by Carl Safina
“Now you don’t see freeze-up until January or February,” Tocktoo says. “You don’t see that thick ice, that blue ice, like when I was growing up. Sometimes, we have a quarter mile of slush.” But because the people depend on Bearded Seals and Walruses, they must go hunting. Tocktoo hunts for his wife and kids, his father, and his father-in-law. “In spring,” Tocktoo explains, “you gotta really recognize weak ice, thin ice—. It’s very tricky because now we’re getting big springtime snowfalls. Makes everything white; covers the weak ice. Very dangerous. People falling through the ice most years now.” The community is mourning a young man whose snow machine recently fell through the ice while he was returning from hunting.
It’s a major problem for animals, too. Bearded Seals, Ringed Seals, Walruses, various other mammals, and certain seabirds are all woven into the sea-ice system. For them, mere melting is a death sentence. Lean and hungry Polar Bears sometimes prowl into town. “Because we’ve got so many kids here,” Tocktoo says, sounding apologetic, “we had to shoot three bears in just the last year.”
He explains, “Used to have Walrus near the coast. Sometimes now we go sixty or eighty miles for Walrus, a hundred miles out for Bearded Seal. You gotta really read the weather that far at sea. We recognize mirages. We read the clouds. You need experience. Young people, sixty miles from shore, you tell them a storm is coming, they say, ‘The weather looks nice.’ When I’m out in the ocean, I’m always teaching my crew, ‘Watch the clouds,’ ‘Watch this or that.’ ”
In summer the people go to the mainland, collecting eggs of waterbirds, picking cloudberries and sour dock (a tricky plant that can be poisonous raw), and catching salmon. September is crowberry- and blueberry-picking time. Later in fall: duck, goose, Moose, and Caribou hunting.
“Facing having to leave all our food—it hurts,” Stanley Tocktoo says sadly. “That is our grocery store out there.” He sweeps his open hand as if stroking the landscape. “We’ve been here for four thousand years for one reason: easiest access to the food supply. We have good channels on each side of this island—access to the ocean, a lagoon behind the island for tomcod, whitefish, and access to the mainland. There is no other place like this on this whole coast. The other islands are surrounded by shallows. We picked out this place for survival purposes. If we make this just a hunting camp, we’d have to figure out how to get across the lagoon when the ice is bad.”
Getting separated from the food supply isn’t a problem limited to Shishmaref or to Inuit people—or to people. It’s one of the great themes of the great decoupling effect of warming on what had been tight-linked ecosystems. Sea ice used to melt in spring, releasing nutrients to single-celled plankton, igniting the whole food chain. Now it melts weeks earlier, nutrients releasing when the days are still too short for plankton to grow or reproduce. (The short days lack sufficient sunlight for photosynthesis.) No early plankton means scarce food for shellfish, which means starving sea ducks, Walruses searching too far afield from their hungry pups, and skinny Gray Whales migrating hundreds of extra miles yet still not finding enough to eat. In the North Sea, changing temperatures have shifted copepod populations north by about six hundred miles, taking them out of the range of cod larvae, helping push an intensely fished cod population into a steady decline. Elsewhere in the North Atlantic, similar shifts in copepods and northern krill have caused declines in salmon. It’s happening globally. And now, like everything else in this community of life they belong to, the people of Shishmaref find their habitat changing, their food growing scarcer, and they are facing the need to move.
Until the late 1990s, I could travel from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Peninsula and along the tropics’ coral coasts and hear little about global warming. There’d be the odd anecdote, and we always knew the sea level was rising because old-timers could tell of changes along the coast. But now, everywhere I go—or even if I stay home at Lazy Point—people have stories. The anecdotes form a mosaic of changes both subtle and widespread. For all the focus on spectacular events like crumbling ice shelves and open water at the North Pole, many small things are also happening. I hear that Arctic shorebirds are losing nesting habitat as bushes sprout across formerly open tundra. I’ve seen nesting sea turtles caught in the squeeze as home owners build seawalls to hold on to property that a rising ocean wants to repossess. I’ve visited atolls where the world’s largest albatross populations—over a million adults—utterly depend on nesting sands just a few feet above sea level. I’ve learned about corals stressed by water getting too warm and acidic. I’ve seen melting ice affecting everything from Polar Bears and Walruses to, now, Eskimos, and I’ll see it affecting people in the tropics and penguins in Antarctica.
