Wildfires are turning Canada into the next Land of Fire and Ice. Canadian literature needs new ways of grappling with this

At the end of last year, when I was beginning to plan a research trip to Iceland, a state of emergency was declared in the town of Grindavík and its 4000 citizens were evacuated. About 3km away, the Sundhnúkur volcano had awoken, gushing lava 100m into the air. Since then, five more eruptions have occurred in the area; citizens of Grindavík have returned home, only to have been evacuated again; 1 man has fallen into a freak fissure; and 3 houses have been destroyed.

On July 22, exactly a week before I departed for Reykjavík, an evacuation order was issued for the entirety of Jasper National Park. Wildfires had blossomed. Within 3 days, 2 of them had merged together to encompass 36,000 hectares, compelling 25,000 people to evacuate, and destroying critical infrastructure in the town of Jasper. Soon after, a wildfire fighter was killed by a felled tree.

To make things worse, two days before my flight from Vancouver, a glacial outburst flood (which, in this case, was the result of a subglacial volcanic bottleneck) ripped through Iceland’s famous ring road from the black sand beaches of Vík all the way to the lava fields of Laufskálavarða.

So, the world is on fire, glaciers are melting, seas are rising, oceans are acidifying at a breakneck rate, and biodiversity is an ancient concept… What to do? Well, according to Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason, in his 2019 climate manifesto, On Time and Water, (translated into English in 2021), in addition to your typical climate action—protests, strikes, lobbying, reforms—we need to read and write, all to establish a new language of climate.

The synopsis of the English version hints at what “a new language of climate” may look like, and at what’s wrong with what we currently have. The back cover contains a scene in which Magnason-in-the-past tells a climate scientist that he doesn’t want to cover the climate crisis because it’s not his field. Quick on the draw with an admonition, the scientist replies: “If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotional, psychological, poetic or mythological context, then no one will really understand the issue, and the world will end.”

Magnason acknowledges in the text that phrases such as “glacial melt,” “record heat,” “ocean acidification,” and “increasing emissions” don’t often resonate with the public as portentous as they should. Instead, they’re something between meaningless white noise and featureless black holes. Magnason compares these buzz words with those of his youth: “nuclear winter” and “nuclear fallout” were pregnant with forboding, or as he himself writes, “there was no buzz in them, no white noise.” “Global warming” excites certain politicians about more oceanfront property in a way that “nuclear winter” never compelled Truman to gossip about atomic bobsledding.

So what, specifically, does it look like to present climate data and graphs in poetic or mythological terms? And how might Canadians learn from the way that Icelanders do it? On Time and Water is less an answer to the former question and more a quest for the language that future authors might deploy in their own responses to it. Magnason tugs on many threads—his family history, including some intimate connections with the likes of American Prometheus Oppenheimer and Tolkein; a comparative etymological study of the Icelandic Eddas and the Hindu Vedas; interviews with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama; and lots of stuff about glaciers—but strangely enough for a book coaxing the sciences and humanities to kiss and make up, he concludes by upturning his carrier bag of statistics and spilling its contents across the page, conspicuously neglecting to weave his spun yarns into a single, cohesive tapestry. The final chapter brims with chemical compounds, percentages, parts per million, gigatons, and BP’s greatest feat of sleight of hand: the carbon footprint. Granted, Magnason is surely still on his quest, but it seems to have already been a long one, with no end in sight.

Climate writing and climate language are not "done" and will probably never be "found."

Magnason has been writing since his undergraduate era and apparently hasn’t slept much since then. He’s published 7 books, multiple volumes of poetry and short stories, 6 plays (some of which adapt his previously published material for the stage), a spoken word CD, and 3 documentary films about ecological destruction. He is a stalwart environmentalist and was an unsuccessful candidate in the 2016 Icelandic presidential election. An author as prolific as he surely has more work in the kiln, so upon first reading, I blanched at the prospect that nothing else on his backburner would have worked as an ending to On Time and Water, that he had to revert to the sort of empiricism he criticises in the rest of the text as being incapable of catalysing meaningful climate change all by its lonesome, especially when the passages that I found most persuasive were anecdotal.

Magnason recounts a trek across the glacier Skeiðarárjökull, during which he witnesses the ancient black sand breaching from under the melting ice, transforming the land into something treacherous and hungry for novice hikers. Such a landscape reminds him of the “chaos” that existed before creation:

The sun knew not

where her hall stood,

the moon knew not

how mighty it was

the stars knew not

their stations.

He quotes the Poetic Edda (800-1100), one of the oldest examples of Icelandic literature, specifically its first poem, “Völupsá,” the Norse myth of the origins of the world, and its end. Ragnarök. The narrator, an oracle, or völva in the old Norse, prophesies that the greatest of the fire giants, Surtr, will raze all the lands with his enormous flaming sword, but after it all, “the earth anew / Rises all green.” It’s a comic ending.

