Not OK

By Pr. Cymene Howe and Pr. Dominic Boyer, Anthropology, Rice University

In August 2019, the world's first funeral for a glacier took place on Ok mountain, honoring Okjökull the first major Icelandic glacier to fall victim to climate change. The memorial plaque laid at the site is "A Letter to the Future" that reads:

"Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier/
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path/
This monument is to acknowledge that we know/
what is happening and what needs to be done/
Only you know if we did it"

News of the funeral went viral as over 10,000 news outlets representing nearly every country in the world brought the story to the attention of millions of people.

Yet the story of how the world's first glacier memorial came to be has never been told until now. "Not Ok" is the documentary film project that led to the creation of the Okjökull memorial.

Iceland is a country known across the world for the beauty of its 400+ glaciers. But it is now losing 11 billion tons of glacial ice each year because of global warming. By 2170 experts predict that all of Iceland’s glaciers will have disappeared.

In 2017, anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer worked with Icelandic filmmaker Ragnar Hansson to make a documentary about what losing their first glacier means to Icelanders and what it should mean to all of us. The film features interviews with leading Icelandic politicians, scientists and artists as well as the opinions of regular citizens and the farmers who have been Ok mountain’s neighbors for generations.

An added twist: the film is narrated by Ok mountain itself—as voiced by Iceland's most famous comedian and former Reykjavík mayor, Jón Gnarr—who adds both humor and perspective to the Icelanders’ views on the impact of climate change.

“Not Ok” is not the typical movie about melting glaciers that focuses on the spectacle of collapsing ice sheets. Instead, it brings the massive and abstract phenomenon of climate change down to a human scale so we can explore the complexity of our emotional response to climate change.

“Not Ok” is a little film about a small glacier in an out of the way place that still tells a story that impacts every living being on the planet. The massive international attention to the memorial proves that Okjökull's story resonated with many people, even those who have never seen a glacier. It is a hopeful sign that more of us humans are learning how to mourn the dramatic impact of climate change on the natural environment.

The stream link has now expired but you can still find information about the documentary here.