Dragons of Fortune: Glaciers as Resource Sentinels and Portals

Across cultures and throughout history, glaciers have been considered to be living beings who respond to human activity, sometimes marauding mountain villages, sometimes rebuking moral infractions. Climate change is leading to rapid extinction of glaciers, with significant implications for the lifeways of local, rural, and Indigenous peoples. Placing the cryohumanities in conversation with studies of extractivism, this paper examines the ways that the global decline of mountain glaciers – terrestrial seas – sets the stage for enclosure and extraction of economically important resources including water, minerals, and land, with specific attention to the contested ontologies and epistemologies of glacier extinction in and around Bolivia’s Milluni Valley, where Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, and Indigenous Aymara cosmovision intermingle and glacial decline has exacerbated inter and intra-community tensions around resource access. Indigenous Aymara cosmology understands mountains and glaciers as ancestors and guardians, yet glacier extinction creates emergent possibilities for resource extraction and exploitation.