"A myth-busting, pioneering ride through climactic upheaval in the Russian Arctic, where extinction is not an end but a becoming. Charlotte Wrigley’s tales of life and matter, death and survival co-mingle, surprise, disrupt, and provoke. Masterful riffs about time across scales reimagine worlds beyond the hubris of scientific technofixes and other false promises of redemption."Jennifer E. Telesca, author of Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna
"Charlotte Wrigley challenges what we knowor think we knowabout permafrost, the finality of extinction, and the role humans play in the Anthropocene. An engaging and thought-provoking read."Jonathan C. Slaght, author of Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl
"Grounded in the permafrost landscapes of northern Siberia, Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood traverses issues fundamental to our time: the meanings of extinction, the experiences of earth-shaking change, the seductions of engineering both genetic and geological. Told through the many livesand possible deathof permafrost, Charlotte Wrigley’s theoretically rich narrative pushes us to imagine better worlds."Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
"Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood rewards its readers with its sensory experience and its philosophical meditations, arming them with new questions with which to challenge their own slow-churning surroundings."Science Magazine
"Wrigley’s sustained and disparate application of the notion of discontinuity to a wide array of environmental questions makes for a sophisticated, thought-provoking, and often brilliant exploration that enriches scholars’ understandings of how non-living entities can intrude into human endeavors in unexpected ways."Andy Bruno, The Russian Review
02/13/2023
Wrigley, a postdoctoral fellow in environmental history at the University of Stavanger, Norway, debuts with an esoteric exploration of the consequences of permafrost thaw. She describes scientists’ efforts to study the changes wrought by climate change in and around Yakutsk, Russia, the largest city built entirely on permafrost, and describes how unprecedented flooding has threatened research there by filling the outdoor ice tunnels that serve as natural freezers for storing fieldwork samples. Wrigley also details the work being done at Pleistocene Park, located in nearby Chersky, where a team of father and son Russian scientists are attempting to “resurrect” the region’s ecosystem as it might have existed during the Pleistocene era, work that includes importing bison and musk oxen thought to have helped compact and preserve the permafrost they trampled over. There’s some stimulating scientific tidbits, but philosophical arguments about how climate crises offer opportunities to make a more just world are thwarted by opaque academic jargon, as when she contends that attempts to restore extinct ecosystems are a mistake because they reinforce the “heteropatriarchal narrative of apocalyptic manhood,” an idea that goes underdeveloped. This will leave readers cold. Photos. (Apr.)