our planet that we could only tolerate on extremely nice days and only for a few days at best, if we were ever able to get there at all. We hear about the polar caps melting due to climate change. We see images of penguins in the Southern Hemisphere or polar bears in the north suffering from a warming climate, and we even see entertaining animated movies about these obscure and rapidly changing environments and how odd creatures adapt or succumb to these changes. We hear from many media sources, from scientists and from environmentalists, that enormous ice masses at the poles are melting fast and breaking away into our oceans. James Balog, a photographer and cryoactivist, recently produced a documentary film called Chasing Ice, which incredibly captured the calving (the collapse) of a chunk of glacier ice half the size of Manhattan Island, breaking off from the Ilulissat Glacier and rolling into gelid waters off Greenland. Pieces of glacier ice more than 200 meters (650 ft) tall—as tall as skyscrapers—suddenly sank, vanished, resurfaced, and bounced around in the water as this colossal glacier crumbled into the sea. Since then, much larger calvings have been reported around the world.

The Barrick Veto

Buenos Aires, Argentina—October 23, 2008. The team at the Environment Secretariat could not believe the outcome of the congressional vote the previous day, October 22. Argentina had achieved the world’s first national glacier protection law, the Minimum Standards Law for the Protection of Glaciers and the Periglacial Environment. The law was strongly conservationist and excluded all industrial activities on or near glaciers and in the periglacial environment. It declared glaciers a strategic reserve, defined glaciers broadly to protect even small perennial ice patches, and banned mining in glacier and periglacial areas. Some of the more salient text read:. . . Article 1. The present law establishes the minimum standards for the protection of glaciers and the periglacial environment with the objective of preserving them as strategic reserves of hydrological resources and as providers of water recharge for hydrographic basins. Article 2. Definition. To the effects of the present law, glaciers are all perennial stable or slowly flowing ice mass, with or without interstitial water, formed by the recrystallization of snow, located in different ecosystems, no matter what their size, dimension or state of conservation. The rock debris material of each glacier is considered a constituent part of the glacier, as are the internal and superficial water courses. Likewise, the periglacial environment is the area of the high mountain with frozen grounds that acts as a regulator of hydrological resources. Article 6. Prohibited Activities. The following activities are hereby prohibited on glaciers as they could affect their natural condition or the functions cited in Article 1, or as they would imply their destruction, moving, or interference with their movement, in particular: a)The liberation, dispersion or deposit of contaminating substances or elements, chemical products or residue of any nature or volume. The construction of architectural works or infrastructure with the exception of those necessary for scientific research. Mining or hydrocarbon exploration or exploitation. This restriction includes activities in periglacial areas saturated in ice. Emplacement of industries. . . . It took a while for the implications of the law to sink in.

The Human Right … to Glaciers?

Yes. The right to glaciers! The very title of this presentation creates a sense of discomfort for some legal experts, much like the discussion about the “right to water” did several years ago. This discomfort is intentional. Hopefully, by the end of this chapter, you will agree that, at the very least, we do need to have a discussion on the role glaciers play in terms of human rights realization, one that may lead us to deepen this discussion on the human rights dimension of glaciers. Glaciers are melting: we know that. And climate change, including natural ecosystemic millenary cycles of climate change, is causing glacier melt. But so is anthropogenic climate change, which is accelerating natural melt at alarming rates. Glacier melt will lead to both flooding in greatly populated areas—particularly downstream from rivers born in the Himalayas—and to the disappearance of massive water reserves in our glaciers and polar ice¬caps, which will in turn cause sea levels to rise and flood many low-lying island states. Some entire populations in the South Pacific, such as islanders on Tuvalu, are in fact already looking for a new nation. They simply have to move or be submersed by the sea. Glacier melt is also an enormous risk to the stability of massive ice bodies in high mountain altitudes. As these bodies deform (as often occurs due to melt), they can collapse and come rushing down-mountain with ice blocks as large as skyscrapers, sometimes pounding into glacier lakes formed by natural dams (formed in turn by moraines left by receding glaciers). These impacts can cause tsunami waves many meters high, taking out anything in their path. In the not-so-distant past, glacier tsunamis have taken thousands of lives in the mountainous areas of Peru, in parts of the Himalayas, and in certain parts of Europe. We read and hear about such predicaments in the media daily and are pretty much desensitized to this issue, although we know very little about the specifics or technical aspects of glacier melt.

