Pluriversal tundra: Storying more than human ecologies across deep, accelerated, and troubled times

The polar tundra around Kangerlussuaq is the largest ice-free area in West Greenland, stretching 170 km between its borders of the Davis strait and the Greenland Ice sheet. Resting on continuous permafrost, hosting rivers fed by meltwater from the inland ice and glaciers, and dotted by small freshwater lakes, the tundra can be seen (and storied) as one large and dynamic water body, composed by various interconnected streams, rhythmed by geological epochs and by seasons – freeze, thaw, flow - and feeding into social and natural ecologies. This chapter attends to the tundra and its bodies of water by walking and ethnographically storying tundra climes with different perspectives: Geologists who reveal deep time of the tundra and show us ruptures in water-ice dynamics. Hunters and their families who show us the landscape as one of more than human sociality. Entrepreneurs and policy makers who dream of converting climate change into a source of profit, as they work to turn the accelerated melting of ice into exportable products. Resulting from these perspectives is a pluriversal tundra, where ways of making sense of the changing water bodies are conflicting, embedded in contrasting ways of knowing and living climes. This storying leads to methodological questions of how to practice an environmental humanities that attunes beyond the human and analyses across deep, accelerated, and troubled timescales. It also leads to questions of the ethics and politics of storying climes: whose perspectives get heard and whose voices are silenced? And in what ways are stories to be responded?