Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies.

Becoming Water takes the reader on a tour of Canada’s glaciers, describing the stories they tell and educating the reader about how glaciers came to be, how they work and what their future holds in our warming world. By visiting Canada’s high and low Arctic, and the mountain West, the reader will learn how varied and complex our glaciers really are, how they are measured and how they figure into the national and global story of inevitable change. The reader will learn to think like a scientist, in particular how to look at climate-related data that contains cycles, trends and shifts, and then ponder what questions to ask in the face of our dramatically changing environment. This book encourages Canadians to explore upstream from ourselves, learning about our origins and how climate change and encroaching human settlement are drastically impacting our glaciers and therefore the natural and human landscapes that lie below—and are dependent upon—them.

Mike Demuth hails from Calgary and has studied snow and ice in its various forms on land and water for the last 30 years with the National Research Council, Environment Canada and Natural Resources Canada as a glaciology/cold regions research scientist. Mike’s attention to studying changes in Canada’s mountain West and the Canadian Arctic was secured by his participation in a research expedition to Mount Logan in 1981. This book is his first public outreach endeavour regarding climate science, water and the stories that glaciers tell. He and his wife live in Braeside, Ontario, and have two daughters and a granddaughter.

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