Читать книгу High Tide: How Climate Crisis is Engulfing Our Planet - Mark Lynas - Страница 16

At first sight, it was clear that Max had told the truth. The oil industry had done well for the people in the area. Many of the houses had pickup trucks as well as snowmachines, and smooth gravelled roads led between the buildings. There was proper water and sanitation too – something which Shishmaref had notably lacked, where ‘honeybuckets’ (a bucket with a bag which is carried out and dumped centrally when full) had been the only toilets. Oil money had also brought the village – which, like Shishmaref, had once been just a few earth houses stuck out on the barrier island – a high school, a fire station, a police department, a community centre, a water plant, a power plant and a municipal services building.

The industry has also brought jobs to Kaktovik. Many of the young men and women work in Native-owned oilfield contracting companies, which is helping to improve the standard of living and keeping unemployment – the scourge of Native communities – down to tolerable levels. As I talked to people around the place, I rapidly got the impression that not even the elders felt nostalgic for the days when the Eskimos had lived entirely off the land. It had been a difficult existence: life expectancy had been much lower, and during the worst winters whole families had starved to death.

That’s not to say that the subsistence aspect of daily life has been completely ditched: Kaktovik’s annual whale hunt, carried out by the men in a flotilla of small boats, is the year’s social high-point, and caribou, seals and fish are still vital parts of people’s diet and culture. In fact, this conscious dependence on a clean sea leads to the one area the Eskimos do stand up and oppose the oil industry – in its moves towards offshore drilling. A spill under the ice would be nearly impossible to clean up, and would spell disaster for fish, whales and seals alike.

I was invited to a family house that afternoon. Jack Kayotuk was slicing up squares of beluga whale blubber in a bucket, a delicacy known as muktuk, when I arrived. ‘Yep, it’s mighty fine tasting stuff,’ he said approvingly, as I chewed some of it. It tasted like fishy rubber, fatty and impossibly rich. Jack carefully peeled the grey skin off the fat and pale-pink meat (it reminded me of pulling sticky tape off a roll). There was caribou and rehydrated mashed potato to go with it. ‘I’ve never been south of the Arctic Circle,’ Jack told me with a grin. ‘It gets too damn hot down there.’

I asked if he supported the oil industry.

‘Yeah, and I’d like to see oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge too. I think it would be all right for Alaska and for this town also. It would give us all the jobs that we need.’ He mentioned how high the cost of living was in remote communities where everything had to be flown in.

Later that evening there was a knock on the door of the Waldo Arms, the homely log cabin-cum-hostel where I was staying, and Ida Angasan came in, stamping the snow from her boots. Fifty-five-year-old Ida was Administrative School Secretary, and fond of talking to visitors. I fetched her a coke, and she plonked down on the sofa in front of the television set. The local channel was broadcasting rolling text messages to all the villages, about the weather, upcoming social events and so on.

‘I’m for drilling,’ she declared enthusiastically. ‘If they do it with safety and caution. After they drill I’ve seen how they put everything back together.’

I asked her why.

‘The main reason is my own students – they are our future. We need a new gym, we need a new school. It’s not big enough to have state championships for basketball and volleyball. I want a full-sized swimming pool too.’ She laughed. ‘I’m not asking for much, am I?’

‘What about the wilderness?’

‘I don’t live in the wilderness. I’m a hundred per cent Inupiat Eskimo. This is our land. We live off the land, we subsistence hunt, we do our three whales every fall…’

And had she noticed any changes in the local environment?

‘Oh, yeah,’ Ida began. ‘There’s no icebergs any more. When we used to go whaling there were icebergs – we used to get fresh water from them. Then in the past few years, it’s like all of a sudden…there’s no ice. It all melts away.’ She paused. ‘I think it’s endangering our polar bears, our seals, our ducks. I was in front of my house tonight and I saw this strange little bird – those birds come down from the mountains, so maybe it’s getting warmer out there.’

She was now in full flow. ‘You go to Barrow and there’s open water in January. That’s very unusual. This is the second year in a row that there is open water. And when it goes out, it doesn’t leave chunks like it used to – it just disappears.’

I asked her how she felt about it.

‘It matters to me. I don’t understand it. Is it because we’re not putting enough oxygen or too much pavement down, or not planting enough trees? I’ve seen how it floods now and gets hot in all of the US.’

Could it be global warming?

‘What else could it be? I don’t know.’ She asked me to explain more about global warming. I told her about greenhouse gases, about the rapidly-rising temperatures, about the disproportionate effect on the Arctic north and how much worse it was likely to get. I told her what I’d heard in Fairbanks from Professor Gunter Weller, and what I’d heard from the Native residents of Shishmaref and Huslia. Her shoulders drooped as she listened.

‘Well, all I can say is God bless us all,’ she said quietly. ‘All I know is we’re in the billions now, and we all try to survive.’ She sighed. ‘I agree with you. If I knew more about it, I would do something. I really would.’

