The Prophet
A version of this essay originally appeared in Requiem, The Dark Mountain Project’s nineteenth book on April 16, 2021
I first met a penguin on a bright Sunday while standing on the frozen sea. My silent human companion pointed towards a figure emerging from the white desert like a prophet.
By then, I’d lived in Antarctica for two calendar months and the sun coiled above the horizon for six “weeks”; I existed in one very long day. Antarctica’s nourishment seeped through my body, into my bones. Her glacial water fattened my cells. Her persistent wind fed my lungs and my blood. Her dryness altered my flesh for survival, morphing my skin into leather and my hair into a fossil record.
On that Sunday, I realized that if I walked too far in any direction I would die. In the green world, one could meander for days or even months across whole continents and find enough food, shelter, water, and warmth to thrive. In this frozen world, life for humans is dire. I might only strive an hour in one direction, maybe ten minutes in another before surrendering to the snow.
The penguin, a small Adélie, hastened towards us before we saw her. She orbited us, alternating between sliding on her belly and waddling, curious and unafraid, playing, tottering, tender, childlike. She squatted on webbed three-toed feet, the color of fallen leaves, next to the clunky blue moon boots entombing my numb feet. (How did her feet not freeze? How was her existence, or any of this, even possible?) Behind us, a volcano, Mount Erebus—namesake of the Greek god of darkness and shadows, and son of Chaos—exhaled smoke into the sky and basked in the clean light.
As the little prophet gazed at me, she spoke, squawking and flapping her wings in a language I didn’t understand, and I—unaware of how braced and vigilant I’d become—softened. She turned her stark black back towards me and departed for the volcano. Earlier, I’d struggled to see her emerge directly in front of me. I realized why: she is camouflaged. We live in intersecting worlds, whose centers are nowhere and circumferences are everywhere, but I cannot go where she can go. I live only on the surface. She descends into profound waters: her darkness obscuring her in the shadows from predators above; her iridescent lightness blending and absorbing her into the ice, the sky, and the light to predators below.
When penguins woo, they give each other pretty pebbles. Adélies also mate for life.
A mountaineer I know accompanied researchers to an Adélie penguin rookery to witness the fertility rites. Under the shadow of the volcano, the mountaineer stood on the colony’s threshold, observing the birds’ nest amongst volcanic rubble, when she noticed one penguin observing her. Knowing about the rocks, the mountaineer selected one, held it up in her hand, and set it down on the ground. The penguin approached, picked up her volcanic gift, and tucked it into the architecture of its nest. The penguin then picked up a different rock in its beak, set it down next to the mountaineer, and then sat down next to her.
In Antarctica, we call that trans-species ritual “getting penguin married.” The mountaineer is now one of two women I know who are married to Adélie penguins.
Antarctica is a graveyard full of bones. Snow particles in Antarctic storms are tiny, like ash. As the Earth’s largest desert, Antarctica receives barely any precipitation. Its wind-hurled snow is often old snow, ripped across the surface for years. The way scientists tell if snow is new or old is by particle size—the smaller snow is, the older it is. Polar storms are often so harsh that before a snowflake can hit the ground the wind typically shatters it into pieces, dismembering its arms from its body.
Here, among the bones of snowflakes, penguins live, die, explore. Some wander inland, away from their huddles, but usually not too far from their home and only source of food: the edge of the sea.
Here’s a mystery: some penguins travel inland and die. Do they intend to die? Do they simply explore too far? We don’t know. Penguin researchers speculate that the likeliest reason isn’t because the birds are sick, but because they are disoriented—why else would they leave the sea they need for survival? This interpretation burrows in the assumption that the correct “orientation” for penguins is to maximize their lives, to live as long as possible. If the “resources” are there—take them!
Most of the evidence—their feathery corpses, along with seals and humans—are subsumed in the snow, but we know penguins travel inland and die because desiccated penguin mummies dot the snow-free Dry Valleys nearby, enormous open-air sarcophagi.
We also know penguins do this because we watch them go.
