Environmental Epideixis: Rhetorics of Scale and Magnitude in Chasing Ice

James Coleman McGuffey Indiana University: [email protected]

Abstract

In November 2012, the award winning documentary Chasing Ice was released displaying the impact that global climate change is having on glaciers throughout the world. The film captures the exploits of James Balog and his project the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS). The EIS is a “long-term photography project that merges art and science to give a ‘visual voice’ to the planet’s changing ecosysystems. EIS imagery preserves a visual legacy, providing a unique baseline…for revealing how climate change and other human activities impacts the planet” (“Extreme Ice Survey,” 2014). Chasing Ice follows James Balog and his team through the unforgiving glacial terrain of Greenland, Iceland, Montana, and Alaska as they fight against the elements in order to install time-lapse cameras so that they might capture the retreat of glaciers. Along the way the documentary exposes the rarely seen beauty of these icescapes while also catching the extreme changes happening at the edges of the earth. Similarly, the documentary displays the wide range of emotions the team encounters as they encounter the beauty, difficulty, and pain of navigating these glacial spaces.

In this essay I will conduct a rhetorical analysis of the documentary Chasing Ice. I am interested in how some of the most remote and alien places on the planet can become a valuable resource for climate action. In particular, I will read Chasing Ice as an epideictic performance that makes present and amplifies concerns about climate crisis. Traditionally, epideictic has been considered the ceremonial form of rhetoric that relies on praise and blame in order to reinforce cultural values and strengthen community (Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca, 1969). As such, the primary value of epideictic was considered to lie in the formation and maintenance of publics (Hauser, 1999). However, following the work of Ned O’Gorman, Brooke Rollins, and Lawrence Rosenfeld I contend that epideictic rhetoric has a more primordial function (O’Gorman, 2005;

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 2 of 19

Rollins, 2005; Rosenfeld, 1980). In particular, I argue that epideictic -through rhetorical tropes dealing with scale and magnitude- functions as a mode of revealing the presence of things in the world and our different relationalities with them. Rhetorics of scale and magnitude allow things such as glaciers to show up in a multitude of forms and relationships, where the same glacier can be the frightful sublime of immense size or a dying icescape flowing into the sea. Epideictic performances geared toward the environment invite a more complex understanding of the world’s ecosystems and may encourage a more concernful relationship to the environment. Thus, I explore epideictic for its inventional possilities in animating climate crisis and promoting action.

This essay concludes with thoughts on how art might usefully contribute to our understanding –both political and scientific- of climate change. Epideictic performances that celebrate and mourn the environment may provide a valuable tool for inserting the experience of “change” in climate change into the public sphere. Moreover, this essay offers an opportunity to revisit the role of human agency in the profound transformation of the earth’s biosphere by exploring icescapes that lie far beyond civilization. In other words, Chasing Ice serves to confront the public sphere with the scope and scale of human caused climate change.

On Wednesday September 17th, 2014, The United States Congressional Committee on Science,

Space, and Technology held a meeting titled, “The Administration’s Climate Plan: Failure by Design.”

In this meeting Indiana Congressional Representative Larry Bucshon engaged in egregious forms of climate change denialism. Rep. Bucshon denied that humans have had any involvement in climate change arguing that

over the last few years, we’ve gone from global warming to climate change since the temperature hasn’t changed in many, many years. The temperature or the earth has been changing for centuries. I fully believe the temperature is changing. But of course now supporters of this new regulation are saying ‘well, it’s changing now at an unusual pace compared to the past, because now the American public is getting it that the temperature of the earth has been changing for centuries (The Administration’s Climate Plan, 2014).

Pushed by Whitehouse Science Adviser John Holdren on this assertion, Rep. Bucshon continued,

“Of all the climatologist whose careers depends on the climate changing and keep themselves publishing articles? Yes, I could read that, but I don’t believe it” (The Administrations Climate Plan,

2014). This would be the tip of the iceberg in theories as to why climate change does not exist.

