Secretary of State John Kerry, in Alaska to host a high-level international conference on the rapidly changing Arctic, said Monday he took an important lesson from the tribal leader in a tiny Dena'ina village.
When Lee Stephan, chief of the village government in Eklutna, opened the GLACIER conference with a reference to 10,000 years of indigenous history in Southcentral Alaska, that put the carbon-emitting Industrial Age -- which did not start until the late 1800s -- into perspective, Kerry said.
"You see the contrast pretty starkly. And it struck me that this is the right place to be, this was the right site to come and discuss those issues," he told the conference audience in the opening session.
By being in Anchorage, listening to Mayor Ethan Berkowitz, Northwest Arctic Borough Mayor Reggie Joule, Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott and other Alaskans, conference attendees "have a better sense of the human dimension" and the moral challenges of addressing climate change, Kerry said.
"The motto of Alaska is 'North to the Future.' So I think it's particularly fitting today that men and women from every corner of the globe have come north for the future," Kerry said.
He mentioned dramatic changes documented in Alaska -- thawing permafrost; coastal erosion; floods, such as the 2013 disaster that ruined most of the buildings in the Yukon River village of Galena; more fierce wildfire seasons, including this year's season, in which a near-record 5 million acres have burned; and other conditions.
"The bottom line is that climate change is not a distant threat for our children and their children," he said. "It is now. It is happening now. I think anybody running for any high office in any nation in the world should come to Alaska or any other place where it is happening and inform themselves about this."
The conference will help shape goals for work at the upcoming United National climate conference, to be held in December in Paris, Kerry said.