Implementation

This chapter looks at the context and circumstances surrounding the implementation of Argentina’s glacier protection law. We also examine the gaps that exist in the implementation of the law and activities that groups like the Center for Human Rights and Environment (CEDHA)—an Argentine nonprofit environmental organization—have carried out to push for this implementation. It’s a long chapter with lots of different activity and so I’ve divided it up into sections that group sets of issues. The first section will look at the context for implementation, the legal attacks by the mining sector and the provinces against the glacier law and how, in this case, CEDHA organized to address these challenges. The second section looks at how, in the absence of information from the state, CEDHA went about carrying out unofficial glacier inventories to draw attention to the risks glaciers and periglacial areas face from industrial activity. The third section looks at analytical work to assess mining impacts to glaciers, as well as complaint actions presented in specific cases where glaciers have been or are being impacted. The passage in the Argentine Senate of the Minimum Standards Regime for the Preservation of Glaciers and Periglacial Environments (law 26.639) on September 30, 2010, was an important stepping stone to achieve a framework and a guiding path for glacier protection in Argentina, but glacier protection was far from a done deal. The glacier law would still have to be regulated and implemented, the key actors responsible for its implementation would have to carry out their responsibilities effectively, and the law would also have to confront systemic legal and political attacks from key detractors, the first two of which had publicly declared themselves strongly against the law and were ready to wage battle: namely Barrick Gold, the mining company that had the most to lose from the implementation of the glacier protection law, and the executive branch of the Province of San Juan who had bet heavily on a development model based on the promotion of mining activity much of which happened to be in glacier and periglacial environments.

Resurgence

In the days following the president’s veto of the glacier protection law on November 11, 2008, the executive power was again in political turmoil. Congress was in an uproar with the veto in part because the congressional majority held by the administration during the earlier months of the presidency was fledgling, and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was slowly losing her political capital to an increasingly empowered opposition, one eager to bring controversial issues to the forefront of the political arena to further weaken her presidency. The glacier law, and specifically the Barrick Veto, played well into this objective. Following the veto, the Natural Resource Commission of the Lower House of Congress convened a public meeting for November 18 to discuss how to respond to the veto. Only seven of the thirty-one members of the commission (mostly opposition members) showed, shy of the minimum quorum necessary to take official action. The meeting was held anyway. Several environmental organizations were invited. Marta Maffei, the original author of the glacier law, contributed to the discussion, as did Ricardo Villalba, the director of the Argentine Institute for Snow Research, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences (IANIGLA). Villalba made unusually strong public statements in defense of the glacier law, indicating that the scientific community was “shocked and saddened” by the president’s decision to veto it. Despite not having a quorum, the commission set out an action plan to bring back the law. They were aware of the official party’s intention to develop a new version, one that would appease the mining sector. Clearly, it would be a utilitarian version similar to what had been proposed in Chile. However, those present that day insisted that the same law, just as it had been passed, should be resubmitted, using the exact same text. In the meantime, the president’s office was deliberating on what to do about the fallout. Cristina Fernandez vetoed the glacier protection law because it was incompatible with Barrick Gold’s flagship project, Pascua Lama, valued by conservative estimates of the time at upward of US$20 billion.

Life Without Glaciers

Climate change is accelerating glacier melt. In the same month that this book first went to the editors, scientists reported the irreversible collapse of a massive portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet at Thwaites Glacier. Thwaites Glacier had already been news years earlier when a massive piece of ice 50 km (31 mi) wide, nearly 150 km (93 mi) long, and 3 km (1.8 mi) thick—that’s more than thirty city blocks of ice stacked on top of each other—broke off into the ocean and became Thwaites iceberg. Imagine an ice cube about seventy-five times the size of Manhattan Island floating away into the ocean. With the new reported collapse, the entire West Antarctic ice sheet has now entered into a rapid and irreversible melting phase (Figure 6.1). Thwaites Glacier, as well as others in the Amundsen Bay sector, such as the Pine Island Glacier, form part of a massive ice sheet on Antarctica that is falling to pieces. This is an ice sheet larger than France, Spain, Germany, and Italy combined, and it contains nearly 30 million cubic kilometers of ice (that’s about seven million cubic miles; Gosnell, 2005, p. 109). As these colossal ice bodies fall into the warmer ocean, they will begin to melt away, eventually raising global sea levels by about 1.2 meters (4 ft) (Figure 6.2). The breakdown has come much more quickly than expected and has now entered into an irreversible “runaway process.” What should have taken thousands of years in the natural evolution of things will now be complete in just centuries or less. The Pine Island Glacier is a long, flowing ice stream in the northeastern part of Amundsen Bay, and it is the world’s greatest contributor of ice to the oceans through melting and calving processes. It is also another of the glaciers at risk of collapsing entirely into the ocean. Thwaites Glacier’s collapse is an indicator that the whole ice sheet may be in imminent danger.

