EDITOR’S NOTE: In this collaboration between Mountain Journal and “Grounding,” an independent production of Montana Public Radio’s arts and culture team, we’re examining how climate change is affecting our landscapes, our brains and our lives. The second season of “Grounding” is exploring the idea of dissonance — the psychological discomfort of reconciling the climate crisis with our daily lives — and is talking to experts from the Greater Yellowstone and beyond to help listeners put words to what they’re experiencing. Through its “Faces of Climate” series, Mountain Journal is giving readers a closer profile of these experts and their work in navigating climate change.
Listen to “Grounding” on Montana Public Radio for more on climate change and mental health, and find the “Faces of Climate” profiles of the experts from “Grounding” on Mountain Journal, along with other “faces” doing good work in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
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When Jonathan Marquis was young, his grandfather took him out on a walk up a hill in Pennsylvania. There wasn’t a trail, and the child was scared.
“How are we not going to get lost?” he remembers asking himself.
It’s hard to imagine Marquis worried about getting lost outdoors without a trail considering the endeavor he set out for himself in 2014.
Now 44, Marquis is the artist behind the Glacier Drawing Project — the only hand-drawn, visual record of the 59 named glaciers in Montana’s Crown of the Continent and Greater Yellowstone ecosystems. It’s been recognized locally with an installation at the Missoula Art Museum and a feature in Mountain Outlaw magazine, and nationally with a writeup in the environmental- and social-awareness magazine Orion. Marquis completed drawings of all 59 glaciers in 2024.
The land is a place where Marquis goes to work on his mental health, he says, and bringing drawing into the process allowed him to better converse with the land, as he put it. Drawing became the way he engaged with climate change.
But despite his efforts, he’s unsure what value the drawings add within the current climate crisis.
“What’s a piece of paper when a 10,000-plus-year-old glacier disappears?” Marquis asked. “Right now, all the artifacts in the world don’t seem to be stopping the machine of climate change and our endless resource extraction from these places.”
The inspiration behind the project was to use his drawings as a visual and emotional record. Marquis said he didn’t set out to prove climate change existed, something he felt was well established by the scientific community. But he believed art played a different, more personal role to how he and others could engage with a changing world.
“[Art] maintains dialogue from a different angle,” he said. “It creates an aesthetic record, it approaches things through a more poetic and artistic lens, and tells us a little bit about how to live with these places and be in dialogue with them. Climate data tells us what’s going on, but doesn’t always tell us how [to] live.”
Clambering through landscapes of car-sized boulders and 3,000-foot scree fields, and bushwacking through the needle-like spines of Devil’s Club and groves of alder, Marquis was also taking advice from legendary environmentalist Doug Peacock as he traveled from glacier to glacier. At the Montana Festival of the Book event in 2013, Marquis asked Peacock what a young artist could do to address climate change. Peacock’s response was to bear witness in your own backyard.
That sentiment ultimately sparked the Glacier Drawing Project, but similar to his thoughts on whether or not the artifact he’s creating matters, he’s skeptical of his own impact.
Marquis wonders if he’s complicit in the concept of “last chance tourism,” or the feeling of needing to see something before it’s gone — a glacier, a coral reef, a sea turtle. He thinks his project is different in the way he kept returning to the same places, and in how he spent hours focused on a single glacier. He wants people to visit these natural places responsibly — to find connection with their wild worlds — but also, harkening to Peacock’s advice, he urges people to explore their own backyards.
“These big ecological networks have always been something I’ve thought a lot about to figure out how I participate and where do I fit in, in this big web of life, and what can one person do as an artist to engage and be creative within that,” Marquis said. “I think that’s what I try to push forward, is just being curious about the land and letting art and drawing be a way to record that experience.”
Three tips from Jonathan Marquis:
How can people use their passions to make change during the climate crisis?
- The advice I received when I first began thinking about drawing glaciers was to “bear witness in your own backyard, because you know it best.” This advice came from author Doug Peacock during a panel discussion with author William Kittredge at the Montana Festival of the Book in 2013.
- After a decade reflecting on and developing my own understanding of what bearing witness in your own backyard means, I believe it’s about thinking, acting locally, and getting to know the place and communities in which I inhabit. What we know from the intimacy of our backyards involves not only the natural environment, but also the people, lives and ideas that inhabit the place and pass through as they journey.
- I conceptualize drawing not only as an art medium but as a process of “drawing in” that brings the glacier into my body. When I look at a glacier for a long time to record its image, I feel it enter my eyes, my brain and nervous system, travel down my arm, and onto paper. I think this creative, collaborative understanding and relationship between humans and the more-than-human world is necessary to feel at home. I believe art is a communal tool for creating dialogue, living in, and making sense of a changing place.
