Climate Change: Home

A powerful collection of voices and images from the frontlines of the war against ecological devastation in the Arctic. First-person narratives from nearly prominent activists, writers and researchers who address issues of climate change, resource war and human rights with stunning urgency and groundbreaking research. Over recent years the Arctic has been a battleground for an international war over natural resources and it still remains one of the most contested lands in the world. Arctic Voices is a window into this beautiful, endangered region.

Faith of Cranes weaves together three parallel narratives: the plight and beauty of sandhill cranes, one man's effort to recover hope amid destructive climate change, and the birth of a daughter. Hank Lentfer listened to cranes passing over his home in Southeast Alaska for twenty years before bothering to figure out where they were going. On a very visceral level, he didn't want to know. After all, cranes gliding through the wide skies of Alaska are the essence of wildness. But the same animals, pecking a living between the cornfields and condos of California's Central Valley, seem trapped and diminished. A former wildlife biologist and longtime conservationist, Lentfer had come to accept that no number of letters to the editor or trips to D.C. could stop the spread of clear cuts, alter the course of climate change, or ensure that his beloved cranes would always appear. And he had no idea that following the paths of cranes would lead him to the very things he was most afraidof: parenthood, responsibility, and actions of hope in a frustrating and warming world. "The cranes flying over my house in the fall have no assurance their California cornfield will not be filled with McMansions. When those birds leave California in the spring there is no guarantee their tundra breeding ground will not be host to another oil rig. Still . . . they teach their young the way. During the months of my wife's pregnancy, I slowly realized my role as a parent will be not to prevent the heartbreak, but to migrate through it, to find places of calm and safety along the way to rest and feed the spirit." Faith of Cranes is Lentfer's quiet, lyrical memoir of his home and community near Glacier Bay that reveals a family's simple acts-planting potatoes, watching cranes, hunting deer-as well as a close and eccentric Alaskan community. It shows how several thousand birds and one little girl teach a new father there is no future imaginable that does not leave room for compassion and grace.

With three roads and a population of just over 500 people, Shishmaref, Alaska seems like an unlikely center of the climate change debate. But the island, home to Inupiaq Eskimos who still live off subsistence harvesting, is falling into the sea, and climate change is, at least in part, to blame. While countries sputter and stall over taking environmental action, Shishmaref is out of time. Publications from the New York Times to Esquire have covered this disappearing village, yet few have taken the time to truly show the community and the two millennia of traditions at risk. In Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground, Elizabeth Marino brings Shishmaref into sharp focus as a place where people in a close-knit, determined community are confronting the realities of our changing planet every day. She shows how physical dangers challenge lives, while the stress and uncertainty challenge culture and identity. Marino also draws on Shishmaref's experiences to show how disasters and the outcomes of climate change often fall heaviest on those already burdened with other social risks and often to communities who have contributed least to the problem. Stirring and sobering, Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground proves that the consequences of unchecked climate change are anything but theoretical.

Profiles the history of the Inuit people from the first inhabitants to the present day society. More than 450 dictionary entries cover issues of society, economy, and politics; influential educators and writers, environmentalists, and politicians; and the many voluntary associations and governmental agencies that have played a role in Inuit history. The introductory essay, chronology, and well-developed bibliography make this an ideal reference source for the researcher or student.

In this gripping circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle, Gretel Ehrlich paints a vivid portrait of the indigenous cultures that inhabit the starkly beautiful boreal landscape surrounding the Arctic Ocean, an ice-bound wilderness that includes northern Siberia, northwestern Greenland, Canada’s vast Nunavut, and northern Alaska. Ehrlich’s expedition, supported by the National Geographic Society, documents what remains of these cultures, specifically the similarities and differences among them, including hunting traditions, shamanic and ceremonial practices, languages and legends--the ways in which they have survived, or have been assimilated, and how they are adapting to the impact of climate change on their ice-age cultures. Ehrlich is fascinated by what she calls the ecology of culture--the ways in which the human presence of indigenous Arctic people is intricately interwoven with land, rock, river, sea, and ice. Depicting human-caused climate change as only the latest and most destructive of the ills and abuses first peoples have been suffering for 250 years, Ehrlich’s haunting and lovely prose portrays ancient tribes and traditions on the edge of extinction and captures the austere beauty of their various lifeways in the frozen dreamscape of the world they have always known.

In June 2007, Erin McKittrick and her husband, Hig, embarked on a 4,000-mile expedition from Seattle to the Aleutian Islands, traveling solely by human power. This is the story of their unprecedented trek along the northwestern edge of the Pacific Ocean -- a year-long journey through some of the most rugged terrain in the world -- and their encounters with rain, wind, blizzards, bears, and their own emotional and spiritual demons. Erin and Hig set out from Seattle with a desire to raiseawareness of natural resource and conservation issues along their route: clear-cut logging of rainforests; declining wild salmon populations; extraction of mineral resources; and effects of global climate change. By taking each mile step by step, they were able to intimately explore the coastal regions of Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska, see the wilderness in its larger context, and provide a unique on-the-ground perspective. An entertaining and, at times, thrilling adventure, theirs is a journey of discovery and of insights about the tiny communities that dot this wild coast, as well as the individuals there whom they meet and inspire.