Texas Representative Steve stockman argued that melting glaciers cannot lead to sea level rise because “think about it, if your ice cube melts in your glass it doesn’t overflow… its displacement…

I mean this is the thing… some of the things they are talking about that mathematically and

scientifically don’t make sense” (The Administrations Climate Plan, 2014). What this little incident

demonstrates –even if it is an exaggerated or exceptional form of it- is our alienation from our

global climate, from the impacts of humanity’s exploitational orientation to the natural world, and

our alienation from the stories that the water cycle can tell us about our impact. It is commonly

asserted that we need to find a way to better communicate the knowledge offered by the scientific

community to the American public; however, I contend that the American public needs to be

offered a new vocabulary through discourse that reorients it to the intricacies of the water cycle

and the environment writ large, such that we are capable of being attuned to the complexity,

wonder, and immensity of it all.

In this essay I argue that the documentary Chasing Ice serves as a form of epideictic rhetoric

that offers us a path to circumvent those discourse which alienate us from nature and plugs us into

the complex and dynamic ways that the environment may reveal the colossal devastation resulting

from human induced climate change. First, I will offer a brief description of the Chasing Ice

documentary. Next, I will turn to a brief discussion of how epideictic rhetoric far from a mere form

of ceremonial/ornamental form of rhetoric actually works as a way of revealing and attuning the

public to the world. Finally, I will analyze the amplificatory features of Chasing Ice as an mode of

directing its audience to an inventive form of thinking.

Chasing Ice

Chasing Ice follows James Balog and his team through the unforgiving glacial terrain of Greenland,

Iceland, Montana, and Alaska as they fight against the elements in order to install time-lapse cameras so that they might capture the retreat of glaciers. Along the way the documentary exposes the rarely seen beauty of these icescapes while also catching the extreme changes happening at the edges of the earth. Similarly, the documentary displays the wide range of emotions the team encounters as they encounter the beauty, difficulty, and pain of navigating these glacial spaces.

Epideictic, Amplification, and Invention

Traditionally, epideictic has been associated with the strengthening of a public’s civic identity by “praising” those values that a society holds dear and “blaming” societal setbacks on failures to uphold them (Aristotle, 1368A). This has led to an underdeveloped understanding of the power and potential the epideictic offers culturally. Recently, however, scholars have come to realize the productive possibilities of the genre. Given these rhetorical possibilities, Gerard Hauser explicitly locates epideictic as an important constitutive and sustaining force for the public sphere

(1999). He argues that it provides the conditions of possibility for the deliberative activity of the public sphere because it establishes the vocabulary and vernacular through which publics may engage. In her study of the 1905 commemoration of Sacagawea, Cindy Koenig Richards argues that epideictic is not only involved in the formation and maintenance of publics, but also provides an inventive space where communities are given the opportunity to engage in “imagining and actualizing alternative public norms,” such as greater agency for disenfranchised women (2009, 7).

Given these considerations of the constitutive and imaginative potential of epideictic, we can begin to flush out a more complex understanding of the genres relationship to presence and absence. As Brooke Rollins has suggested, epideictic perhaps always has had a complicated

relationship with presence (2005). Drawing upon the field of phenomenology Lawrence Rosenfield

argues that the three functions of epideictic are illumination, appreciative attention, and witnessing

(1980). For Rosenfield, epideictic is concerned with how things show up publicly. More poignantly,

he argues that the genre is a mode of rhetoric associated with alethia, letting things be revealed

and taking joy in bearing witness to the revealing (Rosenfield, 1980). Ned O’Gorman augments this

argument suggesting that rather than “witnesses to being” epideictic has audience members bear

“witness to images lexically produced” (2005). Indeed, he suggests that the primordial function of epideictic is to manage what shows up for publics via the (re)working of the public imagination by

“providing common images for people and shaping their sense of scale” (O’Gorman, 2005). For

O’Gorman the registry of tropes surrounding amplification and magnitude lexically produce images

and manage scale thereby serving as key components to a community’s sense of the present and

visible.

Historically, amplification has been closely associated with invention. For instance, we see in

Longinus that while “sublimity gives elevation to a subject… amplification gives extension as well”

(1890, 26). He continues noting, “the sublime is often conveyed in a single thought, but amplification can only subsist with a certain prolixity and diffusiveness” (Longinus, 1890, 26). The

subject of epideictic rhetoric is refashioned through the deployment of figures of amplification.

