The Snows of Kilimanjaro

On Friday of the week the icecap of Mount Kilimanjaro melted, I entered a hospital for removal of part of my left breast. Although I was not nearly as well endowed as the African mountain, I suspected that our losses had similar causes. When I audited one of David Orr's environmental studies classes several years ago, I had scribbled in my notebook, "Human society is embedded in nature. When we abuse nature, we are compromising our own well-being as well."

Everyone agreed that I was an unlikely candidate for the disease. There was no family history of breast cancer, and I had eaten carefully and exercised vigorously all my life, had two pregnancies and had breast-fed my children. Cancer was an unbelievable and unwelcome surprise.

During the week which began with the announcement about Kilimanjaro's icecap and ended with my surgery, a sense began to grow within me that these were not disconnected events. Since 1912, the ice fields described by Ernest Hemingway as "wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun" have lost 82 percent of their ice, and it is predicted that these great glaciers may be gone entirely by 2020. Scientists attribute this both to climate change and to other human activities, such as the clearing of forests by farmers, and the setting of fires by honey collectors trying to smoke bees out of their hives.

Researchers are scrambling to collect core samples of Kilimanjaro's glaciers, to store in freezers until more sophisticated technology is available. It has been suggested that it might be possible to cover the mountain's ice cap with a kind of prosthesis: a bright white cover (inspired by those used in England to protect cricket fields from the elements) to serve as a membrane to seal the glaciers, prevent evaporation, and reflect solar radiation.

It has always puzzled me that the appeals I have received over the years from various cancer organizations emphasize "finding a cure." Although I am the last person who would suggest that researchers abandon that goal, I have always wondered why the wording isn't something else: "Help us find the cause of cancer," for example. I would like researchers to discover what toxins were in the food I ate or the water I drank, what poisons were in the air I breathed, what radiation bombarded me--so that a single healthy cell went haywire. Grateful as I am for the medical skill that has cured me, to neglect what scientists call the "etiology" of a disease sounds like a case of what my grandmother, who grew up in the days before automobiles and garages, called "locking the barn door after the horse is stolen."

The snow will never sculpt the top of Kilimanjaro again, nor will my missing few ounces of flesh be restored as good as new. I cannot claim that the change in my own profile will have nearly the impact that Kilimanjaro's will have. In the case of the mountain, it is predicted that visits by tourists and climbers will begin to dwindle, and that the local economy will be undermined, melted along with the snow.

But I have decided to claim Kilimanjaro as a partner in loss, and take some comfort in acknowledging my solidarity with her. We have been connected through our vulnerability. We are soul-sisters.

Writer Nancy Roth, whose surgeon has told her she is now "cured" (unlike Mount Kilimanjaro), intends to live a long and healthy life in Oberlin, Ohio. One of the goals of her work is to help people become aware of their impact on the web of nature that supports life on earth, including their own. She is working on her fourteenth book--a series of essays on ethics and the environment. Her website is www.revnancyroth.org.