Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 1994, and thereafter took up a position at the University of Edinburgh and thereafter joined Royal Holloway. He has held a Visiting Erskine Fellowship at Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury (2002) and been a visiting Fellow at St Cross College, University of Oxford (2010-11) and St Johns College, University of Oxford (2017-18). In 2005 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Geography and in 2016 was awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust (2017-2020) for a project concerned with the ‘Global Arctic’.
He has published many books and articles concerned with the geopolitics and governance of the Polar Regions as well as the cultural politics of ice. These include: The Scramble for the Poles (2016), Ice: Nature and Culture and The Arctic: What Everyone Needs to Know (2019). He has served as a specialist adviser to two parliamentary select committees; the House of Lords Select Committee on the Arctic (2014-5) and the House of Commons Environment Audit Committee’s Arctic enquiry (2018). In 2019. He was appointed the UK representative of the IASC’s Social and Human Working Group. He has visited Antarctica on four separate occasions and travelled extensively in the Arctic region.
Ice: Nature and Culture pdf by Klaus Dodds
In Ice, Klaus Dodds provides a wide-ranging exploration of the cultural, natural, and geopolitical history of this most slippery of subjects. Beyond Earth, ice has been found on other planets, moons, and meteors—and scientists even think that ice-rich asteroids played a pivotal role in bringing water to our blue home. But our outlook need not be cosmic to see ice’s importance. Here today and gone tomorrow in many parts of the temperate world, ice is a perennial feature of polar and mountainous regions, where it has long shaped human culture. But as climates change, ice caps and glaciers melt, and waters rise, more than ever this frozen force touches at the core of who we are.
As Dodds reveals, ice has played a prominent role in shaping both the earth’s living communities and its geology. Throughout history, humans have had fun with it, battled over it, struggled with it, and made money from it—and every time we open our refrigerator doors, we’re reminded how ice has transformed our relationship with food. Our connection to ice has been captured in art, literature, movies, and television, as well as made manifest in sport and leisure. In our landscapes and seascapes, too, we find myriad reminders of ice’s chilly power, clues as to how our lakes, mountains, and coastlines have been indelibly shaped by the advance and retreat of ice and snow. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Ice is an informative, thought-provoking guide to a substance both cold and compelling.