Climate Change Resources for Intro to Sociology

On November 30th, 2020, I talked about climate change as a guest in a friend's Introduction to Sociology class at Foothill College (on Zoom). I answered his questions and then tried to address his student's questions.

What got you started?

One of my friend's first questions was about what got me started working on climate change. The first thing that hit me hard and got me thinking about climate change as a NOW problem not a SOMEDAY problem was -- back in 2004 -- hearing about how reindeer herders in Siberia were sinking into the thawing permafrost, losing their traditional pastures and migration routes. Something that seemed eternal, permafrost, was being lost, and with it a whole culture. I wrote more about this topic -- thawing permafrost's impacts on indigenous communities -- in a recent blog post: "From Beneath Us It Devours." (I include a good list of sources on the topic at the bottom of that blog post.)

But the thing that really kicked me into gear was attending a talk in November 2008 where I heard the journalist Isabel Hilton talk about the implications of the loss of the Himalayan Glacier in terms of the whole system of trade winds and ocean currents, and also geopolitical security, since China, India, and Pakistan all rely on that glacier for water. This Asia Society article about the event quotes Ms. Hilton: "I think what’s in store as the glaciers retreat, as the water diminishes, is potentially one of the first climate-change wars of the 21st century."

I remember there was silence in the room after she finished speaking. A hand went up in the back. "What can we do?" She answered: "Work on adaptation." I had no idea what she meant, but I wrote down the word "adaptation" and the next day started researching ways to focus my Master's thesis on whatever it was. 

Read "Regional Cooperation at the Third Pole: The Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau and Climate Change" (2009), featuring Ms. Hilton's interviews with experts on the condition of the glacier and its importance to the region.

This Science X (Phys.org) item from August 2020, "Two-thirds of glacier ice in the Himalayas will be lost by 2100 if climate targets aren't met," is a nice summary of the current state of research and projections for the condition of the Himalayan Glacier.

What can I do?

Now, not everybody can focus their career on climate change adaptation. And while the real game-changing solutions will need to be institutional and widespread, individuals of all walks of life can play a role in the solutions. You can educate yourself on how climate change affects whatever field you end up in -- climate change is an "everything" problem, it touches on all our systems. You can be the health care professional who knows about climate change impacts like heat and smoke on the health of vulnerable populations. If you are a landscape architect you can learn about the benefits of drought-friendly native plants and innovative water management in a hotter, dryer climate. You can be a source of good information for your colleagues and loved ones.

You can learn about how to prepare for climate impacts that are happening now, adapting to climate change, and also learn about how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in your community and the world, reducing the impact of climate change on future generations.

I talked about the list of recommended solutions from Project Drawdown's list of recommendations for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These recommendations come from a 2017 book edited by Paul Hawken "Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming." You can see a quick list of the top ten solutions on Wikipedia or go to the Project Drawdown website here and sort by GHG emission reduction amounts. 

The top three solutions are reducing food waste, health and education (focusing on the education of girls and family planning), and shifting to plant-rich diets.

1. Reducing food waste - This can be a part of increasing food security for all. I talked about how increasing food security improves community resilience to all shocks and also has returns to children's attendance in school. If you are hungry, how can you learn?

2. Educating girls and providing family planning (curbing population growth and empowering girls and women) - I talked about how girls and women are disproportionately impacted by food preparation and water gathering needs. Improving their opportunities for education will help free them to help their communities plan for climate change and other problems. We need all hands on deck!

3. Shifting to a plant-rich diet - I recollected hearing David Suzuki talk about Meatless Mondays as a strategy that could have a significant positive impact on the planet. It sends the market a signal that we need less meat, which can have cascading positive effects, reducing GHG emissions and water usage. 

Check out the Meatless Mondays movement, which is being stewarded in part by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Join its Meatless Monday Global community.

This recommendation must include a caveat that some communities cannot easily make this transition, with some living in places where plant-based food is flown in from afar, so it is relatively expensive and poor quality. In some cases, meat-based diets are critical to a community's cultural practices, such as with the indigenous marine mammal hunters who live on the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Due to sea ice loss these hunters may need to change how they provide for their communities (see this 2017 study on that question), but any change in diet should be led by community members, not outsiders telling them to switch to a plant-rich diet.

What else can I do? 

Vote

I can't find the quote now, but I recall seeing on Twitter that someone asked the famous climate scientist Jim (James) Hansen what the most important thing people can do to fight climate change, and he said "vote."

