High Tide: How Climate Crisis is Engulfing Our Planet

The two landmasses are so near that their peoples are closely related too. Almost all Shishmaref’s residents are Inupiat Eskimos, who share a close language and ancestry with their Siberian Eskimo relatives. (Unlike in Canada and Greenland, the name ‘Inuit’ never caught on in Alaska, and the terms ‘Eskimo’ and ‘Indian’ are still universally used to describe the two culturally distinct Native Alaskan first peoples, both by themselves and by Alaskans of non-Native descent.)

Indeed Alaskan Eskimo hunters, cut off from home by open-water leads appearing behind them in the sea ice, would sometimes accidentally spend entire summers in Siberia. A lost hunter’s family would never give up hope until the following winter, when men who had survived would return back over the newly frozen ice.

You still have to be careful out on the ice, Robert Iyatunguk, Shishmaref’s ‘erosion co-ordinator’, told me as he showed me round the village. Anyone who falls through into the water has only minutes to strip completely and change into dry clothes before they freeze to death. And sometimes the ice does strange things: ‘I was once out there on an ice floe with some friends and got this weird feeling of danger,’ he recalled. ‘We all cleared off and immediately the whole floe started to turn over.’ There is safety in numbers – no one goes out alone, and a group of hunters will always share the harvest equally.

Until comparatively recently Shishmaref’s entire food and clothing supply came from the surrounding environment: polar bears, seals, fish, walrus and caribou. Though dog sleds and bone arrows have now been exchanged for snowmachines and guns, and Eskimo kayaks replaced by wooden or fibreglass boats, ‘subsistence’ living remains a crucial part of people’s culture and livelihood. Bits of hunted animal – a frozen caribou leg or part of a seal – were propped up around almost every doorstep, and polar bear skins and dried fish hung on racks behind the houses. Not far from our temporary lodgings at the Lutheran pastor’s residence, a severed musk ox head stared at the grey sky through clouded, lifeless eyes.

A few decades ago people lived in ‘sod houses’, turfroofed dwellings dug out of the ground, dark and dingy but very well insulated from the winter cold. A few lumps further up the shore are all that remains of them – today everyone lives in wooden or prefabricated modern homes, scattered in rows all around the island.

Nine houses had to be moved during the last big storm, Robert Iyatunguk told me. As ninety-miles-per-hour winds whipped around them, and whole sections of thawed cliff tumbled into the raging sea, the whole community had mobilised to save the dwellings which were closest to the edge. It was dangerous work: not only could a house collapse on the people working under it to jack it up, but the ground itself could give way suddenly beneath them.

‘We lost fifty feet of ground in one night with that storm. We’re in panic mode now because of how much ground we’re losing.’

We crunched down a shallow slope where sandbags were protruding through the snow: the remnants of Shishmaref’s last battle with the sea. All the sea walls had failed, he went on. The water just undercut or washed over them. It seemed like nothing could prevent this loose, gravelly ground from eroding away.

Now the talk was of relocation – something that would have to be agreed by all 600 residents through a community ballot. (It was – over a year after I’d left – in July 2002.) It would cost $50 million, and there was no sign of the state authorities coming up with the cash. But the worst case scenario was no longer that of having to move the village, he said, but that of another big storm whilst they were still living in the danger zone.

Time is running out, Robert emphasised. ‘The wind is getting stronger, the water is getting higher, and it’s noticeable to everybody in town. It just kind of scares you inside your body and makes you wonder exactly when the big one is going to hit.’ And this ‘big storm’ throws a perpetual shadow over the community the longer it stays put: people cast anxious glances over at the horizon, and when a strong wind gets up, those closest to the shore often decamp to sleep at relatives’ houses.

There was an emergency evacuation plan of sorts – something partly within Robert’s responsibility that has given him many sleepless nights. In a few hours a C-130 aircraft could arrive, and evacuate all of Shishmaref’s residents within four return journeys. But could it operate during a storm? And what if the runway began to collapse? ‘If our airport runway gets flooded out and eaten away, there goes our evacuation by plane,’ Robert admitted. ‘Then we’d have to go to the next highest point in town, which would either be the church or the school.’

We stood together under the crumbling cliffs. Robert scuffed the base of it with his boot, and icy sand showered down. Up above us an abandoned house hung precariously over the edge, at least a third of its foundation protruding into thin air. The house next door had toppled over and been reduced to matchwood by the waves.

‘There’s one major storm that we never had,’ Robert Iyatunguk concluded quietly. ‘I’d hate to be here when it hits, but my kids are here, and I’m going to stay here with my kids and my wife’s family and their brothers and sisters for as long as it takes.’

I spent that evening with Clifford Weyiouanna, a fifty-eight-year-old Shishmaref elder, who sat polishing his gun as we spoke. Several snowmachines were parked outside his house, one with a sled on which were stacked three large blocks of ice – clear as glass, and cut from a coastal river to serve as drinking water. Children were playing on the snowdrifts – some piled as high as the houses themselves – and Clifford’s grandchildren ran in and out of the house, banging the door behind them.

