The Last Winter: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World

by Porter Fox

Overview

One man’s “curiously thrilling joyride” of travelogue, history, and climatology, across a planet on the brink of cataclysmic transformation (Donovan Hohn).

As the planet warms, winter is shrinking. In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack and in the US alone, snow cover has been reduced by 15-30%. On average, winter has shrunk by a month in most northern latitudes.

In this deeply researched, beautifully written, and adventure-filled book, journalist Porter Fox travels along the edge of the Northern Hemisphere's snow line to track the scope of this drastic change, and how it will literally change everything—from rapid sea level rise, to fresh water scarcity for two billion people, to massive greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost, and a half dozen climate tipping points that could very well spell the end of our world.

This original research is animated by four harrowing and illuminating journeys—each grounded by interviews with idiosyncratic, charismatic experts in their respective fields and Fox's own narrative of growing up on a remote island in Northern Maine.

Timely, atmospheric, and expertly investigated, The Last Winter will showcase a shocking and unexpected casualty of climate change—that may well set off its own unstoppable warming cycle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316460903
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	11/15/2022
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	596,368
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Porter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. He is the author of Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border and DEEP: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow, featured on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Review and in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. He lives, writes and edits the award-winning literary travel writing journal Nowhere in upstate New York.

​His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Outside, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Powder, TheNewYorker.com, TheParisReview.com, Salon.com, Narrative, The Literary Review, and has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing. He teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts and is a MacDowell Fellow. He won a Western Press Association award in 2014 for a two-part feature about climate change and a Lowell Thomas Award for an excerpt from Northland.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

The Fires

1 It Started in Cougar Flats 3

2 The Bird Is Sick 25

3 The Transfer of Energy 44

4 Obelisks of Time 60

5 The Final Questions 78

The Icefield

6 The Law of High Latitudes 87

7 Life and the Living Dead Inside the Glacier 105

8 The Enchanted Divide 122

9 The 10,000-Year Window 133

The Alps

10 The Great Melt Has Arrived 143

11 The Big Picture 163

12 The Ice City 177

13 The Lost and Found Memories Office 189

White Earth

14 A Bad Omen 199

15 A Brief History of Death and Survival 213

16 The Lark's Foot 230

17 Nancy Pelosi Goes to Swiss Camp 256

18 Club Aurora 275

19 This World Is Brutal-Be Happy You Are Not Dead Yet 284

Acknowledgments 293

Suggested Readings 295

Index 298

Editorial Reviews

08/09/2021

Fox (Northland), editor of the literary journal Nowhere, spotlights a warming world in this moving travelogue about snowy places and the people who inhabit them. Decrying global warming’s effect on glacier ice, snow terrain, and high-altitude snowpacks, Fox pals around with scientists who are studying how Earth’s ice, snow, and winters “affect and even control” the planet’s natural systems. In “interviews, revelations, confessions, treks, bonfires, meals, and contemplative road trips,” Fox tries to wrap his head around a world without winter, and cites grave conditions, such as the prediction that “most will be gone in the next century.” He visits Juneau, Alaska, to meet with glaciologists studying the ice ages; goes to Corvara, Italy, to follow along with mountaineers enduring ever warmer tours through the Alps; and heads to Kulusuk, Greenland, to observe how the Inuit cope with ice loss as glaciers slide into the sea “faster than snowfall could replenish them.” Perilous journeys on skis and by dog sled give this the feel of a rollicking adventure story: “Each driver steered this slightly controlled state of entropy not from the back of the sled, where the brake is, but up front, setting up exciting and often terrifying driving-without-brakes situations.” Environmentalists will find much to savor in this exciting yet distressing tale. Agent: Duvall Osteen, Aragi. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Science Books of the Fall
PubLunch Fall Buzz Book.
 