It may have been that many scientists have been saying it. Catherine Flowers (Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice) says it in this Aug. 2020 Guardian article in response to the question "what is the most important political action individuals can take?" To the same question another famous climate scientist, Michael Mann, author of the "hockey stick" graph, responds: 

We need politicians who will support climate-friendly policies. And we need to get rid of those who won’t. Voting is one critical way to do that, and if you live in the US, it’s absolutely critical that you vote on climate in the upcoming general election – from president all the way down to dogcatcher.

In the Nov. 2020 U.S. presidential election we ended up with the more climate-policy-friendly candidate, but the U.S. Senate remains elusive. If we don't have the power to move climate change legislation through the U.S. Senate, everything will stagnate for another four years, and we can't afford any delay. If you want to help do "get out the vote" work in Georgia, here are two ways to do it:

Vote Forward has a letter writing campaign with a Dec. 7 send date and they need 153,000 more letters to be written.

Move On and Resistance Labs are doing text and phone banking.

Resilience Hubs

You can participate in the "resilience hub" movement without being a climate expert. Resilience hubs bring together local government and local nongovernmental organizations to prepare a community respond to natural disasters and other shocks. The movement has spread around the world partly facilitated by the Urban Sustainability Directors Network and other organizations, like UN Habitat Urban Resilience Programme, Mercy Corps (which established resilience hubs in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria), and the Thriving Resilient Communities Collaboratory which created a resource-rich community guide (2014).

The Hawaiian island/city/county of Oahu is creating a Resilience Hub Action Plan as part of its 2019 Resilience Strategy, stipulating: "Resilience Hubs should be defined by each neighborhood or local community for their own needs and goals, however many are focused on providing the following during a disaster: 1) Emergency shelter during a disaster; 2) A central community gathering/information site and distribution center post-disaster; 3) Renewable energy and energy storage/supply even if the grid is down; 4) Water and food stores; and, 5) Medical supplies" (p. 60). 

Northampton, Massachusetts, is currently planning to create a "Community & Resilience Hub" to support its residents "who face chronic and acute stress due to natural and human-caused disasters, climate change, and social and economic challenges."

The Greater Manchester Resilience Hub is a very specific example of a resilience hub created to respond to the 2017 Manchester Arena attack. It has since created a Covid-19 services program.

For Californians, the NorCal Resilience Network has a resilience hub initiative with a leadership training program (deadline for applications for the spring 2021 training is Dec. 20, 2020).

Doughnut Economics

Right now our global economy is based on a linear growth model of economics, where we need to consume and produce more and more and more to be rated as a healthy economy. We can all benefit from questioning this old model of infinite growth, and start thinking about another way to define economic success.

Kate Raworth is a British economist who conceived of something called Doughnut Economics, based on a doughnut-shaped diagram modeling sustainable economic growth, where the outside circle is the planetary boundaries, and the hole in the center is the boundary of human well-being. The hole is where people fall when their basic needs are not being met. The idea is that we need to grow economically into the center without exceeding the boundaries of Earth's limits. Hear more about how the Doughnut can work in a real-world context in a Dec. 1, 2020, interview with Kate Raworth (40 min., a bonus episode of the "Explore the Circular Economy Show" by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation). In this interview she talks about how her model of growth fits within the concept of the circular economy (where materials are designed, created, and distributed with their full lifecycle in mind), and how she worked with leaders in Amsterdam to create a vision for the city based on Doughnut Economics (for more on that, see "Amsterdam to embrace 'doughnut' model to mend post-coronavirus economy" from April 8, 2020).

If you want to see this model brought to California, you can sign up for a meeting on Dec. 10, 2020, 5:30 PM, a virtual meet-up hosted by the Doughnut Economics Action Lab.

Raworth 2017, WEF, Meet the Doughnut

Talk to your loved ones about climate change

One student asked about how to talk to her climate skeptic loved ones about climate change. This is a great question! I talked about how there are many different kinds of climate denialists, and it's worth understanding that some communities have a reasonable distrust of scientists (see the infamous Tuskegee Experiment). It's important to approach your loved ones who doubt the climate science with compassion whenever possible.

One excellent, compassionate communicator of climate science is Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and also someone who identifies as a person of faith, specifically an evangelical Christian. But most of all, she is Canadian -- you can enjoy her "oots" and "aboots" in her excellent series of short videos addressing common questions you might hear from skeptics: Global Weirding.

I also highly recommend listening to Dr. Hayhoe explain the ten things climate change and coronavirus in common (a 30-min. lecture from the 2020 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting) in her lovely Canadian lilt.