‘It’s no good getting old without kids around,’ Clifford chuckled indulgently as one of them whizzed past. He brought out an ‘Eskimo shotgun’ (a bone harpoon which had been used to hunt ducks) and his most prized possession, an intricately-beaded woven belt, so ancient that no one remembered who had made it.

Having lived in the community all his life (bar four years at high school and two in the military ‘hellhole’ of Fort Benning, Georgia, and then Saigon, which he didn’t like to talk about), Clifford Weyiouanna was an authority on the local environment. It was true, he told me, that the permafrost underlying the village was melting, and this was speeding up the erosion. But another factor was just as important – the gradual disappearance of the sea ice.

The sea ice used to lock up the shore for six months of every year, he explained, and so for half the year the eroding power of the waves was banished. Storms could rage all they wanted, but the sandy cliffs would stand. Now that had begun to change.

‘The currents have changed, the ice conditions have changed, and the freeze-up of the Chukchi Sea out here has really changed too. We used to freeze up in the last part of October. This year we didn’t freeze up until Christmas time.’

‘So, how different is it when you’re actually out on the ice?’

‘It’s not as stable. We used to get icebergs from the north many years ago – turquoise blue icebergs – not any more, it’s all young ice now. Thin stuff, only about a foot thick. Right now, the ice on that ocean out there should be, under normal conditions, four foot thick.’

And the animal behaviour was changing too. ‘I think they’re migrating a lot earlier than they used to because of the warming of the ocean. They migrate north in the spring to stay in the cooler waters. That’s the polar bears, the walrus, the spotted seal, the bearded seal, the belugas and the bowhead whales.’ He leaned forward to emphasise the point: ‘Last summer we covered thousands of miles by boat trying to get walrus – there was nothing, except for one boat which found one walrus.’

And then there were the strange new fish. ‘I used to have one in my shed. I was going to give it to a biologist to take a look because it’s not a local fish. The warming of the temperature is bringing some uncommon fish species into the ocean.’

We talked long after midnight. Outside the sun was only just setting, and the kids were as noisy and energetic as ever. No one bothered to order them around: traditional teaching methods are subtle, and Eskimo children are expected to find things out for themselves.

Shishmaref would go on, both Clifford and Robert assured me. If not here, then someplace else further up the coast. But whatever happened, the community would stay together. People here looked after each other – just as the first seal of the hunting season would always be given to an elder. It was the traditional way.

HUSLIA

All over the Alaskan interior people in remote villages are reporting sudden changes, all related to the state’s warming climate: weird animal behaviour, unexpected weather, changing landscape and dying forests. Around Huslia, a small Athabaskan Indian village three hundred kilometres west of Fairbanks, entire lakes have disappeared.

These disappearing lakes sounded a bit too dramatic, and I wasn’t sure I believed it – until I visited the village and saw it happening for myself.

The plane was only an eight-seater, and I was directly behind the pilot. The dials spun as he heaved back the joy-stick, the small craft gaining speed and then bouncing into the air from a side runway at Fairbanks Airport. Soon we were flying over thick forests, which encircled huge ox-bow lakes formed by old river courses. As we cruised at only 900 metres, thin ice clouds scattered the bright sunlight into an ever-present rainbow on the left, whilst on the right, small mountains rose above the treeline, looking almost impossibly smooth under their thick coating of snow.

Huslia was over two hours away, first visible as just a little grey airstrip and a few dozen cabins as we glided in over the forests. As a Native village, Huslia has its own Tribal Council, and one of the officials was waiting to meet us. We loaded our bags onto a sled and rode down into the village on the back of her snowmachine, drawing to a halt outside a log cabin with a large freezer outside the front door and lots of toys scattered around it in the snow.

Cesa Sam appeared at the door. She was dressed only in a T-shirt and shorts, despite the cold weather. Inside, I could see why – the house was boiling, and we all rapidly stripped off our coats and gloves. Cesa was in her early thirties, large and cheerful, and continually pestered by several hyperactive children.

‘Oh, a lot of people can tell you about the weather,’ she said, when we were all drinking hot chocolate around the table. ‘There’s only been one cold winter since ‘94 here. It’s so much warmer, and that’s a big change.’

I went for a walk around the village that evening. It was bordered on one side by a wide frozen river, with steep banks leading down to the ice edge. Lots of snowmachine tracks led along the river, which was clearly the equivalent of a main road in winter. But the spring break-up was just beginning, and dark patches in the snow indicated where water was seeping through from the thawing ice underneath.

Everyone from the very young to the very old seemed to get about by snowmachine, and the saw-like buzzing of motors made a constant background noise. There were fewer kids around than normal: I later found out to my surprise that most of the school seniors had gone on a trip to Mexico. Demolishing my assumptions about Indian villages, modernity was everywhere – televisions flickered inside most of the houses, and on a makeshift basketball court two wiry teenagers were sliding about on the ice, taking turns shooting the ball. Like other kids I’d seen elsewhere in the United States, they wore baggy jeans and sneakers, and moved with a disinterested, thoroughly urban cool.

