Water Rhythms

Listening to the Impacts of Climate Change on the Glaciers of British Columbia

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14288/bcs.no214.196038

Keywords:

politics, Social Credit Party, New Democratic Party, political parties

Abstract

Water Rhythms is the story of climate change as told by the ice and water. It is a story about the dualism of water, the universal connector of both the Earth and its people. It is also the acoustic story of our entanglements with a changing climate and changing landscapes of our own making. Using field recordings collected from both above and below glaciers and outlet rivers, we are sonically mapping changes in glaciers and freshwater runoff from the source to the sink, from the mountain tops to the ocean, in some of the world’s most important water towers, including Lilloet and Pemberton icefields in the BC Coast Mountains, as well as the Himalayas and the Greenland Ice Sheet. We are also capturing the sounds of the river cultures, both human and more-than-human, that have evolved around ­­­our lifeblood, freshwater. Through Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change, we invite listeners into a more embodied way of understanding how we are inextricably connected to the Earth’s freshwater.

Author Biography

Michele Koppes, University of British Columbia

Michele Koppes is a professor of geography, a Canada Research Chair in Landscapes of Climate Change, the director of the UBC Climate and Cryosphere Lab, a 2022 Wall Scholar, and a Senior TED Fellow. Her passion is forensic geomorphology: the art of reading and listening to landscapes to decipher their stories and the forces that shaped them. Her particular focus is on understanding how glaciers and ice sheets respond to climate change, and how changes in ice cover impact landscapes, waterscapes, and people. She believes deeply that in order to address the ongoing climate emergency, there is a dire need for more place-based, integrated, and embodied understanding of how the lives of the ice, the mountains, the rivers, and the people who dwell among them are intertwined. Some of her current research projects focus on landscape and hazards responses to the loss of ice, the effects of climate change on meltwater resources and on mountain cultures, and the experiences of people living with these changes and how they are adapting (or maladapting) to landscape change. She has field projects in high mountains all over the world, from the Coast Mountains of British Columbia and Alaska to the Patagonian Andes, the Himalayas, the Tien Shan, the Greenland Ice Sheet, and the Antarctica Peninsula, where she and her team combine detailed field observations with local perspectives, oral histories, acoustic mapping, and conceptual modelling of ice-ocean-landscape-human interactions.

The Birds of Haida Gwaii mural was commissioned by the Haida Gwaii Community Futures organization in 2013.

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Published

2022-09-28

Issue

No. 214: Summer 2022

Section

Soundworks