Lessons from Fire and Ice

She sees a similar complexity in weather, which for her is analogous to consciousness. She noted, in The Future of Ice, that this “mixing of mind and space,” for Greenland’s Inuit, is called sila. “The two are one ... lightning can make scratch marks on brains; hail gouges out a nesting place, melts, and waters the seed of an idea.” These clouds and the light rain may reflect Ehrlich’s current pessimism about climate change, world and local politics, but I hope lightning won’t make her point emphatically. I ask if she’s worried. “No,” she says. “I’d always go out in a thunderstorm if my dog were lost.”

But the meadow through which she and Gaby move is threatened by more than lightning. “There’s a mandate to the BLM to drill gas and oil wells as fast and as furiously as possible, through this million acres between these mountain ranges. It’s part of a big migration corridor for elk, grizzlies, wolves, coyotes, black bears and swans and sandhill cranes and every kind of duck. Our road’s closed in the winter, so you have to snow shoe or ski three miles in. The highway doesn’t go anywhere, so we don’t have through traffic. It’s very secluded.” She stops, catches her breath. “We’re working on a case to save it. When I bought this place I thought, ‘This is great, this is home.’ But I have no interest in living here, even if there’s an oil well 40 miles down the road.” She sighs. “It would be the final desecration.”

We’ve enjoyed a lively supper, and now breakfast with Ehrlich’s husband, Thomas Kearns — a retired philosophy professor from Amherst — but Kearns has left to study the drilling case at his house in Pinedale, 15 miles southeast, and we’re alone. “Our postmistress, my old friend Pat, introduced us,” Ehrlich says. “Because we subscribed to the same magazines!”

They’ve been married three years, but the simple log cabin where we sit is one that, in 2003, Ehrlich designed and built for herself. “I had sorted out my life to live the rest of it basically alone,” she explains. “Pat told me Tom was a professor, and invited me to dinner. I said, ‘No Pat, anything but that.’ I expected some drooling idiot who didn’t know his way around a piece of sagebrush. But when I walked into the room and saw this bright faced, intelligent being, I just started laughing, because I could see that this was a wonderful person.”