Lessons Learned

While I do consider myself a morning person, setting my alarm clock for 2:00 a.m. crosses the line. When the noise jolted me from my sleep, I did however switch from the unconscious to the conscious fairly quickly as my mind registered that soon I would be boarding a plane heading to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as part of a class offered at California State University Channel Islands. We were about to spend six days to study the impacts of climate change.

A few short hours after waking I watched the world transform beneath me. Familiar mountains covered in chaparral disappeared and the view shifted to much larger features like Mt. Shasta, Mt. Olympia, Denali and long stretches of valleys, filled with verdant rivers, lakes and streams without any homes, roads or even one bright neon backpacking tent dotting the landscape.

Over the past 50 years, Alaska has warmed at more than twice the rate of the rest of the United States. The impacts that global warming is having in this area are numerous. Villages are being relocated due to sea-level rise, glaciers are melting, and permafrost is melting. Climate change is pushing many species in Alaska towards extinction – including Alaska spruce, polar bears, arctic fox, caribou, beluga whales, and numerous migrating bird species.

After spending one night in Deadhorse, we boarded another plane for the Barter Island - located just off the North coast. Barter Island is four miles long and two miles wide at its widest point. As its name suggests, the island was used as a trading center for the native Inupiat people up until the nineteenth century. During the Cold War, the U.S. military built an airstrip and a listening and communications station here, of which remnant structures are still in place. Several families established homes near the airstrip and in 1971 the city of Kaktovik was incorporated.

Once we landed on the small airstrip, we caught a ride to the famous Waldo Arms Hotel. Waldo Arms is the best (and only) hotel in Kaktovik. Walt and Merlyn, whom own and run the place, are the classic Alaskan couple. Kind, warm, and welcoming – yet you couldn’t help but get the feeling that they were as tough as environment that surrounds them.

Our hungry group of six college students and two professors were happy to see that their little kitchen was open and taking orders. As we ate our sandwiches, Merlyn warmly offered little bits of informatin about the changes she has noted over the last fourteen years that she has called Kaktovik home, including the excitement over a new glacier that was recently discovered on the island. Scientists have been using the Waldo Arms Hotel a a home base to study receding glaciers in the Arctic for several years. Last year a storm exposed an unknown glacier on the island. Scientists believe that this ancient ice, being exposed for the first time in thousands of years, might foreshadow a period of extreme loss of land along Alaska’s northern coast due to warming temperatures. The rate of erosion along Alaska’s northeastern coastline has doubled over the past 50 years.

I knew that Merlyn was a wealth of information, and as our group prepared to head back out to the airport to make one last flight before settling into the our camp in the refuge, I quickly scanned my head to think of at least one question of importance to ask her before we departed to spend five days camping in the Refuge.

“Merlyn,” I asked, “if there was one thing that you wished that visitors here would learn here in Kaktovik, what would it be?”

After thinking a bit, she said that she hoped visitors would realize that if they truly want to protect this special place, they needed to change the way they live back home.

I find it ironic that after the spending previous day and a half of flying in awe over the large expansive wilderness that seemed to have no end, the world suddenly felt very tiny. I was on an isolated island in the remote Arctic Ocean, and yet this place is tightly connected to the decisions and habits of people all over the world.

It is difficult to limit our impact in today’s society. The planes that take us to these beautiful destinations take their toll as they emit tons of CO2 into our atmosphere. Our daily lives are filled with all kinds of environmental dilemmas – how to work and school, how far the groceries we buy have to travel in order to get to my table, and what bag to use to take those groceries home. All of these can be connected to the black gold that lies up in the Arctic Refuge – and the people that live there that rely upon a healthy ecosystem.

For me, climate change now has a face. The days spent in the Arctic that followed meeting Merlyn were filled with other encounters - porcupine caribou, grizzlies, ptarmigan and Arctic Tern. I spent time in the remote Arctic Village with members of the Gwich’in nation, whose very culture is sustained by the migrating porcupine caribou herd. But Merlin's answer to my question stayed with me. While I am still challenged to make the right decisions on a daily basis, I now have an extra incentive. I have a clear image of Merlin and this delicate and wondrous place that I know is hanging in the balance.