Norwegian Institute Releases Video Interview with Ben Orlove
By GlacierHub — September 22, 2016
GLACIERHUB
The Norwegian Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) recently released a video of an interview with Ben Orlove, the editor of GlacierHub, focusing on a lecture which he gave earlier this year in Oslo. The journalist Karoline Kvellestad Isaksen, who is affiliated with CAS, conducted the interview and produced the video. Orlove, an anthropologist, is a professor at the School of International and Public Affairs and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
The lecture, “Glaciers in Nature and in Public Life: Science and Society in the Anthropocene,” was jointly sponsored by CAS and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. It was held on April 28 in the Academy’s main building, a nineteenth-century mansion overlooking the Oslo Fjord.
In the interview, Isaksen and Orlove discussed the themes of the lecture. They opened with the broad significance of glaciers as signs of climate change around the world, and the ways in which glaciers cut across the divide between wealthy and poor nations. They recognized the direct economic impacts of glacier retreat, particularly on water resources and natural hazards, but they pointed out that the importance of glaciers extends beyond these economic concerns to issues of human identity.
Citing pilgrimages in the Andes and the Himalayas, Orlove stressed that glaciers are cherished by indigenous people. He reported on a conversation with a group of Quechua alpaca herders in Peru, who said that they had wondered whether the glaciers on a nearby peak were shrinking because the mountain–recognizing the growing lack of respect for the earth on the part of humans–was angry or because it was sad. They decided that the latter was the case. It was this point that led Isaksen to title the interview “The Mountain Is Sad.”