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Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground
An Ethnography of Climate Change in Shishmaref, Alaska
By Elizabeth Marino UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 University of Alaska Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-267-9
CHAPTER 1
It's the End of the World, and Shishmaref Is Everywhere
The raging sea is tremendously powerful and needs to be respected. Shishmaref will need to be protected from the sea and moved to a different location, in due time. The move needs to be closely tied to our hunting traditional cultural practices. We are sea mammal hunters.
— Herbert Nayokpuk 2005
SHISHMAREF IS EVERYWHERE
The first time I flew into Shishmaref it was 2002. I was a twenty-two-year-old newspaper reporter in a brand-new goose-down jacket holding tight to the seat cushion on a single-engine Alaska bush plane as it bumped through the low layer of clouds. Cold and curious, I stared out the window at a slip of an island that seemed dangerous, vulnerable, and impossibly elegant. The coastal Arctic, especially to an outsider raised on romantic notions of the last frontier, is full of both beauty and ferocity. The Shishmaref island chain is especially stunning. It sits as a curve of sand and permafrost in summer, snow and ice in winter, cutting an arc of differentiation between the Chukchi Sea and the shallow Shishmaref Inlet. Even from that first flight, the wild Arctic coast was magnificent and awe-inspiring, and it seemed to be, from my naïve perspective, part of a Jeffersonian dream of wilderness and frontier freedom.
From the air I could see a string of houses, an airstrip, a haphazard scattering of boats, seal-drying racks, and abandoned machinery. In the relative absence of other signs of human life, these human artifacts took on animated qualities. The houses dug into the tundra and clung to the shore. The boats crept toward the water's edge. The seal racks grew up and out of the ground. Flying into a rural Arctic village felt like flying into a more focused, less abstract world, something I still feel today. Everything in the landscape — human, animal, plant, and plastic — has sharp lines and exists in its own right, with some history.
Of course, at the time I had no idea what I was seeing or why it was organized the way that it was.
The last time I flew into Shishmaref I was a thirty-two-year-old anthropologist, five months pregnant, in the same — now beat to hell — down jacket, happy to be coming home. This time Shishmaref was not an idea or a metaphor. The seal racks were full of real memories. The houses were the homes of Clifford and Shirley, Tony and Fannie, Kate and John, and (most importantly for me) Rich and Rachel. I couldn't wait to eat, and I was craving caribou soup, black meat, and seal oil. The Alaska coast was still menacing, and I looked for changes along the seawall and down the coast from the seawall where there was no protection from the waves. The ocean was also, I knew, part of the social life of Shishmaref. It was a place where you could travel, find food, practice tradition, experience beauty; the ocean was an extension of the village, not distinct from it. The ocean, the land, and the village were part of the same socioecological system that encompassed the coast and everything within it. In the interim ten years since that first flight into Shishmaref, many things in my life had changed, and landing in Shishmaref was less like landing in a different, idealized world and more like going to visit old and dear friends and family.
In the interim ten years, Shishmaref's place in the world had changed as well.
Shishmaref had been a familiar place to me and other Bering Strait residents and researchers for a long time and then, quite suddenly, became a place that had been exported to the world's imagination. Researchers and the popular press had identified Shishmaref as one of the very first victims of human-caused climate change. This ever-growing spotlight of attention focused on one thread of the Shishmaref story. In this narrative, an Iñupiaq hunting community, living a traditional lifestyle for thousands of years, was now vulnerable to catastrophic flooding and loss of traditional homeland because of a fearsome and rapidly changing environment suffering under the effects of climate change. In many ways, this narrative is true.
But the story of Shishmaref is much more complicated than that.
* * *
Shishmaref is one of a group of communities around the world to experience an increasing number of disasters linked to human-caused, or anthropogenic, climate change. Flooding has become habitual in Shishmaref. This flooding, paired with increasing erosion and loss of habitable land, is forcing the community to consider migration as the only possible response. As landscapes, precipitation patterns, and climates change because of an overall increase in global temperature, some places and some communities that have previously been habitable are likely to become uninhabitable because of fires, floods, erosion, storms, and other natural disasters. Land will literally be lost, in some cases, because of sea-level rise or erosion. In other cases, areas that have historically experienced rare flooding or drought conditions will instead be exposed to habitual flooding and regularly occurring drought, making rebuilding infrastructure cost-prohibitive or creating deserts where land becomes no longer profitable, and people have no viable way of making a living. People may be pushed to move when these conditions occur. Those communities, families, and individuals who move because of extreme changes in climate are known as environmental migrants, or climate refugees, and are an important point of discussion in the debates about climate change among scientists, governments, and the communities themselves.