* * *
Tocktoo pauses, chipping the ground with his shoe. “Gotta figure out something,” he mumbles. “We’ve selected a place thirteen miles inland, called Tin Creek. It’s one of our hunting areas. If we move into other communities, we’d have scary things for our kids, like drugs. That’s a big worry for me. We’re very happy that our culture is still with us, our heritage, our values—the Inupiat People, y’know?”
The pragmatic Luci says, “We want our kids to go to college and come back as surveyors, lawyers—. But they’re afraid of our storms. They’re settling elsewhere. Who’d want to come to a place that is so endangered?”
“We care about community,” Tocktoo concludes. “When terrorists hit the twin towers on 9/11, we all got hurt. We didn’t know the people, but we knew they had families. We got sad. We put our American flags outside.”
Considering all we’ve taken from Alaska—minerals, timber, the oil, and the future of these people—and considering the billowing billions of dollars pumped from Alaska into the lower forty-eight states, $180 million to move the community would seem a reasonable cost of doing business.
Many other people around the world live in need, some whose islands are also washing away. But as Americans, we have a special compact here. And a bigger question looms: If it’s so hard logistically and financially to move a small American community a few miles to an unoccupied place on uncontested ground, what happens when it’s time to move Bangladesh? What will happen when tens of millions of poor people must abandon saltwater-flooded farms and ruined wells and move in on top of other poor people whose food and water supplies are barely adequate as it is? And coastal China, Africa, Southeast Asia—?
* * *
“When I was a kid we went to church every Sunday. But now, not so many people go,” Tocktoo says as we stroll past the church cemetery, where departed Eskimos lie in graves marked by crosses. The minister, a white guy, is new. Luci says it’s difficult to get a pastor. “Who’d want to come live in a place that’s so endangered?” she repeats.
I’m invited into one house that displays prominent Christian iconography: a crucifix, paintings of Jesus. Edwin Weyiouanna has generously extended an invitation for a lunch of local delicacies. His mother, Flora, has spread the table with preserved black seal meat (from Oogruk, the Bearded Seal, dried for a month, then buried in a plastic pail of seal oil); seal intestine; dried seal jerky; muktuk (whale blubber with skin attached); boiled Caribou; smoked salmon; and boiled Arctic Char, a relative of trout that inhabits both sea- and freshwater and is the world’s northernmost-ranging freshwater fish. I’m finding the Caribou especially tasty.
Chicken, pork, cereal, and the like are available here, and kids constantly suck sugar candies, so even grade-schoolers show rotten teeth. But these people aren’t joking when they say they rely on hunting.
Flora, who still wields her ulu knife deftly enough to make short work of a thick chunk of pink Bowhead Whale blubber, says, “People with teeth like it. Dip it in this seal oil. It doesn’t have much flavor, but you won’t get hungry again soon.”
The seal oil is clear, like fine olive oil. I’ve never tasted whale before. I’m told the people here don’t kill whales but trade for whale meat with another village. Commercial whaling is corrupt and cruel.
But under the circumstances, trying a bite seems permissible, and I concur with Flora on its lack of flavor and the effect on one’s appetite.
On the question of whether Flora wants to make the move away from here, she deadpans in her elderly voice, “I want to go to Hollywood; that’s where the money is.”
* * *
On the flight from Shishmaref back to Anchorage I have my face in the window, soaking in the splendor of Denali and Alaska’s unfathomable vastness. Compared to the white-bread blandness of the Great Plains and its straight-line, wrecked-angular, sod-busted subjugation, Alaska is a place of such depth your mind can founder. It’s so seductive as to be positively menacing. I run my eyes over the landscape like fingers across a map before a great adventure, when the mind levitates with the elation of the unbounded possible. I know what it’s like to get swallowed in wilderness, the euphoria—and the terror. Alaska just seems to be lying there, all undressed, winking at me.