However, we should not assume this to be mere ornamentation. Emerging from amplificatory

moments are new images of the subject, new lines of inquiry, and alternative presences. Peter

Mack in his discussion of Erasmus’ conception of copiousness argues, “copia of things encourages

a writer to think around a subject, to look in different directions for material which may enable it to

be more effectively for a particular audience” (2009, 272) Consequently, amplification as an

inventional enterprise encourages us to step out of the present tenses “what is being shown” in

order to reflect on “what has been shown” and “what could be shown.” Epideictic performances

then may allow audiences to go visit landscapes copiously, which is to visit them in a state of flux

and transition such that they may register new features and reach new attunements.

Amplifying Glacial Melt

In functioning as an exemplar of epideictic rhetoric Chasing Ice deploys numerous figures of

scale to demonstrate the severe losses that are the radically transforming glacierscapes across the

globe. Through the deployment of tropes of amplification Chasing Ice serves not only as a

documentary, but also a form of ceremonial discourse that reveals –or makes present- the haunting

alterations that are occurring beyond the fringes of civilization. Farrell has argued that “the very,

very large and the infinitesimally tiny have one thing in common. They are extremely difficult for

the human imagination to grasp” (2008, 477). Chasing Ice is an exercise in rhetorical invention, an

attempt to remedy the rift between society’s lacking sense or attunement to the immensity of

global climate change and its impact on glacial environments.

Perhaps the most captivating demonstrations of amplification utilized by the documentary

are the particular figures of scale revealing the scope of change. In order to punctuate the

transformations the documentary uses the area of Manhattan and the Empire State building as

measuring sticks of calving events –the process whereby large chunks of ice break of from their

glacier and flow into the ocean. At several points during the documentary Balog and his crew use

Manhattan as a guide for marking change. In one particularly dramatic moment two members of

the crew catch the largest ever witnessed calving event on camera. Balog notes as he presents the

footage to a captive Ted Talk audience in the documentary that “it is as if the entire tip of lower

Manhattan broke off.” During this part of the talk he amplifies this visually overlaying a to scale

map of Manhattan on a photograph of the glacier. He continues, “Except that the thickness, the

height it, is equivalent to buildings that are 2 and a half or 3 times higher than they are.” Balog

then places the time lapse of the calving event accelerating the 75 minutes it took for this lower

Manhattan size piece of the glacier to fall into the ocean, and then adds, “that is a magical

miraculous horrible scary thing… I don’t know if anyone has really seen the miracle and horror of

that.” Balog’s use of scale along with his paradoxical description of the calving event as both

“miracle and horror” exhibits the sublime nature of the colossal changes brought on by climate

change.

Documenting the melting at another glacial site, Balog amplifies the intensity of transformations by

including speed of change with the size. He emphasizes that humans have accelerated geographic

shifts arguing that

you know we really are in the midst of geologic scale change. You know our brains are programmed to think that geology is something that happened a long time ago or will happen a long time into the future. And we don’t think that that can happen in these little years that we each live on this planet. But the reality is that it does. That things can happen very, very quickly. We are living through one of those moments of apoco-geologic change. Right now. And we humans are causing it.

In those final words the documentary focuses on Balog standing at the edge of a cliff as a tiny

speck in the middle of a massive snowy landscape. Aristotle argued that the genre of epideictic

was concerned with matters of the present, though he offered that it may “also make use of other

things, both reminding [the audience] of the past and projecting the course of the future” (2007,

48-9). Here Balog suggests that our capacity to note geologic scale changes remains tied to

distant pasts and futures, and he reorients us to the present and the events occurring in our

lifetimes. He amplifies these changes by labelling the change as apoco-geologic change. The film

then offers another example emphasizing the size and speed of change of our apoco-geologic age

directing the audience to a glacier that has retreated 11 miles since 1984, a number that stands out

by itself. Yet, Balog returns to using urban features to amplify that scale of change in these

isolated glacierscapes by pointing to how the glacier has thinned. A picture of the glacier at its

current state is put on screen as well as a line denoting its 1984 level. A to scale depiction of the

Empire State building is then placed in the gap between the glacier level and the 1984 line. This

move not only brings the scale of change into a context of human magnitude, but it juxtaposes in

scale one of humanity’s most technological feats of magnitude with the damaging consequences of

our technologies.

