The Third Pole, part one

 Part one

The Great Unfreezing: How the Arctic and the “Third Pole” Are Collapsing in Sync

For decades, climate science has warned of melting ice. But melting is a slow word. It suggests dripping, a gradual retreat, a manageable change. What recent research reveals is something more abrupt and more disturbing: the ice is not just melting—it is breaking the systems that ice supports.

From the frozen ocean at the top of the world to the glacier-covered mountains of Central Asia, two new studies paint a picture of cascading collapse. In the Arctic, dwindling sea ice is starving the ocean of nitrate, the essential fertilizer for the entire food web. In the Pamir and Tian Shan mountains—known as the “Third Pole” for their vast ice reserves—glaciers that once defied global warming have begun to retreat, threatening the water supply for 80 million people.

The two regions are separated by thousands of kilometers and very different ecologies. But they share a terrifying common logic: when ice disappears, it takes something irreplaceable with it.

The Arctic: A Garden Starved of Fertilizer

Consider the Arctic Ocean. For most of human history, it was a vast, frozen desert covered in multi-year sea ice. That ice was not just a passive lid. It was an active part of the ocean’s engine.

Each spring, the ice melted back, creating a stable layer of cold, fresh water at the surface. Below that, warmer, saltier, and crucially, nitrate-rich water from the Atlantic waited. Under normal conditions, wind and currents would mix those layers, bringing nitrate up to the sunlit zone where phytoplankton—microscopic algae, the foundation of the Arctic food chain—could use it to grow.

But something has broken that cycle.

A team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh analyzed more than two decades of sampling data from the Fram Strait, the deep-water gateway between Greenland and Svalbard where Arctic water flows out into the Atlantic. Their findings, reported by Phys.org, are stark. Starting around 2009, nitrate levels in waters leaving the Arctic began a steady, uninterrupted decline. The timing aligns almost perfectly with a drastic reduction in summer sea ice that began in the late 2000s.

Here is the mechanism: with less sea ice—and especially less thick, multi-year ice—the Arctic surface is now warming and freshening faster than before. Early ice melt and open water create a stronger, more stubborn layer of buoyant fresh water on top. That layer acts like a lid, preventing the wind from stirring up the deeper, nitrate-rich waters. The fertilizer stays locked away, out of reach of the plankton.

The consequences are immediate and terrifying. Nitrate is vital for the growth of plankton at the base of the Arctic food chain. Reduced nitrate means less plankton. Less plankton means less food for zooplankton, which means less food for Arctic cod, which means less food for seals, polar bears, and whales. The entire pyramid begins to crumble from its base.

And there is a second, global consequence. Phytoplankton are not just food. They are carbon capture devices. Through photosynthesis, they pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. When they die or are eaten, a portion of that carbon sinks to the deep ocean, locked away for centuries. This is called the biological carbon pump. As nitrate dwindles and plankton populations drop, the Arctic Ocean’s ability to store carbon weakens. That is a feedback loop. Less ice → less plankton → less carbon storage → more warming → less ice.

Before this study, scientists had documented changes in Arctic animal populations—shifts in fish ranges, declines in seabird colonies—but the causes were poorly understood. There had been few in-depth analyses of the ocean’s chemical makeup. Now we know: the very water chemistry is changing. The Arctic is not just losing ice. It is losing its fertility.

The Third Pole: The End of the Anomaly

Half a world away, in the high mountains of Central Asia, a different but equally alarming story is unfolding.

The Pamir, Hindu Kush, Karakoram, and Tian Shan mountain ranges contain the largest expanse of ice outside the polar regions. This is the “Third Pole,” a frozen reservoir that feeds the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, which in turn sustain agriculture, hydroelectric power, and drinking water for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan—some 80 million people.

For years, this region presented a puzzling exception to global warming. While glaciers retreated everywhere else, many glaciers in the Pamirs and Karakoram remained stable. Some even grew slightly. This was known as the “Pamir-Karakoram anomaly.” Scientists hypothesized that katabatic winds—cold, dense air currents that flow down the steep slopes of large glaciers—might be creating a local cooling effect, protecting the ice even as regional temperatures rose.

“They were the only glaciers in the world in good condition,” Francesca Pellicciotti, a glaciologist at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology (ISTA), told Swissinfo.

That anomaly, recent observations suggest, has now ended.