I take off my sweatshirt outside the airport and a cabbie agrees that it’s “too hot”—75 degrees Fahrenheit. “It was like this yesterday, too,” he adds. His roses now bloom in October; that never used to happen. When I phone home I learn that a Magnificent Frigatebird, normally resident in the Caribbean, is being seen by birders near Lazy Point.
* * *
Driving toward Seward. The Chugach people lived around what’s now called Prince William Sound, a name soiled and synonymous with Exxon and Big Oil’s long rap sheet against nature. But for scenery today I’ve got the Chugach Mountains and Chugach National Forest, five million wild acres.
Many of Alaska’s locals resent the parks and national forests here because they object to federal involvement in “their” region (but they don’t complain about getting our tax money; on a per-Alaskan basis, federal funds to this state run twenty-five times the national average). Like anti–“big government” folk in many places, such people are whining, selfish hypocrites. America has something for everyone, and those who want more development can move to Seattle, Denver, or Dallas. Meanwhile, Alaska itself has something for all of us: American public land. Call me patriotic, but American wilderness strikes me as among the most exquisite remaining untrammeled landscapes on Earth. Part of its beauty is in the way “wilderness” is an American concept. Part of its beauty is in the statesmanship and forethought that has, so far, kept some of these places wild and original. I thank those whose foresight passed the Alaska Lands Act. And thanks, everyone who has fought to keep Alaskan oil development where it was supposed to go and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where the Caribou are supposed to go. A deal’s a deal.
In Turnagain Arm—a fjord where Captain Cook dead-ended, so turned again—the waters flow silty with fine “rock flour” ground by glaciers against stone. Several pods of Beluga Whales, dusky juveniles and ivory-white adults, roil the murky surface. To navigate and find fish, they use sonar. Seeing them is a treat, especially since this population has declined 75 percent in twenty years. The reasons—oil? other contaminants? native hunting?—remain debated. Probably all of the foregoing.
Here in Cook Inlet, the tide can swing an impressive thirty feet in six hours. It’s North America’s second-highest tidal fluctuation after the Bay of Fundy. We could harness some of that energy into clean electricity, perhaps without hurting wildlife. Someday, when the arguing over oil and global warming dies down in the face of inarguable realities, we probably will.
* * *
In a small stream, a marvel: Sockeye and Chum Salmon that are not just swimming upstream but actually spawning: courting, digging nests, laying and fertilizing eggs. Some are bright and vigorous. Others, spotted with fungus, their fins frayed, approach their final stroke. Courting males occasionally fight. One young “jack” male, returned from the sea a year ahead of schedule, orbits a courting pair, then streaks in, strafing sperm across newly laid eggs. He can’t know the outcome of his daring act. So is his strange motivation just a sexual urge propelled by anticipation of intense pleasure?
Actually seeing their final drama play out in front of my eyes like this is quite something. A life of struggle comes full circle and becomes a death of service. It packs metaphorical power.
Salmon have another mysterious power: once they enter the human mind, they create a region’s soul. Though Alaskans are a diverse and rowdy bunch, one thing they share is their love of salmon. Salmon are business; they are recreation and family; they are a highlight of summer where summer is the highlight of a year. In winter, they’re what’s for dinner. They are fish and they are icons.
Salmon do best at stream temperatures of about 42 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit (6 to 13°C). Warmer water poses problems. Above 55 degrees Fahrenheit, sperm and eggs get impaired; fertilization and hatching suffers. Temperatures above about 60 degrees Fahrenheit affect the delicate transformation from larvae to juvenile (from “fry” to “smolt”) and inhibit internal changes that prepare smolts for migration from freshwater into seawater. In water between 66 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the species, adult salmon stop migrating upstream. Around 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25°C), salmon begin dying.
Sue Mauger is a slender, soft-spoken woman with light brown hair and a gentle demeanor. Her small nonprofit outfit, Cook Inlet Keeper, has quixotically undertaken to “protect the Cook Inlet Basin and the life it contains”—an area the size of West Virginia.
