By Duncan Campbell
GuardianJuly 16, 2001
As a girl, Sarah James and her seven brothers and sisters learned how to snare beaver and rabbits and how to fish for grayling in the wilderness around Arctic Village, a tiny settlement of 150 Native Alaskans inside the Arctic Circle.
Her brothers and her father hunted caribou and moose, her mother tanned the hides and sewed the fur, and their way of life seemed to reflect the name of their tribe: Gwich'in, the Land Where Life Began. Now that feeling of lyrical permanence is over. "We used to have four healthy seasons, but all that is off-balance now," Sarah James, now 56, said. "The treeline has changed, the lakes have dried up. Global warming is very real up here."
The experience of Sarah James and her family will have particular resonance today when a last-ditch attempt to salvage international efforts to combat global warming begins at the climate change talks in Bonn. The talks have been cast into the gloom by the decision of the United States, the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases, to pull out of the Kyoto protocol.
In rejecting the protocol, an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally by 5.2% from the 1990 level by 2008-12, George Bush said: "I will not accept an accord which will harm our economy and hurt American workers." Sarah James is an American worker. She believes that those who live in the northernmost US state are already experiencing the economic hardship that Mr Bush fears. And yet the cause of her suffering is not the Kyoto protocol, but quite the reverse: the global warming it is designed to curb.
Since the late 19th-century Arctic Village has been the focal point of the Gwich'in, who comprise 7,000 people spread over 15 villages, still speaking their own language and living in the traditional way by hunting caribou, moose and duck and fishing in the lakes and streams for pike and grayling. The village is reachable only by a 90-minute flight from Fairbanks, and experiences the extremes of summer, when it darkens, and a bitter winter, when it can be light for only three hours in the day.
It straddles two worlds: there is satellite television and access to the internet in the tribal council office, but no running water or inside lavatories. It has its own post office with the American flag flying beside it, but its traditions owe more to Native Alaskan ways, which many in the village now see as threatened by President Bush's professed desire to drill for oil in the Arctic Refuge to the immediate north. A more immediate threat comes from the effects of climate changes, which are more apparent here than anywhere else in the US. So great are the local fears that they called a tribal gathering last month, the first for 13 years. During it they blessed the new solar panels on the roof of their washeteria, where they do their laundry and take their showers. The panels provide energy in summer, and are a reminder that there are renewable forms of energy that the world has barely exploited.
But it is the rise in winter temperatures that the older people in the village have noticed most. "It used to always be 60 below [-51C] in the winter, but we don't get that any more," said Kias Peter, at 72 an experienced hunter and one of the village elders. "We have lost 13 lakes around here." Calvin Tritt, 50, a former Gwich'in chief, who served in the marines, lives out towards the tiny airstrip. "In spring we used to fish for grayling through the ice and get piles of them. Last week there were only two. When I was young the caribou had about two inches of fat on them, now they're scrawny and they're going loco."
He has little time for President Bush, and said it was difficult to persuade the government to study the many changes he believes are affecting the health of the villagers. "The white man thinks we're like little children." Unlike many isolated rural villages, Arctic Village has managed to retain its young people. About 60 children attend the timbered elementary and secondary schools, and many of the younger adults - the new chief, Evon David, is 25 - have become involved in what they see as a fight to preserve the village against the changes global warming has already brought.
Faith Gemmill, a young woman, who works for the Gwich'in steering committee, said: "Our people noticed changes about five years ago. Now our creeks, our lakes and rivers are drying up. All my life, when we went up on the mountain we would camp by fresh mountain water, and that has gone. There were always ground squirrels, and they've gone too." Next month the Porcupine river caribou herd, the traditional diet of the village, is due to arrive and with it the hunting season will begin, which means that the villagers can go out and camp on the mountainside, hunt, and dry the caribou meat for the winter.
Hungry bears
"On the mountain we usually don't run into grizzlies, but last year our hunters came across three different bears," Ms Gemmill said. "The bears weren't frightened, and they tried to attack, so the hunters had to kill them; and the reason the bears weren't afraid is because they were starving." The evidence for global warming across Alaska is stark. The average temperature has risen 3C - 4.5C in winter, 10 times the rate elsewhere in the world. In Kotzebue the tundra has turned from spongy to dry and the sourdocks and many other plants have disappeared. The region's polar bears have lost 20% of their weight in the past few years.
The arctic ice is 40% thinner than in 1960. In Deering it is melting so fast that hunting on it has to abandoned early, and in Point Lay it is now too thin to walk on. Down in Fairbanks, the gateway to the arctic, the golf course is remarkable for two reasons: you can watch people teeing off in summer at midnight and you can see that they have some unintended holes to contend with. The holes and the dips and waves in the adjoining Farmer's Loop Road, are the most obvious examples of what happens when the permafrost, which underlies the region to a depth of 600 metres (2,000ft), starts to melt.
Glenn Juday, professor of forest ecology at the University of Alaska, has noticed dramatic differences in the local forest system, most obviously in the growth patterns of trees, the change in the treeline, and the biggest single outbreak of fatal the spruce bark beetle infestation in south central Alaska which, he says, is a direct result of warming and drier trees. Changes of that magnitude had not happened for centuries, he said, adding that there were "a number of tantalising hints" that the big changes in Alaska were the result of greenhouse gases.
Professor Tom Osterkamp, who has been compiling data on changes in the permafrost, printed out a graph to demonstrate the rise in temperature. "It sure has been a long spell of warming," he said. Recently a visiting academic asked the Gwich'in in Arctic Village whether they would like to be joined by road to the rest of Alaska. Almost unanimously the villagers said no. Looking at the miles of rolling mountains and wilderness, disturbed only by the occasional crack of a hunting rifle or flock of truculent crows, it is easy to see why. But the rest of the world may be arriving at their doorstep in a different form if the effects of global warming continue at such speed. "The world needs to look at some other alternative energy," Ms James said. "Too bad it's going to affect them too."
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