Pellicciotti and her team conducted direct field measurements on the Kyzylsu glacier in the northwestern Pamirs, Tajikistan—measuring snowfall, mass balance, and water resources. They then used simulations to reconstruct the glacier’s behavior from 1999 to 2023. The results, published in Nature Communication Earth & Environment in September, identified a decisive turning point: 2018.

From that year onward, the glacier began to lose mass. The anomaly was over.

The cause was not primarily warming air temperatures, although that played a role. The immediate trigger was a significant decrease in snowfall. Glaciers are not just ice; they are layered records of accumulation. When less snow falls in winter, the glacier’s bright, reflective surface darkens, absorbs more solar radiation, and melts faster in summer. Less snow also means less mass to compress into new ice. It is a one-two punch: the glacier starves at the top while it burns at the bottom.

Pellicciotti is cautious. She notes that limited monitoring after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 makes it difficult to be certain that 2018 marks a permanent shift rather than a natural fluctuation. “We still cannot be certain that what began in 2018 is truly a lasting trend,” she says. Her team’s next goal is to extend the historical reconstruction back to the 1970s and simulate future evolution. “Only then will we know if we are facing a point of no return,” she says.

But other evidence suggests the region is already past that point. In the Tian Shan range, glaciers are retreating at a rate four times faster than the global average. In Kyrgyzstan, total ice area has decreased by about 16% since the 1970s and could be halved by 2050, according to Ryskul Usubaliev, head of the Central Asian Institute of Applied Geosciences. Glaciers on ridges below 4,500–4,600 meters are now destined to disappear entirely.

And there is an additional accelerator. Dust from the desert and arid regions of Central Asia settles on the glacier surfaces. That dark sediment reduces the ice’s ability to reflect sunlight—known as the albedo effect—causing it to absorb more heat and melt faster. It is the same phenomenon that darkens Arctic ice with soot from wildfires. Ice, once a mirror, becomes a sponge.

Muriel Spark

 

 Muriel Spark on morally improving victim narratives in comparison to satire. Is the former somewhat fake on a psychological level? More: which one really has the greatest power to effect social change?

Her essay was written in 1970, more than fifty five years ago. What can it tell us now?

#literaryculture # MurielSpark

On Muriel Spark’s essay “The Desegregation of Art” (1970), part one 

https://youtu.be/vyf3xyfIWE4

Driving in rain

 Driving in rain.

The War on Smog

 

From the Baram Series 

The Baram Series - statement

Curator's Appreciation  ·  Videopoetry  ·  2025

The Metaphors
Have Disappeared

On Finn Harvor's Plastic Millennium and the art of witnessing an age that moves with glacial speed but explodes like a bomb

---

There is a particular burden that falls on artists who refuse to look away. Finn Harvor — videopoet, writer, visual artist, filmmaker — has spent years carrying it. Working from Seoul, returning periodically to Canada, and making work that refuses the easy comfort of either pure lyricism or pure polemic, Harvor occupies a position in contemporary art that is genuinely difficult to name. This difficulty is, one suspects, entirely intentional.

His sprawling project Plastic Millennium — a name that already performs a critique, compressing geological time into petrochemical disposability — proceeds in modules and series, building something closer to an ecosystem of concerns than a conventional body of work. At its center sits an irresolvable tension: the natural world that Harvor loves with an almost confessional directness is the same world being systematically dismantled by the civilization that produced him. How does one write a love poem to wind when wind itself is becoming data in a crisis?

The metaphors have disappeared. We're in the midst of something that is moving with glacial speed, but is like a bomb going off.

I. The Baram Series

Wind as Direct Branch, Not Symbol

The Baram series takes its title from the Korean word for wind — 바람, romanized as baram — and this etymological choice is anything but decorative. Harvor's years in Korea have given him a second linguistic imagination, one that cuts across his English-language poetics and introduces a productive estrangement. The Korean word carries, in its tonal and cultural surround, valences that the English "wind" has almost worn smooth through overuse. In Harvor's practice, this becomes a methodology: to find the thing again by naming it otherwise.

baram — 바람 — wind, also: hope, desire, longing (in extended usage)
geu-neul — 그늘 — shadow, shade
hai — 해 — sun

These elemental terms function in the work not as symbols but as what Harvor calls "direct branches" of nature — contact points rather than representations.

