Like so many people this time of year, I've been dragging around town half-heartedly doing errands, in an effort to get my chores done before a full-blown cold settles in. I'm really tired, necessitating lots of tea, napping, and the elimination of dairy products from my diet, at the suggestion of a local barista and my doctor alike. While I rest up with that run-down feeling, I've been catching up on t.v. with a few DVDs from the library.
"The Last Days of Shishmaref", a documentary about a region of Alaska and the native Eskimo people who live a traditional lifestyle there, is a visually arresting movie. It's wild America at its most beautiful.
The climate is quickly changing in a warming trend that's been dramatically effecting the seasons for a long time now, with the polar ice caps melting to catastrophic effect. Bearing the brunt of this global impact are the Inupiaq people, who have relied upon seasonality to provide for their families for over 4,000 years.
Worsening storms from enormous ice melts and longer warm seasons have caused so much damage to their small island, that the tribe has already moved their homes back from the shoreline once. Sadly, that's not enough to save it. Shishmaref will soon be totally under water.
The good news is that part of the mainland has been reclaimed for their tribe. They will still have their ancestral hunting grounds and fishing territories, though serious adjustments will be made by their moving. They have been an island people for a very long time.
While the wheels of government adjust slowly to our everday realities, the fact is this: relocation is extremely costly to people and the environment. The move for Shishmaref costs about $186 million, money that could have been spent on sustainable, eco-friendly tenchonlogies a long time ago. What say we make the wheels of change move a little quicker? The indigenous people of the Americas were here first. It's only fair: http://www.thelastdaysofshishmaref.com/shishmaref3/cms/cms_module/index.php
In this global world we live in, we are all neighbors.
