(Dec 13) The ice filagrees the black water, and the shoreside grasses make their last flickers of movement through the hardening ice before December grips them tight. It is icy cold this morning, and prompts thoughts of cold.

The history of humanity until the early 20th century was the history of the harnessing of heat, its tapping, its storing , its channelling. But the harnessing of cold is an important element of the history of our time. Industrial cold storage has revolutionized food production -- most food through history, except that stored in root cellars and other rudimentary storage areas, went bad, and went bad quickly. Now it is shipped all over the world, held in warehouses, sent out in trucks and trains.

Thoreau remarks in Walden on the new industrial invention of carved ice blocks being shipped around the world from his beloved pond, (an innovation of the 1830s); to be followed later by the ice box, and more recently the refrigerator. The air conditioner has transformed the movement and habitations of populations in North America and around the world. We are now sheltered from nature in the summer as well as the winter, and electrical power generation peaks in summertime, not at Christmas. Two of the global environmental threats of our time, the ozone hole and global climate warming, owe a lot to cooling. And the exploration of the depths of the realm of cold, as the new book Absolute Zero discusses, has just begun.
Meanwhile, it is getting cold sitting here exploring cold, so it is time to be up and going to work.