There has been an explosion of awareness about environmental migrants and environmental migration linked to climate change in both popular and scientific dialogues in recent years. When I teach courses on climate change at Oregon State University–Cascades, Tuvalu, the Maldives, and "those villages in Alaska" — places that have been identified as communities of potential environmental migration linked to climate change — are known and recognized by many of my students. Each month I receive emails from colleagues, friends, and family members with links to stories they've seen about Shishmaref or Alaska and the migrations associated with climate change. I have been interviewed by multiple media outlets preparing stories on Shishmaref (USA Today, The Guardian, Financial Times [UK], the Munich Re Foundation Newsletter) and contacted by other graduate students and faculty asking for assistance, literature reviews, and direction in studying environmental migration linked to climate change in general and climate-change-influenced migration in Alaska specifically.
From my perspective as a researcher who was invested early in the topic of migration in Alaska driven by ecological change, I have witnessed firsthand the crest of interest in and enthusiasm for (1) climate change, (2) migration linked to climate change, and (3) Shishmaref as a quintessential example of these two phenomena. In the summer of 2012, as one of my OSU students was completing a research project on evangelical environmentalism and creation care, he exclaimed during an in-class presentation, "Shishmaref is everywhere!"
To be sure, Shishmaref appears omnipresent from where I sit — in my inbox, in my classroom, in the newspaper stories I read, and in the interviews I conduct — because this is my field, the focal point of my research, and the center point of my attention for the last nine years. But there is something absurd about an outsider's claim that this 600-person, primarily Iñupiaq village in extremely rural West Coast Alaska is "everywhere." The questions for my research, therefore, became (1) what is really happening in Shishmaref, and (2) why is it eliciting so much attention?
SHISHMAREF AND THE GREAT CLIMATE DEBATE
There is little doubt among scientists that the atmospheric temperature is increasing because of greenhouse gas emissions released through human activity. The basic mechanisms of anthropogenic climate change are so scientifically rudimentary that the greenhouse gas effect was first introduced in the scientific research literature in 1898 by a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius. What Arrhenius postulated was that heat enters the earth's system from the sun as shortwave solar radiation. Of the radiation energy that hits the earth's surface, some is absorbed, and some is converted into longwave radiation and reflected back into the atmosphere toward space. A portion of this radiating energy is trapped by greenhouse gas molecules in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gas molecules keep heat within the atmosphere instead of allowing all longwave radiation to escape back into space.
The trapping of energy in the atmosphere instead of reflecting it back into space is what scientists refer to as the "greenhouse" effect. The greenhouse effect is essential for the existence of much of the life on the planet. The average temperature of the earth's surface, at which life as we know it exists, is about fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Without the greenhouse effect, the average temperature would be closer to zero degrees Fahrenheit. So, in spite of the relatively small amounts of greenhouse gasses in the earth's atmosphere, we know they have a significant effect on the climate. Because humans have added increasing amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide and especially since the Industrial Revolution, we can expect the temperature of the earth to rise. The long-term biophysical changes to the earth expected as a consequence of rising temperatures linked to greenhouse gas emissions should challenge us all to serious personal and political action regardless of political affiliation, socioeconomic position, or cultural background.
In spite of this mechanistic clarity, as climate change discourses have entered the public sphere, they have proven to be highly contentious. The term "climate change" has come to imply an inexhaustible set of biophysical and ecological phenomena as well as an equally inexhaustible set of values, ethics, personal and political identities, policy recommendations, and agendas. Strategies preventing or limiting extreme climate change — climate change "mitigation" strategies — almost all require a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. Capping emissions means (among other things) limiting the burning of fossil fuels and in most scenarios demands a cost hike for the "cheap" energy that drives many economies.