This is a feature common to much of Magnason’s writing, and many of the texts he quotes in this book: the comic ending. He doesn’t put it in these terms, but I think the sort of language Magnason is hoping future writers will use as they present climate data in poetic terms is generic language, as in, language defined by its genre, specifically comedy. Neither I nor he (I don’t think) advocates for writers cranking out naïve optimism, but rather, explore the climate as a loose-goodey category of stories, like a genre. Some Canadians have done this: Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality (2022) is, I think, an excellent read with a comic conclusion. But more often, I see Canadian climate writing trying to transmit personal experience without any friction. Genre is, of course, discriminatory. Nothing everything can be a comedy, nor everything a tragedy. While Magnason is surely writing from a personal place, he draws on historical and national texts to do so.

He also draws on first-hand experiences with the land—not only personal, but ecological too, even historical and national in its own ways. Surely the ancient viking skalds could read the Icelandic topography as if it was their mother tongue. If Canadians, and those who live on this land but don’t consider themselves Canadian, agree with Magnason’s idea that the exploration of genre is a key to a new language of climate, than we run into a little problem. The land is disappearing.

267 named glaciers reside within Canadian borders. Few are accessible to the average hiker. Treks to the Columbia Icefield in Jasper National Park will only become fewer and farther between in the coming years. In Iceland, however, you can—as I have—rent a car, drive for less than 2 hours, hike for about 2 hours, and bear witness to the melted, saggy corpse of Ok, the first dead Icelandic glacier. It had its glacial status revoked by University of Iceland’s glaciologist Oddur Sigurðsson in 2017, when it had receded so much that it had ceased to move under its own weight. When I crested the final ridge of the Ok shield volcano, I whipped out my copy of On Time and Water and thumbed through the passages on the now-deceased Okjökull: “This formerly fifty-square-kilometre ice cap is now one square kilometre of dead ice.”

As it turns out, Magnason-in-2019 is woefully out of date now. I looked up from the page at the largest patch of ice I could find. It was perhaps a few hundred metres long, but only about 50 metres wide. The other ice tracts in my field of view could not have been more than 50 metres squared. This experience (what some refer to as place-based reading, or in general, place-based education) demonstrated to me in unquestionable terms that climate writing and climate language are not “done” and will probably never be “found.” They are processes which must not halt, lest our knowledge and ideas of climate be stuck in the past too.

It was then that I realised Magnason’s conclusion to On Time and Water might not be a reversion to non-mythological language, but a proclamation that nothing can replace the first-hand experience of the environment that inspires such myth. It’s just that this message seems designed for the initiated only, for those who have experienced such an environment. It didn’t click with me until I had laid my eyes upon Ok. This, what may appear like preaching to the choir, may actually be a nod to the Icelandic authors who inspired Magnason.

If events like the 2024 Jasper wildfire are Canada's bid for the title of Land of Fire and Ice, let me be the first person to say: We don't want it.

On Time and Water takes its name from the poem Time and Water (1948) (Tíminn og vatnið in the original Icelandic) by the Icelandic modernist poet, Stein Steinarr. His abstract painting of a poem, all shades and lines and contours with no “truth” to be understood—but rather, “impressions” to be sensed—marks a seismic shift towards modernity in the poetry of the Land of Fire and Ice. A Steinarr quote that I found in an exhibition dedicated to the poet (itself isolated at the end of a gravel road in the Westfjords) exemplifies his efforts to eradicate any interest in poetic form from his peers: “...you can’t repeat the art of the past, any more than you can repeat a funeral—however successful it may have been.”

Steinarr, born in 1908, came of age and began to write when the British and Americans launched World War 2 aerial missions from his home island. The infrastructure built and income generated by these war efforts catapulted Iceland into 20th-century modernity. Steinarr led the van of a new sort of language and mode of expression capable of grappling with the monumental social upheaval that his country was experiencing at the time; Magnason bows to Steinarr in On Time and Water by, if not demanding to lead the charge, then at least sounding a clarion call for others to join the ranks of those conceiving of new climate imagination. If Canadians are to do their part, or perhaps be global trailblazers of a new climate language, we could learn a thing or two from Icelanders.

Early this year, Magnason wrote an article for the Guardian explaining the situation in Grindavík and Iceland’s long history of volcanic eruptions. At that point, people approached the river of lava like a tourist attraction: “...there was a photoshoot for a skin product, on the other side someone was making a music video and next to them two Chinese women were posing in evening gowns.” He doesn’t only chastize in this article, though, concluding it with a tentative endorsement of the volcanic playground: “If the next eruption is in a safe place, I see no reason not to join the carnival.”

I read this article when I went to the remains of Grindavík. The highway that would have run to town instead ran into a dead-end of miles of craggy black volcanic rock. I was most struck by Magnason’s power of perception, or whatever it was, that allowed him to see past the destruction stretching as far as the eye could see to a future in which folk can celebrate such natural phenomena. If I had simply read this article from my phone or laptop without any first-hand knowledge of the physical place, I think I would have mistaken this foresight for naïve optimism. Reading about Grindavík in Grindavík was necessary to understand Magnason’s meaning.