In that lecture she cites these as the most sustainable solutions to climate change: energy efficiency (citing an ACEEE 2019 report by Ungar and Nadel), clean energy, electrifying what we can while creating carbon-neutral fuels for what we can't, and drawing carbon down into the soil and biosphere.

Two other great resources for helping you respond to loved ones who are climate skeptics:

Skeptical Science - it's got a "Web 1.0" look about it but it has great information, including an exhaustive list of climate change denial arguments hyperlinked to articles that will help you respond.

A free online course edX course “Making Sense of Climate Science Denial” (DENIAL101X), run out of the University of Queensland. I took it and it was extremely helpful in breaking down the phenomenon of science denial in general, and climate science denial in particular.

What is the most certain evidence of climate change?

One of the students looking for help preparing to talk to her climate change skeptic loved ones asked me what is the most certain evidence of climate change. The science of greenhouse gas leading to global warming is documented back to the 19th century, but if you are arguing with a skeptic that might be too fuzzy, since it is possible to attribute some of the warming to things other than greenhouse gas emissions. But sea level rise? That is really concrete, and for my friend's students, mostly living in the San Francisco Bay Area, it's well-documented specifically on their doorstep thanks to the...

Fort Point tidal gauge! 

USGS 1999

See this graph in its original context, a 1999 USGS fact sheet: "El Niño Sea-Level Rise Wreaks Havoc in California’s San Francisco Bay Region." 

Here is a NOAA graph of San Francisco's relative sea level that I think might combine Fort Point data with another gauge or gauges, extending from 1850 to 2020.

This is, as far as I know, the longest-running tidal gauge anywhere in the world, or at least on the west coast of the American continent, and it shows that water levels in San Francisco Bay have risen about seven inches since 1900. A tidal gauge at the Battery in New York City has shown a similar trend, with a similarly long data set.

This clear rise in sea level is caused by a combination of land ice melt and thermal expansion driven by the warming of the Earth by the blanket of greenhouse gases we've thrown over it. At a certain point the argument over the cause will be moot. Hopefully we won't still be arguing causes when SFO and OAK are under water.

Other impacts weighing on our collective minds?

We talked about various climate change impacts in our discussion, and I don't want to spend too much time on them, but here are some resources on some of the topics we touched on.

Heat

Check out Sol Hsiang's research on how heat can contribute to increased conflict in this other Scientific American piece from Jan. 1, 2014, "Feeling Hot Can Fuel Rage."

Smoke

In the San Francisco Bay Area, while sea level rise can grab the headlines, I am more worried about the health impacts of heat and wildfire smoke, since most Bay Area homes lack air conditioning. Well, as bad as it has been in the SF Bay Area, it's worse in Fresno. This Nov. 26, 2020, NYT piece "Wildfire Smoke Is Poisoning California’s Kids. Some Pay a Higher Price." discusses the disproportionate impact of smoke on children in the Central Valley.

 A lot of health professionals are looking into the concerning intersection of wildfire smoke exposure and Covid-19 vulnerability, too. This Oct. 27, 2020, piece in Pulmonology Advisor tackles that question: "The Potential Effects of Wildfire Smoke on COVID-19 Risk and Severity." Bottom line: staying indoors helps avoid both risks.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District website has resources for SF Bay Area folks concerned about wildfire smoke, including an article on wildfire smoke and Covid-19. 

It truly was awful during the smoke events this past summer - every day I had to ask myself - do I have a sore throat from smoke or from Covid?

Viruses and permafrost

Check out this Scientific American piece from Nov. 20, 2020, "Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up." The known threats are anthrax and smallpox becoming reanimated after the remains of those who died of those diseases thaw. But -- we don't really know what viruses will be reanimated.

P.S. What's going on with the Venezuelan oil tanker about to spill?

A student asked about an oil tanker sitting in the water off Venezuela, apparently about to capsize. I didn't know anything about this tanker, but poking the internet the tanker in question appears to be the Nabarima, which has been moored in the Gulf of Paria, off the east coast of Venezuela and west coast of Trinidad and Tobago. It is in a state of disrepair, and is carrying about about 1.3 million barrels of crude oil that is jointly owned by the Venezuelan state oil company (PDVSA) and an Italian oil company (Eni). U.S. sanctions on Venezuela are stopping the tanker from off-loading its oil. 