Penguins sometimes visit humans at Phoenix Airfield, an airport made of carefully compressed glacial ice. They pause on the runway, play, linger, and snooze. It’s permitted unless a very expensive flight is unfolding. Sanctioned penguin herders gently shoo them off the runway for incoming airplanes.
Humans are forbidden from “interfering” in the lives or deaths of animals in Antarctica. If we affect their behavior at all, then we are “too close.” (Animals are, thankfully, allowed to approach us.) I can only helplessly witness a penguin waddle south towards the interior of the continent, towards death, even if I am married to it.
One afternoon, as I waited at Phoenix to pick up passengers, a quiet penguin—another prophet—arrived. It spoke simply by being alive. People came out of huts to take her picture, delighted by her irresistible cuteness. I felt that sweetness, too, but as I watched this young and healthy penguin walk south and inland into the ashy snow, I felt mostly grief.
In the background, around me, under my feet, Antarctica is melting and families of creatures around the globe are being snuffed out. I funneled all my sadness onto that lone Antarctic creature. I knew nothing of this penguin’s inner life nor what an “inner life” looks like for a penguin. Was she lost and disoriented? Did she know there wasn’t food in that direction? Did she feel an urge towards death?—I doubt it. All I knew is that she was walking south, towards her little light going out, and I felt the loss, again, of a cherished friend who chose self-extinction.
I, too, know something of this death urge. It has surged in me during deep depressions. It rises inexplicably, mildly, when I am tired of being me, tired of trying, or haven’t been sleeping well for a while. I want to crawl back into a womb, a cave, a crack, a crevasse, away from the sun’s face, and sleep for a very long time. I’ve learned not to be afraid of my death urge, which hides in the background, but to notice it, to be kind to it.
As I stood at Phoenix, a place named after the magical bird reborn from its own ashes, watching the penguin vanish on the horizon, I learned that what I want is not escape from pain, but transformation in its presence. I don’t want my consciousness to cease, although I know one day it won’t be as it is now; I want my consciousness to travel to new places—deeper places, truer places—that I didn’t even know existed. I don’t feel urged towards death, but rather what comes next: rebirth.
Death as a passage is a seismic trans–formation: our form travels beyond, across. There is no birth, but only ever re–birth: birth again. Even though death, transformation, and rebirth are all colors from the same prism, I can’t always embrace the whole spectrum when I descend, so I take shelter in one hue and in this hymn: I want to be reborn, I want to be reborn, I want to be reborn.
For many a befuddled early polar traveler, Fata Morgana, “Morgan the Fairy”—the legendary sorceress and sister of King Arthur—made islands appear where there were none or showed safe passages where only obstacles existed. She still tricks us, creating mirages just above the horizon; you cannot always trust your eyes here. It’s common to see a patch of the distant mountains looking jagged and off, but I’ve also been only a few miles from four large, military airplanes, parked on completely flat ice under a clear bluebird sky, and not been able to see them. The sorceress obscures by inverting distinct layers of warm and cold air, creating a lens like an eye, so when light passes through images are distorted. What seems plain and straightforward is not always so.
I take refuge in the idea of rebirth, yet the illusion of control still murmurs in my ear: maybe I could “save” the penguin if I herd it towards a path or pick it up and ferry it to the shore. Even if I could, the penguin would likely return to its southward trajectory. I cannot save the penguin from death any more than we can “save the Earth” or “stop climate change.”
What many of us—especially those who stand to profit financially or materially from the way things are—actually mean when we say that we want to “save the Earth” is not that we want to care for the planet, but rather use it and preserve our way of life indefinitely and without consequences. There is a significant difference between wanting to preserve a rainforest, a river, or a species for human benefit versus working to preserve those entities because they are worthy unto themselves and to relate to them symbiotically (sym meaning “together, with” and bio meaning “life”—life together).
Our disoriented civilization’s activities are detrimentally affecting the climate. The generative forces at work in climate change have been playing, responding, destroying, creating, rebirthing long before the so-called Anthropocene—there is no “stopping” these natural forces. The climate crisis is a crisis for humans and the multitudes of biodiverse forms that are being erased from existence. But what if, as Bayo Akomolafe suggests, the way we are responding to the crisis is part of the crisis?
