Sinking Villages Shouldn't Sink Dreams

In a place where a gallon of water costs over $9 and poverty levels are twice the statewide average, imagine confronting the well over $100 million cost of transplanting your entire community miles away.

That's the dilemma facing tiny Shishmaref, Alaska. This village of around 600 is, along with other tiny Alaskan coastal communities such as Kivalina (pictured), Shaktoolik, Unalakleet and Newtok, at the forefront of the global climate crisis.

Shishmaref sits on an island just three miles long and only a quarter mile wide. For the past decade, the Chukchi Sea has been slowly swallowing Shishmaref. That's happening at a rate of 25-50 feet of land per winter storm, according to Brice Eningowuk of the Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Committee in an interview with Conducive Magazine.

These Arctic villages were formerly protected by sea ice and permafrost, but warming temperatures are reducing these natural storm barriers at an alarming rate. Sea walls constructed in Hail Mary efforts to protect Shishmaref have repeatedly failed.

On Earth Day, it's vital that we remember that one of the great injustices of climate change is that the first places impacted are in many cases communities already at the margins of societies.

Shishmaref and its peers are subsistence economies, built on ways of life that are thousands of years old. The Inupiaq Eskimo locals rely on a diet based around bearded seal, walrus and fish. Shipping and fuel costs make meat and produce bought in local stores problematically expensive. When storms hit, they imperil homes and businesses, as well as wash out to sea the food racks, boats and hunting gear that keep the villages' hearts beating.

Residents have resisted efforts to move to bigger towns like Nome and Kotzebue, which provide more diverse economic opportunities.

"People make their livings off carvings, because they didn't really do well in high school or have too good of jobs," a Shishmaref teen named Burt told PRX Radio and the Alaska Teen Media Institute. "It'll be harder for them to get their hands on materials for carvings, all these things will be harder to get in big cities."

Locals did vote to relocate their town in 2002, but they're pushing for a move to a closer mainland site, which will allow them to continue their traditional lifestyle. Wherever they go, the journey will come with a hefty price tag. Schools, clinics, roads, airports, and energy infrastructure must all be reconstructed.

That cost lies behind the long delay. So far, money cobbled together from the Army Corps of Engineers and other state, federal and local sources hasn't been sufficient to move Shishmaref.

For now, locals are facing dual crises: finding the funding necessary to transplant their community before more buildings — or, worse, lives — are lost (you can donate here), and finding the right way to mourn what's already missing. People here are young (the median age in Shishmaref is just 24, according to city-data.com), and they are coming of age amid a gulf of uncertainty.

"I can still picture where my grandfather's house was, and to think of all that land gone is really amazing," another local teen, named Theresa, told PRX. "Making us move into a city wouldn't be right.  Why make us be like everyone else and lose our way of life?"

Photo credit: uscgpress