If events like the 2024 Jasper wildfire are Canada’s bid for the title of Land of Fire and Ice, let me be the first person to say: We don’t want it. I don’t advocate for celebrating the fire. Calling it a tragedy would be an ignominious understatement, nevermind the fact that we can’t fairly compare the two disasters when the Icelandic is the result of geothermal activity, which humankind, as far as I know, had little to do with, and the Canadian (as far as I know) is a result of the climate crisis. What I do advocate for is Canadian authors learning from Icelandic literature ways to understand such devastation as both personal experience and national experience. Writers like Campbell have the former down and packed, but I have yet to see a national ecological manifesto—or, perhaps a transnational one—come out of Canada. In contrast, both Magnason’s book and article arise from deep roots in his country’s identity.

And this identity is inextricably bound up with the land’s idiosyncratic, if often catastrophic, natural phenomena, as On Time and Water suggests: “In Iceland, a glacier’s uniqueness lies in the interplay of fire and ice, with eruptions under the glacier giving rise to jökulhlaups: massive, dangerous glacial outburst floods that can achieve the volume of the Amazon in a short period of time.” In Canada, flame and frost comingle when wildfires dump soot and ash on glaciers that, because of the dark colour, absorbs more heat, thus accelerating the rate of glacial melting. A 2022 University of Saskatchewan study found that wildfire sediment catalyzed ice melt at the Athabasca glacier in Alberta to increase by up to 10 percent.

I was parked on the side of the newest section of the ring road, which had already been expediently repaired after the recent jökulhlaup originating in Mýrdalsjökull. (I was taking a snack break, but was mostly doom scrolling when I found that article.) While a glacier choking on smoke is less sexy than a great glacial flood chasing cars down the highway, surely it’s part of the “uniqueness” (to use Magnason’s language) of Canadian glaciers? 

Is there no beauty in the idea of the Black Glacier? And if there is, does it have to be at odds with Canadian efforts to ensure that future generations never have to deal one again? Magnason deftly holds these two ideas in his head at once: that glacial outburst floods are Icelandic glaciers’ claim to uniqueness; and that they are life-threatening and infrastructure-crippling. I have yet to read a Canadian author who juggles the sublimity of something like the Black Glacier (both manmade and natural) along with the potential comedy (generically speaking) of ensuring that, to future generations, they may be things of the distant past, of myth. This is a national pursuit, as in, of a national proportion, which thus begs the questions of proportion and scale in the first place.

I am to Vatnajökull what Magnason is to Ok: currently, right on the money, but give it a couple of years, and I’ll be woefully out of date.

I had planned on venturing to Vantajökull, thus following in Magnason’s footsteps, and reading some passages from On Time and Water there. When I punched the glacier into Google Maps, I certainly saw how large the ice cap was, but still, I had a single map marker to drive to, one particular place that the internet considered “Vatnajökull.” I didn’t know then that saying “I want to go to Vatnajökull” is like saying “I want to go to the Pacific Ocean.” Sure, that’s possible, but not without going to a specific beach or bay or cove. I wound up at Skaftafellsjökull, one of Vatnajökull’s many outlet glaciers.

Place-based reading further complicates the question of scale that Magnason probes at throughout the book. How can humans conceptualize and deal with problems of planetary proportions and geological time when some of us struggle to learn the topography and history of a single glacier? The answer to this question probably has to be discovered by humans as a single collective of planetary proportions and geological time: a species.

Conceptualizing a problem of such proportions, though, may very well start on the scale of the individual. It’s like Steinarr: a single man who, by the quality of his work, found himself at the forefront of a new mode of cultural expression. But there’s a difference between the work of an individual, and work that valorizes the individual. Recent cli-fi and eco-fiction often represent ecological resilience as grand demonstrations of a few comrades in the face of systemic intransigence. The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers is about a collective of guerilla environmentalists tree sitting and blowing up lumber mills. Birnam Wood (2023) by Eleanor Catton pits college dropouts against sexy billionaires and giga-mining corporations. It’s sensational, us-against-everybody, the-problem-isn’t-me-it’s-everybody-else.

“But a dying glacier is actually no more dramatic than the normal changes of the spring season.” This is Magnason, and this is true in my experience. Reading On Time and Water perched atop an uncomfortable rock at the foot of Vatnajökull, I stared off into space trying to figure out what it meant to read this particular book at that particular time and place, but it was mundane. However, if I ever returned to Iceland and took a photo of the glacier from where I then sat (if there still exists), it would look much different. Smaller, or perhaps even totally gone. I am to Vatnajökull what Magnason is to Ok: currently, right on the money, but give it a couple of years, and I’ll be woefully out of date. Deep time has caught up to us, or rather, we have caught up to deep time.

Glacial recession, like glacial progression would be without humankind’s meddling, is both right in front of us and totally imperceptible. Place-based reading is an exercise in balancing deep time and with immediacy, in trying to get geological time and human time to meet up. In a few years, as On Time and Water is now outdated concerning Ok, it will also be outdated regarding Vatnajökull, as I will be. 

Canadians should read Icelandic literature in Iceland, and do it soon, before the chance disappears forever.