interior Ken Salazar announced the selection of the University of Alaska as home to the first of eight planned regional climate science centers in the nation. He said this: “With rapidly melting Arctic sea ice and permafrost, and threats to the survival of Native Alaskan coastal communities, Alaska is ground zero for climate change. We must put science to work to help us adjust to the impacts of climate change on Alaska’s resources and peoples.”
Yes, there is a great variability, as the scientists say, to weather and climate, and the earth’s interconnected systems are immensely complex. None of us can say that a particular event is solely attributable to global warming. The trends, however, are clear, and the changes occurring in the north have been well documented by the IPCC in its series of reports, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, ongoing scientific studies, and the popular press.
This book is not about the fact that climate change is occurring on regional and global scales (faster than the models predicted), that the emission of greenhouse gases from human activities (rising at an increasing rate) is driving it, or that we may be reaching “tipping points” after which the earth will likely be a very different and less hospitable place than that which has supported the human species since its members first learned to rub two sticks together.5 Although many people have chosen to ignore and even deny the peril we’ve brought upon our world, the scientific community has been in agreement for many years about the basics and seriousness of global warming, and publications on the subject abound.6 Some of them are listed in my bibliography.
This book, instead, takes a look at my reddish corner of the world and the ways that its people and communities are learning from, struggling and coping with, and adapting to the climate-related changes they encounter on a daily basis.
Of course, there’s a lot of change going on in the north besides climate. There’s environmental change brought on by resource development, land use, and the accumulation of toxins, and there’s continuing socioeconomic change. Native peoples in particular have leaped, in just decades, from traditional to modern lives. Changes related to global warming aren’t easily teased out of the entire fabric of change, and climate change isn’t usually the first thing that northerners—who face so many other challenges, from cultural loss to high energy costs and competition over resources—worry about.
Still, northerners live in and depend on the environment in more intimate ways than most Americans and tend to be keen observers. The indigenous among us, with ancestors who survived and thrived in a harsh and unforgiving climate for thousands of years, hold a particularly close and generational knowledge of their home places. These Native people, whose values are grounded in respect for the land and in cooperation, have in the past demonstrated great resilience and innovation.
An ecologist who has worked among northern communities for many years said to me, “These people are really good at adapting—and proud of their abilities. They’re not sitting ducks getting washed out to sea.” Their adaptation to date has been assisted by such things as strong community networks, an acceptance of uncertainty, flexibility in resource use, and government support.
And yet, the ability of individuals and communities to adapt, today, is constrained by political decisions made (or neglected) at every level—regional, national, and international. It’s also challenged by the unprecedented speed and degree of environmental change.
I have on my desk a brittle and yellowing scrap of newsprint I tore from somewhere a few years ago. The one paragraph reads, “‘We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering,’ said John Holdren, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an energy and climate expert at Harvard. ‘We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.’”
Holdren is now President Obama’s science adviser. In testimony to Congress in July 2009, Holdren again pointed out the need to reduce carbon emissions and sequester as much carbon as possible and to make parallel efforts in adaptation. Adaptation strategies—such things as improving the efficiency of water use, managing coastal development with sea level rise in mind, and breeding drought-resistant crops—need, he said, to be employed at every level from the individual on up. This commitment, he said, would take leadership, coordination, and funding.
Until a few years ago, “adaptation” as related to climate change was rejected by many of us, from Al Gore on down, who were concerned it diverted attention from the critical need to reduce carbon emissions. “If temperatures increase, if sea ice decreases, we’ll just adapt,” was a toss-off response from those who wanted to continue business as usual. They posed adaptation as a simple solution, on the order of providing more air conditioners and, more positively in their view, taking advantage of ice-free Arctic waters for shipping and oil production.
Alaska’s representative Don Young, who at every opportunity mentions “the myth of global warming,” likes to talk about adaptation. He has opposed an endangered species listing for the polar bear and insisted that the bears can just switch from living on ice to living on land. He complained on a radio show, “We’re the only ones that are not adapting to climate change. We’re the only ones. All the other species will adapt. They’ll all change, and they will survive.”7 Rep. Young is apparently unaware that the current rate of species extinction is one thousand to ten thousand times faster than at any time in the last sixty-five million years, or that there’s a distinction between the common use of the word adapt (to adjust) and the biological one (in which species genetically evolve over time, through natural selection, to improve their conditions in relationship to their environments).8 The IPCC has estimated that global temperature increases in the next hundred years may match those that occurred over five thousand years at the end of the last ice age—a rate far too rapid for evolutionary change by all but the fastest-breeding (think fruit flies) species.9
The mitigation part of Holdren’s triad clearly isn’t going too well, as global emissions continue to rise and the international community fails to brake a disastrous course. Adaptation—as in making human choices about how we’ll live with the changes already set in motion by global warming—is now taking over much of the discussion, as it must. Even then, it’s important to realize that adaptation as Holdren and others intend it involves proactive planning for the long-term—making changes to activities, rules, institutions, and so on in order to minimize risk. It is not the same as coping, which is a short-term response to protect, right now, resources or livelihoods. Coping mechanisms can get you through an event or year but can easily be overwhelmed.
Lara Hansen, an ecologist who started a nonprofit called EcoAdapt, lamented to me as I began this book the lack of a “field” of adaptation.10 (This has been described elsewhere as an “adaptation deficit”—the difference between what we know and what we need to know to help with adaptation. This gap exists both in scientific research and in policy making.) Resource managers, community planners, and others working in areas affected by climate change, Hansen told me, “know at some level they need to work on this, but they feel completely disempowered to do anything because they’ve never had any formal training on what adaptation is. Generally when I talk to people at state agencies, the response I get is, ‘Yeah, we know we need to be doing something about this, but we don’t know what it is, and we don’t even know how to start approaching it.’ There’s very little in the world to help a person define a good adaptation versus a bad one, or to decide what is effective and fiscally wise or not.” Hansen founded EcoAdapt to train people in what she called “unfortunately a growth industry.”
The north, Hansen said, is a very useful place from which to learn. “The changes are happening so fast that the people and ecosystems have already started to do things. It’s not been formally called adaptation, but it’s happening. We need to know what those things are and try to learn lessons from them. What’s working? How did people come up