As in Shishmaref, subsistence food is still vital. At a ‘pot-latch’ communal meal later in the evening, hunks of caribou shared space with jelly, ice cream and crisps on paper plates. The elders played bingo several nights a week, sitting attentively at classroom desks in the community centre. The Huslia village store was packed with dried soups, big plastic bottles of coke, biscuits and even some fresh vegetables like onions and carrots, a new shipment of which had come in on our plane. But in the summer the whole community moved out to ‘fish camps’ to catch salmon, and the traditional diet again predominated. Cesa’s own house, where we stayed in an upstairs boxroom, doubled as the village video store, and was well patronised by residents seeking repeat viewings of Eddie Murphy films and Titanic.

Although village life looked relaxed enough, the relationship between modernity and traditional lifestyles is never easy – in Huslia as in other Native villages across Alaska and the United States generally. The Koyukon Indian language – part of the Athabaskan language group, that includes the Apache and Navajo as far south as Arizona and California – is dying. Old people still speak it to each other, but the middle generation were beaten by their white schoolmasters if caught speaking it, and everyone now speaks English at home.

Alcoholism is a huge problem, even in ‘dry’ villages like Huslia, and several recent teenage suicides have shaken the community’s confidence to the core. No summary can explain the social crisis underlying this kind of tragic behaviour, but loss of culture is surely a central problem, contributing as it does to the breakdown of community values and roles, alienation, loneliness and poor self-esteem.

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In a way, these wider cultural changes ran parallel to changes in the surrounding environment. In the past people derived meaning from the regular progression of the seasons – from the migration of the caribou to the first appearance of the salmon in early summer. These rhythms, and the subsistence lifestyle generally, explained the world and made the people feel part of it.

But now the salmon sometimes failed to appear on time, and the previous year all the berries died before they got ripe. Hungry bears were ranging closer to the village. Willow trees were springing up where there used to be standing water, and most of the beavers had disappeared. The world was unravelling, and even the most stoic and experienced elders were at a loss to explain what it meant.

And underlying everything was the rising temperature.

‘Right now we hardly see forty below all winter.’ I was talking to Wilson Sam, Cesa’s father, the following morning in his kitchen. ‘I think we maybe saw one day of it, but the rest was like twenty-five, thirty below. And that’s all winter, that’s a big change.’ Wilson and his wife Eleanor were plucking geese, plunging the dead birds into boiling water to loosen the feathers then tearing off great handfuls and piling them up on the kitchen table. Wilson had shot over a dozen the day before.

‘My parents used to have really warm gear,’ said Eleanor. ‘I remember my late father, he had long caribou legging boots about this high.’ She put down her half-plucked goose to indicate. ‘All us children, we had fur coats too – real fur coats. My mother had a rabbitskin parka. Now the weather’s really changed, and people don’t use that kind of fur clothing so much any more.’

‘Now if it gets to forty below people say it’s cold,’ added Wilson. ‘But in them days it was colder. And it lasted for days sometimes. Worse than, what, fifty, sixty below. You know, real cold.’

Eleanor looked up, as if she had just remembered something. ‘My grandpa, he said in our Athabaskan language before he died, when he was in his eighties. He said the cold weather is going to get old. Because it’s getting warmer in Alaska, you know? The cold weather’s going outside.’

That afternoon I was riding Cesa’s snowmachine down a steep slope, trying to keep up with Harold ‘Farmer’ Vent, a Huslia old timer and councillor. Farmer looked like he’d seen a good few Alaskan winters: his lined face tucked under a pine marten skin cap, the buff-coloured tail hanging down the back, he looked every inch a skilled trapper. Always about fifty metres ahead, he kept disappearing around stands of forest and behind clumps of bushes, and I was worried about losing him. I had no idea which way led back to the village, and the landscape of forests, snow-covered depressions and riverbanks all looked identical.

Then, abruptly, Farmer drew to a halt. ‘This is it,’ he announced.

We were in a large bowl-shaped area, a kilometre or so across. Much of the snow had melted, leaving dusty grass and a tangled mat of dried-up pondweed. It was only then that I realised, with a jolt, that this had once been a lake.

‘The water’s just draining out,’ Farmer said. ‘I don’t know where it’s going. We used to paddle down here in canoes during the summer to get to my mom’s fish camp. We got to carry the canoes now.’

The area around Huslia used to be covered with lakes. ‘Every spring they still fill up with water, but then it just drains out – all the way to the bottom. All these lakes are drying up now, they’re just grass.’

He climbed back onto his snowmachine, and I followed him for a couple of kilometres more – up a steep bank and then down the other side before he stopped again. The scene was the same, though this time a line of birch trees surrounded the dusty hollow, indicating what had once been a lakeshore.