Amplification, Metaphor, and Variety

Beyond amplifying the looming crisis of climate change by demonstrating the tangible changes of the glacierscapes Chasing Ice brings new life to ice short-circuiting our alienation from nature endemic to society’s investment in technological instrumentalism. Chasing Ice also amplifies that dynamism of glacial landscapes by copiously deploying a variety of metaphorical descriptions

of them. By varying the metaphors used to understand these landscapes, the documentary reveals

or makes present the diverse features of the glaciers. Speaking of the copious use of language,

Erasmus argued that deploying variety in the use of rhetoric is useful as the “eye is held more by a

varying scene, in the same way the mind always eagerly examines whatever it sees as new. And if

all things continually present themselves to the mind without variation it will at once turn away in

disgust” (1963, 16). In other words variety begets attunement/attention and bemoans alienation.

One metaphorical manifestation of these glacierscapes offered in Chasing Ice is that they

are living entities. The primary mode of pushing this metaphor throughout the documentary is

that these glaciers are dying. Describing the retreat and calving of a glacier Balog describes

witnessing the process as “a real sense of the glacier just coming to an end like this old decrepit

man just falling into the earth and dying. It was very evocative very emotional.” In this moment of

personification Balog is amplifying the fragility of these massive structures of ice, noting their age

and once vigorous status has come to an end. The life and death of these glaciers becomes entwined with more emotion as he describes the decline of another glacier, “when I saw that glacier dying it was like wow… you know… we uh… Well if a glacier that has been here for 30,000 years or 100,000 years is literally dying in front of my eyes. You are very aware aware of the fact

that.” Here he gestures with his arm swooping from high to low and pauses a moment collecting

himself. He then turns to the camera, “you know sometimes you umm.” There is a clear break in

his voice, “sometimes you go out over the horizon and you don’t come back.” Balog’s narration

implies that these are not merely earthly objects, but special environments that are dying and

cannot return.

The power of this moment is amplified by Chasing Ice’s insinuation that glaciers aren’t

merely objects but have become a critical element in society. In keeping with the narrative of

glaciers as living entities, the documentary points to the fact that within the ice lays the memory of

earth’s history. Balog shares that embedded in the ice is the history of the planets makeup, telling

us “I learned about the record that is in the ice cores. The history of ancient climate that was

embedded in those cores… and the story that the glaciers were telling.” Here the ice emerges as

something more than mere memory; it becomes a story teller—a theme that he attends to more

than once. He contends that the story of climate change is “in the ice… somehow.” Chasing Ice

attempts to tell that story through the use of nature photography, where “there is a powerful piece

of history unfolding in [the] pictures” and knowing this Balog has “to go back to those spots” and

see the dynamic in the static. Within these glacierscapes is a rhetorical energy, a desire to look, to

see, and to translate. The reward of seeing is to connect with an alienated world, echoed by Balog

when he states that “there is a strange bizarre fascination in seeing these things you don’t normally

get to see come alive.” However, in seeing this life, there remains the burden of being attuned to

its death. Speaking of his discoveries via time lapse technology he addresses the question of

“don’t they normally advance in the winter?” His reply again references the life-like nature of

glaciers stating, “no it was retreating through the winter because it is an unhealthy glacier.” For

Balog, the glaciers are bodies, which are susceptible to pathogens and other microscopic chemicals.

Extending the metaphor, Balog compares the impacts of the smallest of chemicals to human bodies

to that of glacial bodies noting that in the case of steroids the minutest alterations can lead to

massive changes. He then applies a dental anecdote to the immense changes in these glaciers

stating, “if you had an abscess in your tooth would you keep going around doctor to doctor.” The

glacial bodies inhabiting the world are exhibiting severe symptoms, yet we as a society continue to

refuse acknowledgment of the real pains the earth is experiencing. Chasing Ice amplifies our

failure to see the dying body of glacierscapes by connecting it to the ways that humans have

divided up the planet in a singular statement, “the vast amount of glaciers in the world are

retreating. Glacier National Park will need a new name. We’ll be calling it Glacier-Less National

Park by the middle of the century because all of the glaciers will be gone.” Here Balog introduces

us to the ways that our alienation from the environment will betray the ways we have betrayed

even those spaces we have chosen to protect as national parks. The complexity of the

environment and these glacierscapes is far more intertwined than we could have imagined.

