One morning in the fall of 2001, I was examined skeptically by a table of Iñupiat business leaders in a hotel coffee shop, sizing me up to determine if they would assist me in writing a book about climate change. They wanted to know if I was an anti-oil environmentalist before their community would cooperate with me.
Setting out to write "The Whale and the Supercomputer" in 2001, I started with no preconceptions about climate change or oil development. I was lucky enough to arrive when Native leaders were making their own decisions about the changes they were seeing in the environment. I told the story of their realization alongside my own.
Fourteen years later, those changes have accelerated.
Spring comes ever earlier on the Arctic Ocean, and fall is later. Ice is thinner and covers less water, with many biological changes caused by warming. Everything that started back then has proceeded, in many cases, more rapidly and with more disruption than the worst predictions. All while carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from burning fossil fuels.
But business leaders on the North Slope still fight for the outwardly conflicting positions of admitting the climate crisis while also supporting Arctic oil development.
Just like President Barack Obama. And, increasingly, like most Alaskans.
Clear conflict
Are we all hypocrites for accepting an Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, or a public school education, while knowing that the oil production paying for it is helping to rob us of winter?
Richard Glenn has answered that question many times. He is executive vice president of lands and natural resources for Arctic Slope Regional Corp. He was a big character in my book. His wife, Arlene, was pregnant and my youngest was at home in diapers when we spent days on the sea ice, in whaling camp, talking about these issues (now his youngest is in middle school). When we spoke again recently, he asked and answered the hypocrisy question before I had a chance to work up to it in our conversation.
"Don't you see a kind of conflict there? I get regionally selfish when we reach that part of the discussion," he said. "Planes are still going to fly, trains are still going to roll, so why shouldn't that hydrocarbon come for the support of our communities?"
Glenn trained as a geologist and takes great pride in the knowledge that his work has helped provide for his community and family, keeping them warm with natural gas and keeping Barrow humming with oil money. It's a similar sense of purpose he gets from hunting bowhead whales in an umiaq, a traditional boat made from the skin of the bearded seal, and sharing the catch with the entire community.
If anything, he's more pro-oil now than he was when we met. At that time, he considered offshore oil exploration too dangerous because it would threaten marine mammals that are the foundation of Iñupiaq culture. Now he supports the current exploration campaign by Shell, along with the Arctic Slope Regional Corp. and many, but not all, North Slope leaders.
The reason is the same. Oil keeps the North Slope and all of Alaska running. If the trans-Alaska pipeline shuts down, so does the economy. More discoveries are needed to slow the decline toward that inevitable day.
'Worry every year'
Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, a former mayor of Nuiqsut, considers the risk too great. "If we put oil and gas first, we'll never protect the bounty we need for ourselves and generations to come," she said. "I worry every year that the ice conditions of our elders are not the ice conditions we have, about whether or not they are going to be able to get back with the harvest of the whale."
But when I posed the question about others' hypocrisy to Ahtuanguruak, she held back, saying only, "For me there is a lot of concern."
It's an important Iñupiaq value to avoid conflict and refrain from publicly criticizing others. Besides, these are hard questions, not easy ones, so why not give one another a break and work through them together, with mutual respect?
After I wrote my book, I toured the country speaking to audiences and media representatives, often in the uncomfortable position of representing what the Eskimos think. On a smoggy day in Los Angeles, I rode to a talk show over clogged freeways, my mind boggled by the waste of energy you see there, as huge cars with single passengers creep along in the blazing hot sun.
The host asked me if the Eskimos were hypocrites for supporting oil development while suffering from climate change. I said, "No more than anyone else."
Charles Wohlforth is the author of more than 10 books. He lives in Anchorage.