“Before the snowpack vanishes and the glaciers melt away, The Last Winter takes us on a tour of all we are poised to lose—the beauties and elations and wonders, both natural and human, to be found in frigid latitudes and altitudes. Fox is an ideal guide. He writes perceptively and knowledgeably but also lovingly about the places and people he encounters along the way. The result is a curiously thrilling joyride that makes you marvel and grieve.”
 —Donovan Hohn, author of MOBY-DUCK and THE INNER COAST

“The importance of ice was not as clear to me as it should have been. It is now. This is a rousing, literate, multi-continental tour of the cryosphere. Check it out: the end of winter, if we fail to prevent it, will be the end of the world as we know it.”—William Finnegan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning BARBARIAN DAYS

“From its gripping opening pages to its haunting conclusion, Porter Fox's The Last Winter is poised to become a landmark text in climate change literature. Yet this isn't a dry, doleful book. Instead, it's filled with often gorgeous prose and fascinating, indelible characters who seem to have gone AWOL from a Paul Theroux or Peter Mathiessen novel. Riveting, unforgettable, and important.”—Tom Bissell, author of CHASING THE SEA and APOSTLE

“In the grand tradition of writers like John McPhee, journalist Porter Fox beautifully transforms the language of the natural sciences into captivating and deeply personal narratives. As a new father, Fox revitalizes the terms of the classic Arctic adventure into an emotional allegory of our planet's perilous decline. Absolutely necessary reading, not only as a portrait of our fragile planet, but as a guide for salvation.”
 —Jennifer Percy, author of DEMON CAMP

“As winter vanishes, so do the many cultures forged by glacier, ice floe, and permafrost. Porter Fox has written an imaginative and deeply personal travelogue that reveals how climate change is not only a threat to our future, but a threat to our past.”
 —Nathaniel Rich, author of LOSING EARTH and SECOND NATURE

"Alarming and adventurous . . . If the book were nothing more than a litany of doomsday data points, it would be important reading, though hard to recommend to any save masochists. But Fox is a seriously terrific writer and an utterly madcap reporter, qualities that allow him to leaven the weighty with the whimsical, the threatening with the thrilling."—Boston Globe

“Ominous though beautifully written. . . It’s the kind of book John McPhee would write if he were abroad in wintry places, and we’re fortunate that Fox has taken his place. An essential addition to the library of climate change and one that ought to spur readers to do something about it.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred

"What’s lost in those [climate] reports and the doomsaying that often follows is the creative, persistent people behind the study abstracts: those dedicating their lives (and sometimes risking them in the process) to research in some of the world’s most remote and wild places. In The Last Winter, Fox puts names and backstories to much of the data as he travels from Washington State to Alaska to Greenland to Switzerland and beyond, connecting with the scientists who are often painstakingly collecting information that the rest of us rely on to make sense of our changing planet. . . . The book is part adventure travelogue, part profile collection and part essay, as Fox, a lifetime skier, contemplates what the world will be like without snow.”—Scientific American

“Moving travelogue about snowy places and the people who inhabit them . . . A rollicking adventure story. . . . Much to savor in this exciting yet distressing tale.”—Publishers Weekly

"A gripping account of the declining state of the cryosphere . . . Fox has written an important, much-needed book about the climate crisis that injects a personal element into an abstract-seeming problem. This is popular science at its best."—Library Journal, Starred

“As a climate scientist who has studied the north polar region for nearly 40 years, I am all too familiar with what is happening to our planet’s ice, but much of my research has focused on the physics and quantitative observables of climate change. After reading The Last Winter by Porter Fox, I have come to realize that my knowledge of the cryosphere and its importance to our planet, while perhaps deep, has also been rather narrow. . .  .  The Last Winter is a welcome addition to the growing genre of books seeking to link human faces with global climate change. When telling such tales, it can be difficult to find the right balance between science and storytelling. The Last Winter hits the mark.”—Science

“Compelling, thoroughly researched . . . . The Last Winter is a travelogue, climatology brief and warning bell: Fox and his colleagues cannot save the climate by themselves. Fox’s account is an urgent call to savor winter while it still exists—and figure out a way to ensure it doesn't disappear.”—Shelf Awareness

“Deeply researched, beautifully written, and adventure-filled book. . . . Original research is animated by four harrowing and illuminating journeys—each grounded by interviews with idiosyncratic, charismatic experts in their respective fields and Fox’s own narrative of growing up on a remote island in Northern Maine. Timely, atmospheric, and expertly investigated.”—Powder Magazine

"On the corner of Boyd and Fox streets in Portland, a mural depicts a classic winter landscape with the message, in large letters formed by chunks of ice: STAY POSITIVE. It was a useful, if serendipitous, admonition as I came to the end of Porter Fox’s book about climate change, “The Last Winter.” In the face of the terrifying statistics that he cites page after page, positivity, if not optimism, is the only way."—The Portland Press Herald/ Maine Sunday Telegram