The "climate change debate" in America quickly polarized as a proxy culture war and became a debate about development versus environmental protection, big business versus big government, and common sense versus organized science. In 1997, the United States Senate passed a resolution to veto any bill that put caps on greenhouse gas emissions and, following this, the United States and Australia refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. These decisions set the stage for a political imbroglio that dichotomized climate change camps into "believers versus deniers" and "intervention versus inaction." These competing discourses each sought and continue to seek validation — through both scientific evidence and public consensus.
Involved in this pursuit of verification, scholars and journalists looked for test-case studies to examine how climate change would affect people on the ground. If climate change was as bad as the activists said, then surely someone was being affected in the present. The world needed a face for climate change, and the Arctic appeared to be particularly well-suited for that purpose.
The Arctic experiences something called polar, or Arctic, amplification, which is a greater overall warming in the Arctic region than in other parts of the globe during warming trends. This is due in part to the decrease of snow cover on land and the decrease of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Exposed, snow-free land and especially the dark-blue ocean absorb more heat energy than do snow or ice, which reflect light. When the Arctic Ocean in particular is ice free, then the earth's albedo (reflective power) decreases, leading to an increased absorption of light and heat energy. Climate models predict greater warming in the Arctic than in other parts of the world in the coming century because of the increase in heat absorption compared to heat and light reflection. These predictions corroborate recorded evidence of early Arctic warming compared to the rest of the world contemporarily. From 1954 to 2003, the mean annual atmospheric surface temperature in Alaska and Siberia rose between two and three degrees Celsius. This warming has been particularly salient in the winter and spring. Along with warming, snow and ice features have diminished, there has been an increase in windiness and storminess along the coast, and permafrost boundaries have moved north, meaning that previously stable permafrost areas have thawed, causing foundation problems for structures in Alaska and problems with erosion.
What is predicted to happen across the globe is, in clear and measurable ways, occurring in the Arctic right now. Changes in Northern climates, landscapes, and ice features on land and in the ocean have inevitably affected human communities who live in and depend on these ecosystems. Erosion in Alaska Native villages is a primary example of the complex conditions created by a warming environment. Eighty-six percent (184 out of 213) of Alaska Native villages have experienced problems with erosion and flooding.
Erosion in Shishmaref is a primary driver of flooding and infrastructure damage. As permafrost boundaries move north, previously frozen ground in Shishmaref has thawed to become towers of freestanding sand, which deteriorate quickly when exposed to wave action. In 2013 a fall storm removed thirty to forty feet of land in a single night, which is significant for an island that is only a half-mile wide. Added to this, there have been changes in weather patterns. Shore ice, which freezes around the island sometime in the fall, is freezing later and later in the year, meaning that fall storms coming off of the Chukchi Sea no longer meet with a natural ice buffer and instead pummel the island with wind and waves. This erosion and resulting flooding precipitates the need for the community to relocate or migrate. In total there have been six flooding disaster declarations issued for Shishmaref by the State of Alaska since 1988. And so Shishmaref became a community of environmental migrants, or climate refugees, and a face of climate change.
DOES THE ENVIRONMENT MOVE PEOPLE?
The story of environmental migration is not quite as simple as it might seem. To understand how Shishmaref came to be an important climate change case study for researchers and media outlets — to understand how Shishmaref came to be "everywhere" — it is important to understand something about migration itself as a research topic. Throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, social science research on human migration frequently failed to identify natural or environmental systems as driving factors for migration decisions. Some scholars attribute the lack of environmental drivers in human migration research to a Western European/North American bias toward the belief that "technological progress would decrease the influence of nature on human life," a trend that persisted until well into the latter half of the twentieth century. The idea was that as technology mediated the relationship between people and the environment, the ecological niche of any given location was increasingly less important. While, for example, prolonged drought drove Pueblo Grande inhabitants out of the greater Phoenix area during the thirteenth century, the population living there today in prolonged drought will not be forced to move. Instead, the over four million inhabitants will be buffered by technological interventions such as water diversion, air conditioning, and a global marketplace. Within this new, technologically advanced rubric of human-ecological relationships, scholars considered migration to be an economically driven decision, not an environmentally driven one. Poor economies pushed migrants, better economies pulled migrants — the environment was distal as a relevant mechanism for migration.
It was under these intellectual circumstances that a surprising essay by Essam El-Hinnawi, published by the United Nations Environmental Programme in 1985, defined environmental refugees as
those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground by Elizabeth Marino. Copyright © 2015 University of Alaska Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS.
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