The theoretical resonance here is with phenomenology — specifically the strand running from Merleau-Ponty's insistence on the lived body as the site of perception to Tim Ingold's more recent anthropological arguments about lines, weather, and what he calls "the meshwork" of life. For Ingold, wind is not a backdrop to human experience but a participant in it; we do not observe weather, we inhabit it. Harvor arrives at a strikingly similar position from a poetic rather than theoretical direction. When he writes that baram and its companions "do not function so much as symbols of nature, but direct 'branches' of it," he is refusing the Romantic sublime — that mode in which nature becomes a screen for human projection — in favor of something more genuinely ecological.

This distinguishes him sharply from a certain strand of contemporary ecopoetry that, despite its environmental intentions, remains firmly within a human-centered lyric tradition. One thinks of how differently, say, Juliana Spahr's collective-subject poems or the quieter phenomenological lyrics of Forrest Gander approach similar terrain. Harvor's Korean immersion gives his nature-address a quality of linguistic foreignness that prevents the easy domestication of the natural world into a vehicle for interiority.

II. War and The Constant Roar of the State

The Exhaustive Machinery

If the Baram series represents one pole of Plastic Millennium, the war poems — gathered under the chilling collective title "The Constant Roar of the State" — represent the other. Yet Harvor's crucial move is to refuse the separation. The environmental and the martial are, in his framing, not parallel crises but a single crisis viewed through different lenses. "By the very act of 'fighting an enemy,'" he writes, "we — via the exhaustive machinery of war — create another, more amorphous, but also threatening enemy."

This convergence has theoretical backing in the work of thinkers like Andreas Malm, whose Fossil Capital traces the entanglement of industrial expansion and organized violence, and Rob Nixon, whose concept of "slow violence" — harm that accumulates gradually, without spectacle, over vast timeframes — is precisely the phenomenon Harvor gestures toward with his image of something moving "with glacial speed" while "going off like a bomb." Nixon's slow violence is violence that doesn't make the news, that evades the camera, that requires the patient attentiveness of the literary artist rather than the journalist to make visible. Harvor's project is, among other things, an extended act of such attention.

His videopoem "Meat: The Weapons Folks' Buffet," with its origins in a 2014 publication and its satirical targeting of arms-industry profiteering, situates him in a tradition of political art that refuses sentimentality without abandoning passion. One thinks of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's poetic engagements with capitalism and violence, or — closer to Harvor's multimedia mode — the tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk turned against itself: total art not in the service of nationalist spectacle but of critical disassembly. Muriel Spark, whose 1970 essay "The Desegregation of Art" argued for satire and detachment over sentiment as the proper mode of socially engaged art, would have recognized the stance. Harvor's satirical work does not weep; it illuminates.

III. The Videopoetry Form

Discrete but Linked

Harvor's insistence that each piece exists simultaneously as poem and video — "with each element of the project linked but also discrete" — is not a technical aside but a statement of aesthetic philosophy. The videopoetry form, as practiced by its most serious exponents, refuses the hierarchies that typically govern multimedia work: image does not illustrate text; text does not caption image. Each track retains its own integrity while the combination produces something irreducible to either.

This places him in dialogue with a tradition that stretches from Stan Brakhage's experiments with film as poetic thinking, through the work of Chris Marker (whose essay films treat image and text as equal partners in an argument that neither alone could make), to the more recent formal experiments of filmmakers like Ben Russell or the videopoetry community now centered around platforms such as Moving Poems. Within the specifically literary sphere, Harvor's project rhymes with the work of Anne Carson — another writer for whom form is never merely vessel, and for whom the movement between languages, registers, and modes is itself a meaning-making activity.

The fact that Harvor has been building this project "for many years," explicitly not trying to be "trendy or 'newsy,'" marks him as temperamentally opposed to the attention economy's demand for constant novelty. There is something stubbornly Benjaminian about this — the collector's patience, the archaeologist's commitment to the long view, the insistence that the fragment, properly attended to, can illuminate the whole. His note that the project began almost accidentally, through a wordplay between Baram Writer and the Korean film title Baram Fighter, suggests a working method open to contingency and linguistic accident — a method that allows meaning to arrive rather than imposing it.

