ICE STATION QUELLETTE
“THE LAST ICE ON EARTH”
The threat we faced was not a surprise attack.
For the better part of a century, scientists had been warning a long parade of heads of state of the effect of rising carbon dioxide on our climate.
In 2051, a team of scientists and adventurers arrived on our planet, climate refugees who escaped their dying worlds. They unwittingly brought with them some mysterious cosmic hitchhikers – the Mimizuku Samurai Space Owls®, the silent defenders of the Earth.
© Kate Russell Photography
It was no secret our oceans absorb 1/3 of our carbon emissions and make at least half the oxygen.
And our polar ice-scapes are the foundation of our climate stability.
We were absolutely aware how the fields and shoots and canopies of green protect a whole world of organisms in the soil that sustains our life on earth, and conserves water, our most precious resource of all.
Humanity is wildly adaptable, especially under threat. But those Extractionists kept doubling down on their losing hand –– again and again. Entrenched in their outdated and increasingly expensive industries, and addicted to their own comforting lies, they steadfastly believed in the magical power of dollar signs to save them.
Those ‘leaders’ enjoyed big paychecks from the Extractionists, and the Extractionists enjoyed big government subsidies. But public outcry began overwhelming their blank assurances that the giga-calamities accelerating all over the globe were somehow business-as-usual.
We were our way to living in the past tense.
Happily burning the Earth alive, the Extractionists continued to slash and scorch and till their way across the land, turning little lively worlds into dust for the wind to carry away. They were replacing all the bright green and blue with various shades of trash, turning the land and seas into empty, sorry expanses of nothingness. The deleting of the world's flora and fauna pressed forward, in the name of growth, convenience, progress, trade, advancements, enticements, lucre, and moxie. Just about everyone was toiling in unison toward our mutual end.
In the words of one of the great seafaring heroes of the time, Dr. Sylvia Earle: “Why does a fish only have value when it’s dead?” The Extractionists answered that question by trying to silence the final warning sirens.
It was like someone banned the word "iceberg" as the Titanic steamed toward its doom.
Or banned the word "volcano" as the little warnings fell from the sky in Pompeii. (In defense of the Pompeiians, there was actually no word for “volcano” when Vesuvius blew up their world. They had no idea what was coming.)
But we sure did, sure as sugar.
“Goodbye New York, goodbye Washington,” was the warning a half a century before the term “existential threat” became common, as the public gradually apprehended the concept of certain doom.
everything they told us was real – power, security, prestige – was imaginary.
The figment of someone's fourth quarter projection.
Those scientists were increasingly joined by writers and artists and activists and politicians and even children who saw, very clearly, that their future was being stolen from them.
It was like trying to get an entire planet to stop smoking.
In other words, impossible. Until we stopped seeing ourselves as smokers.
When this team of scientists and adventurers arrived here, they were refugees who escaped their dead planets and hollowed-out dimensions.
They helped us see that we were all part of a divine energy that flows through every living thing, and even through the mountains and oceans and the clouds and the stars.
We couldn’t change the world. it wasn’t the world that needed changing.
It was us. We had to change the way we saw ourselves.
Through their compassion for all life –– these exiles, these foreigners, these absolute strangers –– they helped us see the Wildscapes that had been invisible to us all these years, and embrace the deep Intangibles that surround and sustain us.
And so many incredible, beautiful things we had been told were imaginary turned out to be real.
This changed our lives from a struggle to survive to an ever-expanding kaleidoscope of reverence for the richness of all life, for ourselves and for each other, and for the myriad ways all these forces converge, interact and coexist, across time and space and back again.