An Eyewitness Account of Global Warming

The following is an e-mail message sent to me by Lesley Thomas in response to a request in my February 2006 newsletter for my constituents to share their eyewitness accounts of global warming. Lesley's message was so full of good insights about Alaska, I decided that the only way to do it justice was to publish the entire thing so that we could all be more aware of the devastation that is happening to our neighbor to the north. —Jim

I am from the Alaskan Arctic and here are some stories from my relatives about this last summer and this winter:

• At Kivalina, in an Inupiat Eskimo village north of Kotzebue, a summer berry-picking-camp thermometer reached 103 degrees Fahrenheit, and the cloudberries had cooked on the stem.
• People who had never heard of heat stroke were passing out; local health aides were trying to educate people about prevention and treatment.
• Bird biologists and longtime bird watchers and hunters reported mysterious die-offs of many kinds of shore birds who migrate to the Arctic to breed. They aren't making it back in spring, or their babies are starving in the nest because the parents are not finding small fish.
• In February, the pack-ice was all gone at Shishmaref. An Inupiat village on Bering Strait is having to evacuate due to rising water and increasing storms eroding their village into the sea. The pack-ice gone by February is an astounding thing no elder could recall.
• If there is no pack-ice for the traditional spring seal and walrus hunting, people will be in serious trouble. (You need pack-ice to hunt these animals, which are staples in the diet.)
• Also, all over Seward Peninsula, after big winter blizzards and snowfall and temperatures back to the pre-arctic warming temperatures of 30 degrees below zero, everything suddenly melted two weeks ago. Now the subsistence hunters cannot travel to find land animals either, so they can't feed their families. In a land where the stores carry mostly junk food at astronomical prices and people have little money (and serious health problems from junk food), this is devastating.
• As recent newspaper articles have shown, arctic hunting and gathering is not only for food, but is a way of life and keeps the Native Alaskan people spiritually connected to the land and each other. It is at the very deepest root of their culture. Global warming destroys that ancient way of life, which is already so threatened by evacuation, oil drilling, TV, and other modern intrusions.
• Shrinking pack-ice and increased strength of storms with rising water levels and bigger surges make oil exploration and offshore oil platforms (which are planned for all up and down the Outer Continental Shelf) a true threat to marine habitat, and to the salt marshes that support millions of migratory birds during their crucial breeding and molting season. Once oil spills on the Arctic Coast, it will stay indefinitely because tidal action is minimal toward the poles, and if there is any pack-ice, it will trap the oil. And the tundra and arctic marshes grow (and repair, or cleanse) much more slowly than in southern climates.
• Land animals are at risk: People are seeing that animals such as caribou appear sicker and thinner. They are starving because of the sudden thaws that then freeze up and create an impenetrable coat of ice over their forage. They also cut their legs on the ice and bleed to death. They also are plagued by a big increase of insects in summer; the mosquito breeding period is much longer now. In the '70s and '80s, mosquito season started in mid-July, now it is mid-June.
• People talk incessantly of arctic warming in the north; it is on everyone's minds because it is affecting them deeply each day. No one knows what will happen to their way of life or their economic base within the next few years.
• Everyone has heard by now of the drowning polar bears trying to find their pack-ice. Well, the stranded ones are found in increasing numbers walking through villages, ransacking subsistence camps. They must be shot, because they can't be where children are playing and women are fishing and gathering.
• They found a huge tropical sunfish off Kodiak, living quite well in the Aleutian waters.
• There's only one good thing have I heard about global warming in Alaska: My 70-year-old mother found a swimsuit and swam in the Bering Strait for one hour without getting chilled; she said it was like Hawaii.

Lesley Thomas is the author of Flight of the Goose, a literary eco-novel set in a modern Inupiat village; it is available in Seattle bookstores or on the Far Eastern Press Web site. She is trained in arctic ecology and has taught English at the University of Washington. 

Revision date: March 21, 2006