A Local Event in a Global Context

Last Saturday, the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference ended in an agreement to reduce global greenhouse emissions in an effort to limit global warming and its consequences. Meanwhile, here in Hudson, in the middle of December, it's almost 50 degrees outside. With Christmas just a few days away, there is no snow on the ground and no ice in the river, and no expectation of either in the foreseeable future.

In the context of concern about global warming and the consequent accelerated melting of the polar ice caps, a remarkable book makes its appearance: Ice, by Lynn Davis.

Over a period of twenty years, beginning in 1986, Lynn Davis made a series of voyages to Disko Bay in Greenland to photograph the majestic icebergs of the Jakobshavn Glacier. Since Davis's first visit, the glacier has retreated, and so have the icebergs, evidence that things we have taken for granted in nature are disappearing more rapidly than we ever imagined.




It is Davis's hope that "by witnessing and recording such transcendent phenomena that it is not too late to change what now seems like an irreversible fate."

Fifty-eight of Davis's stunning images of the Jakobshavn Glacier have been gathered for the first time in one volume, Ice. This Saturday, December 19, from 5 to 8 p.m., Davis will be at Hudson Home, 366 Warren Street, to sign copies of this stunning and monumental work. The book includes a foreword written by Davis's longtime friend, legendary performer and writer Patti Smith.
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