Courage Before The Thaw
I ARRIVED IN HOMER, Alaska, just after the trees died. It was 1999. A string of warm summers had emboldened a tiny beetle that drilled into local spruce trees and killed them. The spruce bark beetle, which can pirouette on the point of a pin, leveled forests here across an area the size of Connecticut.
Old-timers who had lived in the woods for decades suddenly had extravagant mountain and ocean views. But now there was no privacy and more road noise. Some folks gave up on country life and moved to town. At the time, I couldn’t see the bigger picture. I noticed only that there was a lot of firewood around and that toppled trees left local trails impassable. I watched huge ships load spruce chips at the Homer harbor and then set off for Japan. I walked the beach, following a yellow tidal wrack of spilled chips.
The forests were only the first thing to suffer. Today, climate change is transforming Alaska from Panhandle to North Slope. No part of life is untouched.
Alaska is the nation’s frontline of climate change. The largest state in the union is warming twice as fast as the rest of the country. Spring comes earlier, winter arrives later, and some years it seems that winter does not arrive at all. Warming conditions have fueled wildfires and insect outbreaks. Sea ice is unreliable. Ocean acidification threatens to destroy the marine food chain, resources on which Alaskans depend. The state is melting, burning, and drying out.
Most Americans think that global warming will harm other people but not themselves. In Alaska, the consequences are already personal. Climate change affects how we live, how we work, how we think about the future, and what we put on the dinner table.
In Homer, we sit on a skinny band of coastline without the permafrost that cements the land in 80 percent of the state. Inland, warming temperatures are melting the permafrost, leaving the ground soupy and easily eroded. Structures built atop this once-solid foundation are toppling. Roads, pipelines, airports, and rail lines are also vulnerable, and climate change will add billions of dollars to the cost of maintaining our public facilities.
Two years ago, President Obama gazed out the window of Air Force One onto Kivalina, a tiny Native village on a wisp of land in the Arctic’s Chukchi Sea. Rising sea levels coupled with lack of sea ice and melting permafrost have left this community at the mercy of winter storms. Residents have decided to move, but funds to relocate the entire village don’t exist. Erosion threatens the survival of more than two dozen other communities here, with no clear solution.
Change has been a constant for Alaska’s Native peoples since Russian fur traders arrived nearly three centuries ago. Today, warming temperatures bring a new wave of consequences. Lack of reliable snow and ice cover can make subsistence hunting treacherous, if not impossible. The changing ocean conditions affect the availability of fish
