Snow: Our History

Summary

A profound and lyrical meditation on humanity's relationship with snow—and what it would mean to live without it

Humans have never lived on an Earth without snow, but as global temperatures rise, snowfall, snowpack, and snow cover are diminishing. The frozen world is softening. Confronting this change inspired Amy Waldman to write Snow: an exploration of an element that, always ephemeral, has now become doubly so.

Snow braids environmental and cultural history with art, literature, and personal narrative to explore how humanity learned to live in snow, how we evolved alongside it, and how we are adapting to its retreat. Waldman moves from Native American spirituality to 1920s Germany to Ursula Le Guin’s fictional planet of Winter to examine snow’s changing meanings. And she traces her early longing for it as a child in Los Angeles to her present-day emotions about its encroaching absence.

Waldman investigates how snow came to be something to control rather than submit to; how modernity made snow a source of nostalgia; how snow has been appropriated as a metaphor for purity and whiteness; and how artificial snow is becoming a doppelganger for the real thing. Snow, with its inevitable melt, has always taught us to let go, but Waldman makes the case for keeping the memory of this essential element alive.

With rich detail, stunning prose, and surprising connections, Snow traverses across centuries, continents, and ideas to construct both a history and an archive—telling the story of our relationship to snow and of how this most reflective of substances has reflected us back at ourselves.