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.7
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.
‘It’s all over the area,’ Farmer told me. ‘I trap way up towards Hog River, and all those lakes are drying out too.’
I asked what difference it made to the animals.
He shook his head sadly. ‘Ducks, beaver, muskrat…We used to shoot muskrat off this hill right here, but everything is drying out, so we can’t get nothing. With beaver it’s the same thing.’ He pointed to the edge of the bank. ‘There used to be a beaver house right over here. They’re all moving someplace, I don’t know where.’
We stood in silence, as Farmer stared at the ground. ‘It’s just – what do you call it?…Pitiful really. Even the geese and stuff, they’ve started disappearing now. Every year it’s getting harder and harder to live up here.’
Polar warming
Evidence of dramatic climate change is piling in from right around the Earth’s polar regions. Greenland’s ice sheet is thawing so fast that meltwater is running off at a rate equivalent to the annual flow of the Nile.8,9 Throughout the Northern Hemisphere winter snowcover has declined by a tenth since 1979,10 whilst rivers and lakes are freezing a week later and thawing a week earlier than a century ago.11 Alaskan mountain glaciers are losing ice at a rate fast enough to have a measurable impact on global sea levels,12 whilst other glaciers and snowfields are disappearing throughout the region.13
This warming is mirrored in the Southern Hemisphere, where the Antarctic Peninsula is warming at a rate similar to that in Alaska. (The Antarctic continental interior, which is surrounded by cold circumpolar winds and sea currents which isolate it from wider global temperature changes, has warmed much more slowly, if at all.) As a result, snowcover and glaciers on the Peninsula are shrinking, ice-dependent Adelie penguin populations shrinking and new plants are beginning to colonise the landscape.14
About 10,000 square kilometres of ice shelf have been lost from both sides of the Antarctic Peninsula, culminating in March 2002 with the spectacular collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf, an event which made headlines around the world. Before its sudden demise, Larsen B was a floating wedge of ice 200 metres thick and larger than the entire country of Luxembourg. ‘The speed of it is staggering,’ said a British Antarctic Survey glaciologist at the time, as his ship navigated through the armada of new icebergs. ‘Hard to believe that 500 billion tonnes of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month.’15
Much of what I had heard from Alaskan residents is backed up by hard scientific evidence. As Clifford Weyiouanna told me, sea ice is thinning rapidly. This observation is confirmed by submarine cruises under the Arctic ice, which reveal a thinning trend of over 40% over the last thirty years.16 The total area of Arctic sea ice is also diminishing rapidly: satellite data shows an area one and a half times the size of Wales is lost every year.17 In September 1998 ice cover in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas around Alaska (Shishmaref is
