Who will pay: A Climate Change Story

Who will pay: A Climate Change Story

by Tim King

The vast Chukchi Sea, between the Bering Strait and the Arctic Ocean, has been the friend and partner of the Inupiaq people for millennia. It was the source of their life and their culture. But, for the Inupiaq that fished and hunted in the area of the Kivalina and Wulik rivers, that began to come to an end at the beginning of the last century.

‘Kivalina is a small Unupiaq village in Northwest Arctic Alaska that sits on a barrier reef  island,” Colleen Swan, the Kivalina Tribal Administrator, told Christine Shearer for her 2011 book Kivalina: A Climate Change Story. “The village sits there because, in 1905, the Bureau of Indian Affairs came and built a school on the island, informing the people who lived in the geographic area that they had to bring their children to the school to be educated or face imprisonment. Historically the island had only been used for seasonal hunting and fishing. The Inupiaq people complied and brought their children to the school from their individual settlements on the outskirts of the barrier island, an area that was and is their aboriginal territory.”

“Over time, life became difficult and the parents were concerned that they were endangering the lives of their children by bringing them to and from the school during winter storms and subzero temperatures. Winter consists of approximately nine months out of the year in this part of the world. The parents began moving their families to the island permanently and that began a different life for them in what is now a village called Kivalina,” Swan continued.  

The people did not need that education that the colonists forced on them and the the island they were forced to  move to was doomed.

The process likely started earlier, but Christine Shearer says that Kivalina elders first recall noticing sea erosion on the island in the 1950s. The island, which is made of sand and gravel, was being eroded from wave action and storm surges from the Chukchi’s powerful winter storms. The storms were eroding the island because year-by-year, with increasing rapidity, the Sea was warming and not forming the dense mat of protective ice before the storms began.

Shearer describes a series of storms in the first decade of this century that relentlessly chewed away the ground under the little community. An excerpted description included in her book by written by David Darlington, of the Readers Digest, is perhaps the most graphic.

“As the first big fall storm approached in 2004, the ground behind [the school principal’s] trailer collapsed. Where there had once been a broad beach between the town and the ocean, the earth behind the buildings now dropped directly into the water, and the former school principal Gerry Pickner suddenly found his house teetering on a steep bank with seawater splashing against its windows. While teachers scrambled to move his belongings into the school, the ocean advanced on the town’s fuel tank and generators; meanwhile, at the island’s north end, waves threatened a gravel airstrip, Kivalina’s main connection with the outside world,” Darlington wrote.

Kivalina was hammered by powerful storms again in 2005 and again in 2007. In 2008 the people had had enough. They sued a raft of fossil fuel companies, including Exxon Mobil, for the estimated  cost to relocate the village from the fast disappearing island to a higher site on the mainland. The US Army Corps of Engineers had estimated the cost to relocate to be between $100 and $400 million and the science was clear: The fossil fuel industry was largely responsible for the disappearing ice in the Chukchi Sea and, as a consequence, the disappearing island of Kivalina. The village also sued the fossil fuel companies for creating a false debate around global warming.

The Inupiaq people believed that they were owed recompense from the fossil fuel companies who knowingly corrupted the truth about the destructive use of fossil fuels and thereby were responsible for the destruction of their home and way of life. 

Kivalina from the air - Wikipedia

Kivalina: A Climate Change Story is not about the law suit, which was dismissed by a federal judge in 2009. It is about the tragedy experienced by the people of Kivalina. It is also about a more than fifty year campaign to knowingly corrupt American public discourse, politics, and the judiciary so that those who are responsible for the tragedy at Kivalina, and other corporate wrong doing, will not be held to account.

Minnesota recently sued ExxonMobil, and oters, for creating a false debate around global warming. If you want to understand what Minnesota’s lawsuit is up against Kivalina: A Climate Change Story is an excellent explainer.

Kivalina  A Climate Change Story, 2011; by Christine Shearer

Tim

Central Minnesota Political