arctic voices resistance at the tipping point Edited by Subhankar Banerjee SEVEN STORIES PRESS New York Copyright © 2012 by Subhankar Banerjee A SEVEN STORIES PRESS FIRST EDITION Arctic Voices is being made possible by a generous grant from the Alaska Wilderness League. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. SEVEN STORIES PRESS 140 Watts Street New York, NY 10013 sevenstories.com College professors may order examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles for a free six-month trial period. To order, visit http://www.sevenstories.com/textbook or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226–1411. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Arctic voices: resistance at the tipping point / edited by Subhankar Banerjee. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13:978-1-60980-385-8 (hardback) ISBN-10:1-60980-385-X (hardback) E-ISBN: 978-1-60980-386-5 1. Arctic peoples—Social conditions. 2. Indigenous peoples—Ecology—Arctic regions. 3. Traditional ecological knowledge—Arctic regions. 4. Environmental degradation—Arctic regions. 5. Environmental responsibility—Arctic regions. 6. Arctic regions—Environmental conditions. I. Banerjee, Subhankar. GN473.A76 2012 577.0911’3—dc23 2012011126 PHOTOGRAPHY THROUGHOUT BY SUBHANKAR BANERJEE (unless otherwise indicated) DESIGN BY POLLEN, NEW YORK PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS From Kolkata to Kaktovik En Route to Arctic Voices Something Like an Introduction SUBHANKAR BANERJEE Here’s What You Can Do to Keep Wild Alive EMILIE KARRICK SURRUSCO and CINDY SHOGAN PART ONE snapshot of now From Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North NANCY LORD They Have No Ears RIKI OTT BPing the Arctic? SUBHANKAR BANERJEE Teshekpuk in the Arctic’s Biggest Wetland STEVE ZACK and JOE LIEBEZEIT Protecting the Apples but Chopping the Trees ANDRI SN.SR MAGNASON PART TWO pain and joy of being connected From Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic MARLA CONE The Fall of the Yukon Kings DAN O’NEILL Following Cranes to the Arctic GEORGE ARCHIBALD Broken Promises: The Reality of Big Oil in America’s Arctic PAMELA A. MILLER From Kivalina: A Climate Change Story CHRISTINE SHEARER PART THREE we are the caribou people From People of the Deer FARLEY MOWAT Caribou Currency SETH KANTNER We ‘ll Fight to Protect the Caribou Calving Ground and Gwich’in Way of Life JONATHON SOLOMON, SARAH JAMES, and REVEREND TRIMBLE GILBERT Caribou Time NICK JANS PART FOUR ardlic ocean is our garden From Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape BARRY LOPEZ We Will Fight to Protect the Arctic Ocean and Our Way of Life ROBERT THOMPSON, ROSEMARY AHTUANGARUAK, CAROLINE CANNON, and EARL KINGIK Dancing for the Whales: Kivġiq and Cultural Resilience Among the People of the Whales CHIE SAKAKIBARA PART FIVE reporting from the field From Coming into the Country JOHN MCPHEE In the Great Country PETER MATTHIESSEN Coast to Coast: Perilous Journeys with Arctic Shorebirds STEPHEN BROWN In Calloused Human Hands: Tuullik, Teshekpuk, and Our Western Arctic JEFF FAIR PART SIX decade, after decade, after decade … From Two in the Far North MARGARET E. MURIE From Being Caribou KARSTEN HEUER From Midnight Wilderness DEBBIE S. MILLER Saving the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge GEORGE B. SCHALLER PART SEVEN we gather; we speak out; we organize A Brief History of Native Solidarity MARIA SHAA TLÁA WILLIAMS We’ll Fight to Protect the Gwich’in Homeland and Our Way of Life Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge CHIEF DACHO ALEXANDER, MARILYN SAVAGE, and MATTHEW GILBERT Past and Present, Culture in Progress VELMA WALLIS From The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Sprits in Siberia PIERS VITEBSKY Acknowledgments Contributors Credits and Permissions From Kolkata To Kaktovik En Route To Arctic Voices Something Like An Introduction SUBHANKAR BANERJEE “I learned by living out in the wilderness.” —Sarah James1 “When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bigger war is the war against the planet. This war has its roots in an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits—limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration.” —Vandana Shiva2 1. How do we talk about the Arctic? How do we think about the Arctic? How do we relate to the Arctic? And, why talk about the Arctic, now? These are some questions we explore, through stories, in this volume. Along the way, we talk about big animals, big migrations, big hunting, big land, big rivers, big ocean, and big sky; and also about big coal, big oil, big warming, big spills, big pollution, big legislations, and big lawsuits. And we talk about small things, too—small animals, small migrations, small hunting, small rivers, small warming, small spills, small pollution, small legislations, and small lawsuits. 