My time in Alaska was drawing to a close. I had expected Kaktovik to be hostile and bleak because of the oil connection, but it was just as warm and welcoming as the other Native villages. People stopped to give me a lift if I was spotted walking the few hundred yards from the hostel towards the centre of the village, and I was constantly invited into their houses as if I were an old friend.

Another thing that impressed me was the concern the Inupiat Eskimos had for their local wildlife. For a start, everyone in Kaktovik is obsessed with polar bears. People don’t seem to shoot them like in Shishmaref – instead they drive to the end of the airstrip, where the whalebone dump is, and sit in their pickup trucks to watch entranced whilst the huge bears lumber around sniffing for any bits of remaining meat.

There are only 20,000 polar bears left in the world, and on my last evening in Kaktovik I was keen to see one in the wild. Travelling up to the end of the airstrip with a local hunting guide called Robert Thompson, we circled the whalebone dump, but it was empty.

Robert turned round on the snowmachine. I was standing on the sled at the back.

‘Let’s go a bit further afield,’ he called out.

We travelled east, to a spit of land where the sea ice had piled up high against the beach, making a ridge about twenty feet high – the only vantage point for miles around. Robert stopped the snowmachine and dismounted, moving gingerly forward, revolver cocked.

‘Sometimes they can come straight at you from behind these ice mounds,’ he told me. ‘I don’t want to take any chances.’

It was well after midnight, and the sky was cloudy, with a strange reddish light making distances difficult to judge. As I peered over the Arctic Ocean, each successive snowdrift seemed to metamorphose into a polar bear and then back again. The wind was bitter, blowing spindrift between the mounds of ice.

‘There’s no one between here and the North Pole,’ muttered Robert, as he scanned the horizon with binoculars.

Then I saw it – a distinct yellow dot moving in the distance. ‘There!’

Robert whipped round. ‘Oh yeah, I got him. Quick – let’s go closer.’

We leapt back onto the snowmachine and headed north. Suddenly the bear popped up right in front of us, and then – startled by the noise of the engine – quickly loped off. It stopped again two hundred yards away, the black dots of its eyes and nose amongst the yellow fur clearly visible to the naked eye. It yawned and lay down for a while, before lumbering off again at a surprisingly fast rate towards Kaktovik.

We followed it, and as we neared the village, I could see that several cars were already moving down the airstrip to marvel at the scene.

I felt immensely privileged to have seen a polar bear – the more so because of how threatened these beautiful animals are going to become as climate change destroys their habitat over the next few decades. Already there is evidence from Canada’s Hudson Bay that polar bears are less well nourished and bring up fewer cubs in the years when sea ice breaks up earlier.³² And this is, unfortunately, only the beginning.

With temperatures rising ever faster and sea ice coverage shrinking fast, polar bears – together with other ice-dependent animals like seals, walruses and belugas – are going to be squeezed onto a smaller and smaller remnant of floating polar ice during twenty-first-century summers.

Once that perennial ice disappears for ever – as it is likely to do within the next hundred years, according to the latest predictions³³ – the entire Arctic marine ecosystem, as we currently know it, will be destroyed. The frozen North Pole will cease to exist, leaving open water at the top of the Earth. The polar bears will have nowhere left to go, and their extinction is near certain.

This spells disaster, of course, not just for the animals but for human populations too – not just the residents of Shishmaref and Kaktovik, but all the Native people living in Canada, Siberia and Greenland – who currently depend on them. As a US government study drily points out, ‘few adaptation options are likely to be available’ once the animals begin to disappear for ever.³⁴

Time is running out too for the land areas of the Arctic. With twenty-first-century warming predicted as high as a staggering 10°C,³⁵ much of the remaining permafrost is likely to thaw – further damaging forests, houses, roads and other infrastructure, and raising the spectre of massive releases of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane from bogland hitherto inert and frozen.³⁶

In addition, the area of tundra is likely to decrease by two-thirds, a looming catastrophe for all the animals and plants which are adapted to this fragile Arctic ecosystem. This is ironic too, considering the current debate over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and its potential effect on the caribou. Because tundra mosses, forbs and lichens are a vital winter food source for the caribou, climate change could decimate the herds whatever the outcome of the oil drilling debate.³⁷

This is just one of several bitter ironies facing Alaskans as their entire environment morphs with the rapidly-rising temperatures. The biggest and bitterest of all, of course, is that an overwhelming majority of state residents still seem deadset on pumping out their fossil fuel reserves for as long as the oil keeps flowing – whatever the eventual cost to their climate.

This dissonance sheds some light, perhaps, on the complexity of human psychology, and how difficult it is to tackle societal denial based on wilful ignorance and self-interest. But it also illustrates the wider struggle that modern civilisation in general is going to face if it is to change its ways in time to head off the worst of the looming catastrophe that lies ahead.

In this sense, the dilemma facing the residents of America’s largest and most northerly state is one which faces all of us, each time we boil a kettle, switch on a light, drive a car, or vote. It’s not unique to Kaktovik, Fairbanks or Anchorage. In this modern, interconnected, energy-hungry world, we are all Alaskans.