On Thin Ice explores the relationship between the Inuit and the modern state in the vast but lightly populated North American Arctic. It chronicles the aspiration of the Inuit to participate in the formation and implementation of diplomatic and national security policies across the Arctic region and to contribute to the reconceptualization of Arctic Security, including the redefinition of the core values inherent in northern defense policy. With the warming of the Earth's climate, the Arctic rim states have paid increasing attention to the commercial opportunities, strategic challenges, and environmental risks of climate change. As the long isolation of the Arctic comes to an end, the Inuit who are indigenous to the region are showing tremendous diplomatic and political skills as they continue to work with the more populous states that assert sovereign control over the Arctic in an effort to mutually assert joint sovereignty across the region Published on the 50th anniversary of Ken Waltz's classic Man, the State and War, Zellen's On Thin Ice is at once a tribute to Waltz's elucidation of the three levels of analysis as well as an enhancement of his famous "Three Images," with the addition of a new "Fourth Image" to describe a tribal level of analysis. This model remains salient in not only the Arctic where modern state sovereignty remains limited, but in many other conflict zones where tribal peoples retain many attributes of their indigenous sovereignty.

Explore the changing coast of wild Alaska. . . at toddler speed - Sequel to 2009's top-selling A Long Trek Home: 400 Miles by Boot, Raft, and Ski - Unique narrative combination of thrilling adventure with the challenges of bringing small children along - An accessible window into life on America's "Last Frontier' Small Feet, Big Land follows the expeditions and daily life of a family of four: Erin McKittrick and her husband, Hig, lifelong adventure trekkers, set out t o explorethe vast and remote wild corners of Alaska with their two young children in tow.After trekking thousands of miles through harsh and beautiful wilderness together, Erin and Hig must adjust to the short attention span - and short legs - of a toddler and the weight of a newborn baby, as they walk Alaska's rapidly changing coastline. While visiting remote Arctic villages, touring a zinc mine, and exploring for two months on one of Alaska's largest glaciers, Erin sees the dramatic effects of climate change on the landscape around her, and considers the very different world in which her children may live one day.Whether huddling in the pelting rain, facing a curious grizzly bear, eating whale blubber with new friends, or picking berries on the sunny tundra their unconventional adventures draw Erin's family - and readers - closer together as they explore the intersection of wilderness and industry in America's wildest state.

In recent years, journalists and environmentalists have pointed urgently to the melting Arctic as a leading indicator of the growing effects of climate change. While climate change has unleashed profound transformations in the region, most commentators distort these changes by calling them unprecedented. In reality, the landscapes of the North American Arctic--as well as relations among scientists, Inuit, and federal governments-- are products of the region's colonial past. And even as policy analysts, activists, and scholars alike clamor about the future of our world's northern rim, too few truly understand its history.   In Unfreezing the Arctic, Andrew Stuhl brings a fresh perspective to this defining challenge of our time. With a compelling narrative voice, Stuhl weaves together a wealth of distinct episodes into a transnational history of the North American Arctic, proving that a richer understanding of its social and environmental transformation can come only from studying the region's past. Drawing on historical records and extensive ethnographic fieldwork, as well as time spent living in the Northwest Territories, he closely examines the long-running interplay of scientific exploration, colonial control, the testimony and experiences of Inuit residents, and multinational investments in natural resources. A rich and timely portrait, Unfreezing the Arctic offers a comprehensive look at scientific activity across the long twentieth century. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in political, economic, environmental, and social histories of transboundary regions the world over. The author intends to donate all royalties from this book to the Alaska Youth for Environmental Action (AYEA) and East Three School's On the Land Program.

For millennia, "the North" has held a powerful sway in Western culture. Long seen through contradictions--empty of life yet full of promise, populated by indigenous communities yet ripe for conquest, pristine yet marked by a long human history--it has moved to the foreground of contemporary life as the most dramatic stage for the reality of climate change.   This book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to ask key questions about the North and how we've conceived it--and how conceiving of it in those terms has caused us to fail the region's human and nonhuman life. Engaging questions of space, place, indigeneity, identity, nature, the environment, justice, narrative, history, and more, it offers a crucial starting point for an essential rethinking of both the idea and the reality of the North.

Chronicling her quest for wildness and home in Alaska, naturalist Marilyn Sigman writes lyrically about the history of natural abundance and human notions of wealth--from seals to shellfish to sea otters to herring, halibut, and salmon--in Alaska's iconic Kachemak Bay. Kachemak Bay is a place where people and the living resources they depend on have ebbed and flowed for thousands of years. The forces of the earth are dynamic here:  they can change in an instant, shaking the ground beneath your feet or overturning kayaks in a rushing wave. Glaciers have advanced and receded over centuries. The climate, like the ocean, has shifted from warmer to colder and back again in a matter of decades. The ocean food web has been shuffled from bottom to top again and again. In Entangled, Sigman contemplates the patterns of people staying and leaving, of settlement and displacement, nesting her own journey to Kachemak Bay within diasporas of her Jewish ancestors and of ancient peoples from Asia to the southern coast of Alaska. Along the way she weaves in scientific facts about the region as well as the stories told by Alaska's indigenous peoples. It is a rhapsodic introduction to this stunning region and a siren call to protect the land's natural resources in the face of a warming, changing world.