From the Publisher

★ 10/01/2021

A gripping account of the declining state of the cryosphere by Fox (Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border). He reports from Greenland, the Alps, the Alaskan Icefields, and the wildfire zone of the Pacific Northwest's Cascades and immerses himself in the environments among the people who live and conduct research there. It might be considered a follow-up to his earlier book Deep, which examined how a warming climate would affect snowfall. Here, Fox describes in plain language the science, methodologies, and data of the glacial recession that scientists call "the Big Melt." The book's digressions from the scientific narrative fill out the picture; Fox discusses winter and alpine folklore, effects of climate change on Inuit people in Greenland, Greenlandic Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen, and his own fears for the future of his young daughter. Yet another dimension concerns Fox's struggle with the idea of climate change and its enormity. The picture that emerges is terrifying, as Fox eloquently describes the significant impacts of melting ice sheets and more frequent wildfires. The book includes archival photographs. VERDICT Fox has written an important, much-needed book about the climate crisis that injects a personal element into an abstract-seeming problem. This is popular science at its best.—Robert Eagan, Windsor P.L., Ont.

Library Journal

Narrator Jeremy Arthur strikes the right balance between dramatic storytelling and a journalistic tone in this remarkable audiobook about climate change. His deliberate pace lets the stats sink in as he straightforwardly delivers the scientific information. Author Fox has found a trove of invaluable data in his globe-trotting climate reporting, which includes stops in the Cascades, Alaska, Greenland, and Switzerland. He interviews experts and aficionados ranging from glaciologists to alpinists to help him suss out the crushing facts of rising oceans, calving glaciers, and hottest temperatures. A new dad, Fox grew up in northern Maine and often wrote about the world’s great ski slopes. Now he hopes his daughter will get to schuss the snow-blanketed mountains and witness the austere beauty of cold country. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

Narrator Jeremy Arthur strikes the right balance between dramatic storytelling and a journalistic tone in this remarkable audiobook about climate change. His deliberate pace lets the stats sink in as he straightforwardly delivers the scientific information. Author Fox has found a trove of invaluable data in his globe-trotting climate reporting, which includes stops in the Cascades, Alaska, Greenland, and Switzerland. He interviews experts and aficionados ranging from glaciologists to alpinists to help him suss out the crushing facts of rising oceans, calving glaciers, and hottest temperatures. A new dad, Fox grew up in northern Maine and often wrote about the world’s great ski slopes. Now he hopes his daughter will get to schuss the snow-blanketed mountains and witness the austere beauty of cold country. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

★ 2021-09-01
Think these last few years of climate change have been weird? You haven’t seen anything yet, Fox warns in this ominous though beautifully written book.

“Things on earth are never the same for long,” observes writer and traveler Fox, who divides his time between Brooklyn and, it seems, everywhere else in the world. Transitory, however, doesn’t always mean natural. The author worries in particular that winter is disappearing. For heat lovers, warm winters might be welcome, but winter has a regulatory function that is essential to our planet’s heating and cooling systems and to its water supply. A new aridity now dries our forests and makes them vulnerable to wildfire. “The eight most fire-ravaged years in recorded history had all seen historically low snowpacks,” writes Fox. Indeed, much of Siberia, which has lately been seeing summer temperatures above 100 degrees, burns in season; Fox notes that a recent fire covered an area as large as the country of Greece, which, of course, has been blazing away this summer. The author has traveled widely to interview ski bums, glaciologists, Indigenous hunters, and explorers, and he smoothly incorporate their takes into the narrative. He often writes with a light hand—e.g., “it struck me that if Jesus had made it to retirement age and happened to wander into Central Washington, I wouldn’t be surprised if he followed Ed’s lead, bought a snowmobile and a pair of skis, and spent sixty days a year skiing bottomless powder.” Jesus on skis is a nice conceit, but Fox’s work is deeply grounded in science, as when he notes that in the Alps, “nearly every glacier under 11,500 feet is predicted to vanish in the next twenty to thirty years.” It’s the kind of book John McPhee would write if he were abroad in wintry places, and we’re fortunate that Fox has taken his place.

An essential addition to the library of climate change and one that ought to spur readers to do something about it.

Kirkus Reviews