Snow: An Emotional History

At the Academy, Waldman is writing a nonfiction book on the human relationship with snow, focusing on its emotional content. Using cultural history, philosophy, science, and sociology, and memoir, she will tell the story of how humans adapted to, harnessed, and were inspired by snow, only to imperil it through a warming climate. Across the Northern Hemisphere (and in the Andes) snowfall and snow cover have been declining for a half century, with the rate of diminishment accelerating over the past decade. Snow has long been a material resource for humanity, cooling the earth by reflecting light and providing water to more than a billion people. It has been a site of play as well as an imaginative material, lodging in our collective consciousness, providing a way to understand and express our interior lives. Waldman will try to understand why an inanimate substance has had this power for us, as a prelude for defining the void the loss of snow may leave behind. While acknowledging the ecological, economic and practical consequences of snow’s diminishment, Waldman will focus on the intangible ones. “What does it mean to lose something so woven into our personal histories, our stories, our language, our art—to have snow live on primarily in memory and imagination; or as an artificial doppelganger?” she asks. During her time in Germany, Waldman will speak with climate scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg, as well a sociologist at the University of Jena. She will also conduct archival research on the skiing films of German director Arnold Fanck, the significance of coldness and snow in Nordic-race theory and Nazi ideology, the Nazi-led 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and the first indoor snow palaces in Berlin and Vienna. Spring 2010 Project: “The Submission” — a novel-in-progress