It isn’t that our actions and agency and individual animals don’t matter—they do. But maybe my impulse to “rescue” the penguin is part of the problem. Maybe the framework of problems-and-solutions isn’t as helpful as we think it is. What many humans have been doing, the ways we are already responding to environmental catastrophe, isn’t working for us. I don’t mean our efforts “aren’t working to stop climate change” (which they certainly aren’t), but that the despairing game-over-we-can’t-stop-climate-change-so-why-try? mindset isn’t working as a way to live now, here, in the fog of our trouble. There are lands—alchemical spaces, compost piles, sanctuaries—to inhabit beyond the spectrum between hope and hopelessness.
A clue to these Fata Morgana, these mirages—“saving the penguin” or “saving the Earth”—is buried in the word interfere. The prefix inter implies happenings between two different entities—separation. The origins of the word interfere means, “to strike against, to exchange blows, to strike each other.” The language of interfere is the language of violence, domination, and colonization. Interference centers human agency and exaggerates our power. We could substitute interact, but it still misses this core truth: in one way or another, our substance, the very stuff that you and I are made of—our cells and the earthen elements coursing through them—are inextricably woven in a tapestry with every other being. The prefix intra, happenings within one group, describes our web much better. Intra is imbued with intimacy. We do not simply “affect” each other. We do not inter-fere nor do we inter-act. We co-emerge from the loamy soil of becoming through “intra-acting,” to use the sage concept created by philosopher Karen Barad.
Before I met the penguin, we had been in relationship with each other, intra-acting long before I’d emerged from my mother and she’d emerged from her egg. Homo sapiens and Pygoscelis adeliae have been in relationship, in intra-being, long before humans sailed to Antarctica. The human roots of our genocidal ecological crisis—capitalism, colonialism, and other -isms—arise from a taproot: relationship. The climate crisis is a crisis of relationship. The first question to ask isn’t how we should relate, but how are we already relating? How do we experience our entangled bonds to others and terra? To see differently, to live cooperatively with all beings and make, as Donna Haraway writes, “odd kin,” one does not need to undergo an exotic, excruciating sojourn to Antarctica and wed a tuxedoed bird. We can begin now, where we are, with the beings around us. Hunt—as polar mountaineers do—for the cracks on the surface, the openings in the story, the subtle signs on the snow’s crust that foretell ruptures. Avoid the crevasse, but not its invitation. Let yourself be swallowed whole.
After years of seeing penguins, I got to cradle one in my hands. Before flying to Antarctica last year, I wandered on the cliffs above Harris Bay, a small cove on the outskirts of Christchurch, New Zealand, looking for a penguin colony I heard was there. Just up the path, I saw an elderly man descending a long ladder to the rocks below. I had stumbled upon the longest studied group of penguins in New Zealand and the man who studied them. Dr. Chris Challies is a scientist who has been studying a colony of endangered white-flippered penguins, Eudyptula albosignata, since 1976, visiting them here once a week. As we ate sandwiches together by the sea, he told me that he just had a paper accepted that detailed how the breeding habits of the penguins had been affected by climate change, and then he invited me to visit the penguins with him—the babies were hatching.
Chris donned thick leather gloves, reached into human-made nesting boxes (which he said the penguins preferred), carefully removed adults, measured them, and temporarily put them in a bag to calm them while he tended to their young. As we worked our way through the neighborhood, I asked him about the mating habits of penguins. “They mate like humans mate,” he said, “generally for life, usually separated by death, sometimes by divorce,” and then he chucked, “but usually after a year or two they get back together.” Chris knows who mates with whom, how many chicks they’ve begotten, whole genealogies.