Amplifying these changes requires that society scurry to address and engage its dynamism.

Beyond the life of these glacierscapes Chasing Ice also points to the unmatched beauty

offered by these natural ice formations. Opening the documentary, Balog speaks to the “terrifying

beauty,” the “sculptural” presence, and the “architectural” prominence of these landscapes. He

equates the beauty of these landscapes to the uniqueness that can be found in portraits of human

faces, exclaiming, “It is sort of like doing a portrait… of people… you know Richard Avedon and

Irving Penn spent their entire careers doing portraits of faces essentially and found endless

variation and endless beauty and endless magic in those faces, and for me that is the same thing

that is going on here.” Chasing Ice is attributing a beauty and uniqueness to Ice amplifying the

sense of awe that can come from looking at the endless ways that ice can manifest itself across the

globe. Referring back to Erasmus, “variety everywhere has such force that nothing at all is so

polished as not to seem rough when lacking its excellence. Nature herself especially rejoices in

variety; in such a great throng of things she has left nothing anywhere not painted with some

wonderful artifice of variety” (1963, 16). Chasing Ice demonstrates that “the eye is held more by a

varying scene” (Erasmus, 1963, 16). The documentary through rhetorics of scale and variation

amplification reveals and attunes its audience to the dynamic and complex interactions that exist

between humanity and nature, those interactions which have moulded and led to the evolutions

that define our current state of affairs. In a final gesture of capturing the beauty of ice, Chasing

Ice’s final scene finds Balog seeking out the beautiful fleeting moments of the dying glaciers.

Wading barefoot in the freezing waters at the edge of these glacierscapes Balog is capturing what

he refers to as “ice diamonds,” those tiny fractured remnants of glacial ice that are refracting the

full spectrum of light from the son. In lamenting the dying breath of glaciers that can be seen in

these dying “ice diamonds” Balog laments, “when my daughters Simone and Emily look at me 25

years from now and ask ‘what were you doing… When… When global warming was happening and

you guys knew what was coming down the road’ I want to be able to say, ‘guys I was doing

everything I knew how to do.’”

Conclusion and Closing Credits.

Farrell has defined rhetoric as, “the art, the fine and useful art, of making things matter”

(2008, 470). As an epideictic discourse, Chasing Ice attempts to fit that bill. Drawing on tropes of

amplification through figures of scale and variety Balog’s project illuminates the dynamic role that ice place in society and the immense human activities have played in changing/destroying those landscapes that more prominently feature ice. Ultimately, Chasing Ice enables us to better engage climate change as a crisis – or to be more apt- a moment of krisis. As Stephen Schwarze reminds us that if, “we engage crisis [or krisis] as citizens, or engage in criticism as scholars, we must do so to enable the process and enhance the quality of public judgment” (2007, 96). Speaking copiously

of glaciers Chasing Ice directs us to approach the world dynamically rather than statically. The

rhetoric produced by Balog and his crew direct audiences to a renewed and invigorating sense of

attuning ourselves to the world and its environmental matters. As we face the looming crisis of

climate change we must recognize that a key obstacle in moving forward is in the texture of our

vocabulary for addressing matters of such scale. Drawing upon our abilities to scale down and

scale up we might just be able to move forward from the horrors of our current inadequacies to

comprehend the detrimental side of human progress.

Closing Credits

Cold Feet, don't fail me now

so much left to do

if i should run ten thousand miles home

would you be there?

just a taste of things to come

i still still smile

but i don't wanna die alone

i don't wanna die alone

way before my time

keep calm and carry on

no worse for the wear

I don't wanna die alone

way before my time

is it any wonder

all this empty air

I'm drowning in the laughter

way before my time has come

References

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