IV. Love, Consciousness, Difficulty

On Several Levels at Once

What is perhaps most unexpected in Harvor's statement — and most revealing of his seriousness as an artist — is the closing turn toward love. The poems, he writes, should be read as "appreciations of the natural, as experiential-philosophical meditations, and as love poems." He acknowledges the "rather simple connection" between nature's tangible gifts and human emotional life, then immediately complicates it: "articulating this rather simple connection is hard, and that is because being conscious of the experience is hard."

This is a significant admission. In a cultural moment that rewards clarity, accessibility, and the illusion of transparency, Harvor is insisting on difficulty — not difficulty as obscurantism or credentialing, but difficulty as honest reckoning with what consciousness actually is. To be aware of the wind on your skin while simultaneously aware that the systems producing carbon emissions are altering the chemistry of the atmosphere through which that wind moves — this double awareness does not resolve into a clean poetic statement. It generates friction. And friction, in Harvor's work, is not something to be smoothed away but the very texture of the art.

That he grounds this complexity in the experience of place — Canada and Korea equally, the particular light of both — gives it a specificity that prevents it from floating into abstraction. He is a geographically doubled artist: formed in one place, practicing in another, returning, observing the development that "boxes in" nature with 21st-century precision on both sides of the Pacific. The perspective is genuinely global without being universalist, attentive to difference without being touristic.

Nature touches us directly, and gives us tangible experience. Yet at the same time, it can bring us closer to other forms of more emotional experience linked to our connections with the others who are meaningful in our lives.

Plastic Millennium is, finally, a project whose ambition matches the scale of its subject. It does not offer comfort. It does not offer the aesthetic pleasure of a crisis neatly aestheticized. What it offers instead is the more demanding gift of an intelligence — formed across cultures, languages, and art forms — that has looked steadily at a world in which the metaphors for crisis have been overtaken by the crisis itself, and has chosen, despite everything, to keep making work. In the history of art, this is what has always mattered most.

Finn Harvor  ·  Plastic Millennium  ·  Baram Series  ·  The Constant Roar of the State  ·  Videopoetry  ·  Seoul / Canada

World War One and its aftermath

 IMPOVERISHED VETERANS AFTER WORLD WAR ONE

*

To understand the grievances that would drive seventeen thousand U.S. veterans onto the Anacostia Flats in 1932, it helps first to look north. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, Canada had already been fighting for nearly three years. More than 600,000 Canadians served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force—out of a national population of just eight million—and by the armistice, nearly 61,000 had been killed, another 172,000 wounded. A Canadian private’s daily pay was $1.10, barely more than the American dollar, and just like their American counterparts, they watched civilians at home earn far more for safer work.

But the most bitter difference came after the war. Canada offered no equivalent of the U.S. Adjusted Compensation Act. Canadian veterans received a small pension if permanently disabled; otherwise, they were given land in a still‑inhospitable West or a short re‑settlement allowance. Many returned to unemployment and neglect. The government’s 1925 Returned Soldiers’ Insurance Act was too little, too late. By contrast, the U.S. government in 1924 promised a delayed bonus—not full justice, but a promise. When the Depression gutted that promise, American veterans marched on Washington. Canadian veterans had no bonus to lose; they simply vanished into work camps, city streets, and silence. Their story underscores both the relative privilege and the ultimate betrayal felt by the Bonus Army—privilege because the U.S. even debated compensation, betrayal because that debate collapsed into Hoover’s tanks in 1932.

The Business Army: historical context - the Bonus March

https://youtu.be/_tNlMv-2rEI

Military pollution

 

People talk a good talk about protecting the environment; they don’t talk so about the single largest institutional petroleum consumer on the planet: the US Department of Defense. From 1975 to 2018, Pentagon emissions exceeded 3.6 billion metric tons of CO₂. That’s not a typo. Simultaneously, other nations are also significantly increasing their military capabilities — and therefore, their emissions.

The War on Smog 2, with intro

https://youtu.be/t8q3jt2DwyQ

Cameras and Economics

 

 The Camera Gear Trap

Camera gear videos dominate YouTube for a reason: they promise clarity in a confusing field. What to buy, what to upgrade, what will make your work “better.”

But there’s a quiet assumption underneath all this: that better tools lead directly to better films, and that’s only partially true since many filmmakers (especially those working on personal documentaries or experimental forms) the obsession with gear can become a form of avoiding the difficult task of focusing on craft. 