2. In the Arctic, impacts of climate change can be seen and/or experienced everywhere.3 Indeed, the Arctic is warming at a rate double that of the rest of the planet. When I was in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 2001–02, there was much talk in the communities about oil development, but very little about climate change. But when I returned north to Alaska/Siberia/Yukon in 2005, 2006, and 2007, almost everyone was talking about the effects of climate change on animals and on the communities. I had witnessed things that I had not seen before—an exposed coffin from melting of permafrost (plate 15); a drunken forest in Siberia, trees leaning at odd angles from softening of the permafrost; and the skeleton of caribou that had died from starvation due to winter icing on the tundra. I also had heard stories of communities that needed to relocate because of coastal erosion (see Christine Shearer’s essay in this volume); the drying up of lakes that is affecting subsistence fishing; and deeper snow or taller and bushier willows making the migration much harder for the caribou, for examples. We tell many stories of climate change in Arctic Voices. At the same time, I am realizing that there is an Arctic paradox: that oil, coal, and gas, the burning of which has caused unprecedented Arctic warming, are the same nonrenewable resources whose extraction projects are expanding rapidly in the Arctic—terrestrial and offshore. These days there is talk about ecological restoration, including ecological corridors—to connect up landscapes that we fragmented all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—from Yellowstone to Yukon; from Baja to Bering. In the Arctic, however, we are going in reverse—severely fragmenting the ecocultural space with great speed. There are resource wars4—for oil, gas, coal, and minerals—everywhere in the Arctic—from Alaska to Siberia, with Nunavut and Greenland along the way. In Arctic Alaska, these wars have intensified since I first arrived there more than a decade ago. I’d also note here that Arctic Alaska resides in the most biologically diverse quadrant of In the winter of 2006 about a thousand caribou from the Teshekpuk Lake herd came over to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a 240-mile journey. Kaktovik resident Robert Thompson said that this never happened before. He speculated that the tundra froze, and the caribou came looking for food. The tundra also froze in the Arctic Refuge, resulting in the deaths of several hundred animals that winter. The skeleton shown is one those dead caribou that was photographed the following summer. Due to unprecedented Arctic warming there is thawing of snow and rain during the autumn and winter months, followed by freezing that produces solid ice on the tundra. Hoofed animals, including caribou/reindeer and musk ox are able to dig through snow to find food, but are not able to break through ice— they are starving and dying. In many parts of the arctic these freeze-thaw cycles have contributed to significant population decline for these animals. (Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee, August 2006.) the circumpolar north. There is a great irony in the fact that oil sits underneath caribou calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; oil sits underneath bird nesting and molting grounds in the Teshekpuk Lake Wetland; coal sits underneath caribou calving grounds in the Utukok River Upland; oil sits underneath the migration route of bowhead whales in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. It’s worth taking a look at how much coal and oil is up there in Arctic Alaska. By current estimates, there is some 30 billion barrels of oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. Let’s put that number in perspective. In the US, each year we consume a little over 7.5 billion barrels of oil—30 billion barrels only amounts