UNSOLACED

From the Arctic to Africa, an award-winning nature writer finds abundant evidence of a changing planet.

As a “bookend to The Solace of Open Spaces,” from 1984, Ehrlich, also a poet and novelist, offers an intimate, engaging memoir recounting her strenuous adventures—in remote Greenland, war-torn Africa, and the American West—where she has been confronted with dramatic effects of climate change. In the Arctic, sea ice has thinned drastically, putting all life—including humans—in peril. “Ice-adapted people have everything to teach us,” writes the author: “they have a survivor’s toolbox of self-discipline, patience, and precision. They understand transience, chance, and change.” Sadly, since her first visit to Greenland in 1993, Ehrlich has seen that toolbox become ineffective against a warming environment. With the disappearance of snow and ice, “the planet cannot reflect the immense solar heat it receives back into space, and thus, keep the lower latitudes temperate,” causing more global heat to be generated. In Africa, sparse rainfall has resulted in degraded and desertified soil; at the African Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe, the author learned about restorative strategies such as planned grazing and “putting airborne carbon into the ground.” In lush, evocative prose, Ehrlich details some breathtakingly perilous journeys, including trekking across a span of polar desolation, where she feared being stranded forever, and escaping from armed rebels in Zambia. Her personal life was no less dramatic: being struck by lightning, causing a brain injury that took three years to heal; deaths of family and friends; divorce; and bouts of deep loneliness. But her grieving is for the Earth. “We humans have made a world where common sense, compassion, and care for one another and the planet has become too much of a rarity,” she writes. “It’s getting smaller, isn’t it,” she remarks to a friend. “All the places we can go to find solace.”

A vigorous plea for responsible environmental stewardship and a treat for all fans of nature writing.