#filmmaking #cameragear #indiefilm #creativeprocess #gearacquisitionsyndrome

서초구 밤에/ Seocho at night

 

CanLit’s woes

 Novels and story collections published by Cdn houses tend to hew to a narrow scope of themes. Does it have to be that way?

CanLit and Genre Fiction: Are We Conceptually Self-Limiting?

https://youtu.be/IM6ANhJ872M

Pollution Wars

 

 #wargasm #warecology #militarism #militarypollution

The tremendous bravery of the Ukrainian people is stirring to see. But these types of conflicts increase significantly military budgets and therefore pollution, even after the fighting has stopped. Why not reduce military budgets drastically and therefore reduce the likelihood of these sorts of conflicts between in the first place? And if there are quite a few people who agree with this point of view, why doesn’t the topic trend more frequently on social media?

*

Pollution Wars 1 (https://youtu.be/t90a8DoIW3Q) is a short, non-videopoem piece by Finn Harvor, uploaded in early 2022. It functions more as a direct, essayistic or commentary-style video rather than one of his hybrid literary/experimental “authorial movies” or videopoems.

The video explicitly links industrialism, militarism, and environmental pollution. Harvor argues that wars and heightened military budgets dramatically increase pollution—not only during active conflict but long afterward through sustained defense spending, manufacturing, and ecological damage. He highlights the bravery of the Ukrainian people amid the ongoing invasion (contextual for 2022) but questions why societies don’t prioritize drastic reductions in military budgets to lower both conflict risks and environmental harm. 

The hashtags (#wargasm #warecology #militarism #militarypollution) tie it directly to his other works.

Visually and tonally, it appears straightforward and reflective, using footage or collage to underscore the industrial-military complex’s ecological footprint, without the fragmented phonetic poetry, narration-over-music layering, or satirical edge prominent in pieces like The Wargasm 2.

Contextualization with Harvor’s Other Video Poetry/Work

This piece extends the “warecology” and militarism critique central to The Wargasm 2 - new cut (and its source poem “nHI-lizm”). Where Wargasm 2 uses ironic, nihilistic language and collage to explore war’s perverse allure, desensitization, and absurdity (the “wargasm” thrill), Pollution Wars 1 grounds it in concrete environmental consequences—treating war as an accelerator of the Anthropocene’s industrial pollution crisis.

It aligns with Harvor’s broader themes of:

• The intersection of technology, power structures, and planetary degradation.

• How globalization, neoliberalism, and militarism shape everyday and ecological realities.

It complements more politically charged works like Peacedemic or Wargasm? (which weighs peace vs. perpetual war machinery) and contrasts with his quieter, observational pieces such as Deep Into Another Night or The Baram Poems series (lyrical engagements with weather, place, and subtle environmental shifts in South Korea).

In essence, Pollution Wars 1 acts as a straightforward ecological companion to the more artistic/satirical anti-war videopoems. It reinforces Harvor’s consistent concern with how human systems of violence and production erode both culture and the biosphere, presented here in a more advocacy-oriented format to provoke discussion on military spending and trending social priorities.

The War on Smog, part two

 

The War on Smog, part two

https://youtu.be/bdQWvMQrs0A

This is a short experimental moviepoem (poetry film, ~1 minute) by Finn Harvor, part of his ongoing “The War on Smog” series. It highlights the environmental paradox of militarism: militaries are justified as protectors of nations and people, yet their operations are among the largest polluters on the planet, actively worsening the climate crisis and making the world less livable.

The piece confronts the irony of “immense defense budgets” causing a “slow, borderless catastrophe.” Key lines from the series (including this installment) include:

“The big planners / Are sure / Whatever they do / Is a form of tough minded / Solution….”

It questions whether militaries can “protect us from an unliveable planet” when their training, wars, fuel consumption, weapons production, and logistics emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases, create toxic pollution, and contribute to smog, wildfires, rising seas, and systemic environmental risk. The narration blends ironic corporate/military-speak with poetic critique, portraying “protection” as self-defeating.

Visual and Stylistic Elements

Consistent with Harvor’s ambient/authorial style (seen in his earlier works like Thievanomics and Meat: The Weapons Folks’ Buffet), it uses layered visuals paired with rhythmic music and text overlays to create a haunting, ironic tone. 

 #climateemergency, #ecopoetics, #futureofwar, and #artandactivism.