Invisible Glaciers

Up in the highest reaches of the Central Andes, along the Sierra Nevada in California, along the European Alps, in some of the most unlikely places, including countries like Turkey, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Romania, Montenegro, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Iran, and China, and in some more likely ones such as Mongolia, Russia, Nepal, Norway, Sweden, Argentina, Chile, and Canada, lie entire swaths of frozen lands containing enormous quantities of invisible water in a solid state, hidden from sight until the surrounding ecosystems call on these lands to provide summer meltwater. As much as 25% of the surface of the Earth’s land experiences these frozen conditions, and more than 9 million people live in such environments. Even more live immediately below these lands, and yet most of us have never even heard of this frozen realm. The Incas and the Aztecs are known to have used this frozen terrain to store and conserve food. I am not talking about the more obviously glaciated regions with visible white cover on high mountaintops (which also act as water towers and basin regulators), but rather of that strip of land that lies somewhere below the lowest limit of the visible glaciers and somewhere above the timber line. No ice or snow may be immediately visible in this region, but, sure enough, the Earth is storing colossal amounts of ice, protected from the warm ambient temperature, for when the environment needs it most. We can think of this invisible frozen region as a buffer or hydrological ice zone that ecosystems call on for steady water all year round. It’s what glaciologists call the periglacial environment. The term itself is somewhat deceiving. Peri suggests “perimeter” or “surrounding,” so we might guess that the periglacial environment is the area surrounding the glacier, a sort of buffer zone around the visible ice where logically some sort of cryogenic activity (freezing activity) is occurring. Although such activity may indeed be occurring around the fringes of any given glacier, this is not the area known as the periglacial environment. Periglacial environments are much more complex than their name might suggest.

The Birth of Cryoactivism

Juan Pablo Milana and the environmentalists of San Juan Province left a memorable impression in the mind of Argentina’s Environment Secretary, Romina Picolotti. But she realized that fighting a glacier protection battle against the very well entrenched mining industry could be a defining con¬frontation for her tenure as Secretary. If she lost the battle, it would mean her inevitable resignation as head of the agency. In her short time inside politics, she had already learned to pick her battles carefully because the political stakes were always at the highest level. The loss of any battle, however small, could be the end of her political favor with President Nestor Kirchner. And, in her case, because she was a public figure brought to the administration on technical expertise and not because of any political track, that would probably mean the end of her political career. Environment was not a priority issue for Argentina, although, as in many parts of the world, it was slowly gaining social recognition and consequently political force (these generally come in that order). As such, any politically unmanageable problem from the low-profile Environment Secretariat could mean unnecessary and unwanted political conflict for the executive branch. It would not be tolerated. Furthermore, both the president and his eventual successor Cristina Fernandez, for whom Picolotti would continue as Environment Secretary, were from prov¬inces heavily entrenched in industry—the extractive oil and gas industry—and their outlook on development was mostly aligned with and tied to the oil sec¬tor. They believed that large tracts of land without industry and development (of which Argentina has many) is land gone to waste. One preposterous plan to emerge in their home province of Santa Cruz, site of Argentina’s Glacier National Park, was to build a massive dam (Condor Cliff Dam, renamed the Nestor Kirchner Dam) by flooding a large glacier lake (Lago Argentino) well above its natural water line to harness hydrological power for downstream communities. This would flood and disturb numerous glaciosystems.But Nestor Kirchner had confided to Picolotti when he first brought her to his administration as Environment Secretary that his generation did not understand environmental issues.