In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society (review)

Melting and retreating glaciers are a critical motif in the science and contention of global climate change. For the most part glaciers are located distantly enough from human populations that their melting poses an abstract or largely symbolic threat, but this is not the case in Peru. The Andes are enormous, and they crowd the human populations into narrow mountain valleys that open and broaden into much wider but still confined defiles, which then wind their way to and over a plain to the Pacific Coast, where the largest Peruvian cities and most political power are situated. Humans all along these watersheds are both linked and divided by the glaciers perched far above them. In modern history, more Peruvians have died or suffered horribly from glacial disasters than people in any other country on earth.

Mark Carey’s story begins about 1940, immediately before the 1941 disaster in which a glacial lake named Palcacocha burst through its confining moraine dam and swept down and through Cojup Canyon and then scoured through the beautiful, rich center city of Huaraz, the capital of Ancash Department. In the immediate aftermath, a government commission of “glacial experts” arrived to examine the glacier and its context by methods very different from those used by the resident mountain populations, who had lived there many centuries at least. The experts produced “data” of a type that Carey could mine for a dissertation. Yet Carey’s research is so thoroughly grounded in extensive reconnaissance on foot in the Andes, and also expert knowledge of glacier science, that the reader can comprehend much about the complex geography of the Andes and the string of disparate human communities between the ice and the coast, from tiny shepherds’ camps and scientists’ tents at the foot of a glacier to the mountain Indian towns to the much larger and diverse valley regional cities, all the way to the distant city of Lima from which power flows, and to which money runs. In Carey’s view, the history of climate change in general and human “management” of glaciers and their vast stored water is really a series of power struggles, in part humans “against” the glacial disasters, but mainly between different social groups. These begin in the 1940s among local, regional, and Peruvian national sectors, but international forces, from European glacier scholars to Duke Energy, soon arrive.

Carey starts from Naomi Klein’s concept of the “shock doctrine” which creates an overture for “disaster capitalism,” the processes by which both natural and unnatural disasters become opportunities for neoliberal aggrandizement and enormous profits to large global corporations. Carey sees a more nuanced process, in which both small players and giant ones can use disasters to advance their causes and secure comparative advantages. He calls this “disaster economics” in contrast. This level of theorization is all Carey wants or needs, so the reader is spared much tedious discourse about how a giant hunk of ice is in fact a “non-human actor,” etc. The book also features well-chosen historic photographs, and simple but reasonably satisfactory maps, which, along with the author’s excellent descriptions of place, help the vast majority of the book’s potential readers, who have never been near these wonderfully terrifying mountains, and probably never will be there. But the reader will come away with an insightful history, and the example of a broad approach to sociopolitical analysis of environmental problems backed by expert grounding in the fundamental sciences involved, which can be applied productively elsewhere.