Chris pulled out a parent and held it in his lap, inviting me to touch the penguin, which I never would have done on my own; I touched its back before he put it into a bag to calm it. He reached into the box and pulled out a living chick, only a few days old, and then pulled out a second chick that was dead and tossed its corpse onto the rocks below us. Chris motioned to me and I cupped my hands, as if for communion, and he set the living baby penguin into them. It rested its head on my fingertips; it wiggled its little bum as it nestled into my palms, and then lay totally still. The penguin was warm and soft, squishy and alive. I stroked its back, covered in tiny dark blue-sheened feathers, with my thumb. I felt a heart thumping in my hands and I couldn’t tell if it was my own or the bird’s. I couldn’t forget about its sibling strewn on the rocks. Eventually, I set the living chick down and it waddled into the shelter of its nest. I turned around and watched the waves carry the dead penguin to a different home.
Antarctica is transforming. In most places, her glaciers—her rivers of ice—are shrinking. But in some places, mysteriously, glaciers are growing. Millions of years ago, what we now call Antarctica was a swampy, temperate forest. Beneath our feet—mine booted and the prophet’s webbed—beneath the ice, the land itself holds ancestors: 37-million-year-old penguins over six feet tall and the ferns, trees, dinosaurs, mystics, and monsters of supercontinent Gondwanaland.
Antarctica is a cut, a slice in time. What is now Antarctica is metamorphosing. It might become a temperate forest again. Glaciers may vanish partially or entirely—and they may return. We don’t know. We do know that glaciers become water, which in turn becomes something else: habitat, drink, blood, piss, amniotic fluid, spit, clouds, seas, semen, rain, mud, puddles, rivers, lakes, slush, sweat, snow, ice, mist, fog, cerebral fluid, cider, tears, wine, dew. On and on. Nothing is truly gone, but loss is real, loss slices you open. That is the deliciousness and excruciation of living. Mourning embroiders scar tissue. Grief is one of the faces of love.
In 2015, an Adélie colony of nearly 40,000 in East Antarctica suffered an enormous loss: every penguin chick died due to a record amount of sea ice and an unprecedented rainy episode. Next year, in the same colony, only two chicks survived due to an unusually large amount of sea ice. It had been forty years since a mass die-off like this occurred for a colony of this size. Adélies are not the only penguins that have recently suffered catastrophic breeding failures. The Halley Bay colony, the second largest group of Emperor penguins in the world (up to 50,000 penguins), lost their young due to sea ice breaking up early because of abnormally stormy weather in 2016. It happened again in 2017 and then again in 2018.
Glaciers occlude and glaciers unveil, like scrolls. In 2016, researchers at Cape Irizar stumbled upon what they thought was another penguin mass death—strewn chick carcasses, bones, guano, and pebbles—but penguins had not been known to live there for hundreds of years. Radiocarbon analysis of these Adélie mummies, eggshells, and bones revealed that the birds had been dead for hundreds if not thousands of years. Samples showed that the site had been occupied three times between c. 3000 BCE and c. 1200 CE. The only reason these penguin ruins were discovered was because of increasingly rapid snowmelt. Penguins have died en masse before the current climate crisis.
Bones reveal, unfold, prophesy. Researchers in the Chatham Islands in New Zealand recently exhumed the oldest known ancestor of penguins. Kupoupou stilwelli lived during the Paleocene era, when there was no Antarctic ice cap. Remarkably, penguins originally dwelled in temperate lands and adapted to thrive in a polar place. What is more astonishing is that the diversity of Paleocene penguin bones lends more weight to this hypothesis: not only did penguins rapidly evolve following the last mass extinction—which killed the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all plant and animal life on earth—but Kupoupou stilwelli may also have lived at the same time as the dinosaurs. In other words: penguins, our elders, may not only have survived the fifth mass extinction, but emerged because of it. The penguin is an old, beautiful world reborn, again and again.
Scientists label the flow and flux we are living in the sixth mass extinction, a death knell for human civilization and the current iteration of biodiversity. The Earth is always changing—this is what it means to be of the Earth: to live, to die, to be reborn. There were five mass extinctions before now and there will be more extinction, more labour pains. Life, as astounding and precious as a penguin, is already emerging from this death-event and is offering us a rock, an invitation, odd-kinship, fealty, terra, rubble, ruins, shelter, home.