Mauger’s group is finding streams warming as air temperatures rise. In the summer of 2002, stream temperatures exceeded 55 degrees Fahrenheit for fifty days. Two years later, that was up to eighty days, with a week above 68 degrees. Some individual streams remained above 68 degrees for a month. Up in Yukon streams, warming favors a salmon parasite called Ichthyophonus. It turns salmon flesh so mushy that it can’t be dried by the people there who’ve depended on it for winter food. So as usual, poor people suffer first.
“We were certainly surprised,” Mauger says, “that the fish here are stressed in each phase of their life cycle.”
Partly, the problem is less snow. Mauger explains that winter snow and ice are “like water batteries that need winter recharging if they are to power streams with cool meltwater in summer.” But warmer winters mean potential snow falling as rain. Unlike the measured drip of snowmelt, rain just runs away. “So in summer, when we’re counting on snowmelt for flow,” Mauger continues, “streams have less water running.” Low water warms faster. “I never thought I’d be worrying about warm streams in Alaska,” Sue says, still incredulous.
Ripples: In California, where salmon, agriculture, and cities all rely on melting snowpack flowing from the Sierras, they’re already competing for dwindling water. Snowpack was the year’s water reserve. In some recent years, however, the snowpack’s been half of normal. Precipitation that used to fall as snow now falls as rain that runs off so rapidly that even the state’s extensive dams and reservoirs cannot hold it all for later use.
* * *
Ed Burg, a somewhat shy, bearded biologist employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is a big-picture guy fascinated by how landscape and lifescape fit together; how ice, water, rock, sediment, vegetation, and animals weave their tapestry, do their dance.
We’re in a roadside meadow dotted with trees, like a pretty Alaska postcard. When Burg drilled here, he found twenty feet of sphagnum peat, representing about fifteen thousand years of accumulation under very wet conditions. He didn’t find any wood in those cores; trees did not grow here. When he cored growing trees, he found that the median age of the spruce in these meadows is about thirty years. The birches are just ten to fifteen years old. His main point is that the trees and shrubs are not only young; they’re new. Until recently, all the emerald glades in view were wetlands. All these meadows, in other words, are drying out.
“It’s a compelling climate story,” Dr. Burg says. “But also, on the practical side, if the trees join across these meadows to form continuous forest with each side of these valleys, it would certainly make stopping fires harder.”
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We walk into deeper, older surrounding woodland. Burg leads. “It’s hard working in these forests,” he’s telling me. “You spend all day climbing over fallen trunks.”
But it’s obvious that he loves it. All around us, however, trees are dying. His comment: “It gets much worse than this, I assure you.”
At a smallish spruce, two feet in diameter, recently fallen, he kneels. “Spruce Bark Beetles have hit this. I’m going to peel off some of the bark and show you the galleries.” Galleries—a nice word. “Normally, you can’t peel the bark like this. But see this powder under the bark? It’s called frass. Insect poop, basically. Beetles have eaten the inner bark layer, where sugar is concentrated, and filled the space with frass.” If the attack is really heavy, he adds, they girdle the tree and it dies within a year.
This is about as small a tree as they’ll hit. Bigger trees have more of that sugary inner bark. And smaller trees can better defend themselves. “Small trees have higher pitch pressure; they can cement the beetle right in, Mafia-style,” adds Burg, relishing the thought.
Indeed, almost all of the surviving trees here are small. Most of the taller trees are already dead. The same temperature change that’s drying the bog also stresses the trees; insufficient water impairs their ability to produce pitch, their best defense.
This is one of the largest infestations in North America. Why here? The beetles usually have a two-year life cycle. “Mom comes in spring and lays eggs,” explains Burg. The larvae hatch, eat all summer, then spend winter in the tree. They continue eating the next year, change into adults, and spend their second winter in the tree. The next spring they come out and find new trees—normally. But when we have really warm summers,” Burg says, “they can become adults in their first year.” Then the beetles can do in a year what once took two. “You get a double dose.”
The beetles have been here for at least 250 years. Only recently, however, have the infestations begun killing forests over a wide region.