In mid-October 2020 it appeared to be tilting about 25 degrees. In late October efforts to correct the tilt appeared to have helped, and experts from Trinidad and Tobago visited the tanker to confirm the condition. They said it has “absolutely no tilt” and that the vessel was “totally horizontal” per Reuters reporting on Oct. 22, 2020. 

The environmental group Fishermen and Friends of the Sea are still concerned that the ship is in disrepair and poses a great risk to the Caribbean.

From Beneath Us It Devours: The Implications of Thawing Permafrost for Indigenous Communities

On Nov. 12, 2020, I talked about the implications of thawing permafrost for indigenous communities on Cimpatico's adaptation channel. 

(Jump to Cimpatico's description of itself at the bottom of this post.)

(Jump to my explanation of how I ended up talking about this topic on Cimpatico.)

You can see the interview on the Cimpatico platform here. You have to create a free account to get access.

Or, see it on Youtube.

It's 26 minutes, and with that time constraint I didn't get to talk about a lot of things I wanted to talk about. So, I'm going to make this post a parking lot of resources for people who want to learn more about this topic.

"Permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere" by GRIDArendal (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

What Is Permafrost?

Permafrost is soil, sediment, or rock that remains at or below 0 C for at least two consecutive years. (R. Wray, Indigenous Peoples' Atlas of Canada).

Permafrost is part of the "cryosphere" -- the parts of the Earth where water is found in the forms of ice and snow. The cryosphere includes sea ice, lake ice, river ice, snow cover, glaciers, ice sheets, ice caps, and the places where the ground is frozen, including permafrost. (See NOAA's cryosphere page.)

Why Do Scientists Think it is Thawing?

Evidence of thawing permafrost extends back 60 years. A study showed that "significant degradation" of permafrost has occurred since 1964 along the Alaska Highway corridor in Canada (the southern Yukon and northern BC area): it appears permafrost has retreated northward by "at least" 25 kilometers (James et al. 2013).

What Are the Primary Impacts of Thawing Permafrost?

The primary impact of thawing permafrost is the loss of natural infrastructure, which causes a long list of secondary impacts that destabilize systems that socio-economic systems depend on. This includes destabilization of roads, buildings, chilling facilities (especially for food), sewage and garbage containment systems, coastal land through erosion, and burial grounds (see the 2017 NPR piece "Cemeteries Turn To Swamps As Alaska's Permafrost Melts"). Also, there is a threat to clean water from thawing permafrost. Some communities depend on fresh water from lakes contained by permafrost (thermokarst lakes), and as the containment strength of the permafrost weakens, the community might slowly or suddenly lose its fresh water source. In August 2016, the Alaskan village of Point Lay lost its fresh water source suddenly when ground ice separating its reservoir from an adjacent river thawed, draining the reservoir (Trochim & Schuur 2018).

Other health-related impacts of thawing permafrost are the release of pollutants such as mercury from the permafrost (see the 2015 Barents Observer piece "Arctic Mercury Pollution To Increase as Permafrost Thaws"), and the re-awakening of long-dormant diseases such as anthrax (see the 2016 Barents Observer piece "Scientist: Yamal anthrax outbreak could just be the beginning"). A Nov. 20, 2020, article in Scientific American raises the alarm about "the potential risks from the resurrection of ancient and poorly described viral genomes" (pointing to Ng et al. 2014, discussing the reanimation of a 700-year-old caribou virus from a permanent ice patch).

Also, there is the release of additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from thawing permafrost, creating a feedback loop that will speed up climate change, with particularly vicious immediate feedbacks into the Arctic's warming. Thawing permafrost is releasing the powerful greenhouse gas methane, which bubbles to the surface in Arctic lakes, but also might be causing explosions, resulting in mysterious craters appearing around the Arctic in a process called cryovolcanism (see the 2020 National Geographic piece "Colossal crater found in Siberia. What made it?").

The Arctic was thought to be warming two or three times faster than the rest of the planet. Now it's thought that it might be 3.75 times faster (Post et al., 2019). Autumnal warming might be even faster than that, as much as 6-8 times in some parts of the Arctic (per 2020 thread by Van Steenbergen, referencing the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer). This will only get faster.

In the interview on Nov. 12 someone asked about whether there will be a sudden, catastrophic release of methane from the warming Arctic, sometimes called a "methane bomb," and my answer was that the threat of climate change to food security in the Arctic is a much more imminent threat than any methane release. Read more about how the hype about a potential methane bomb in the Arctic isn't supported by the findings of scientists studying the subject in this 2020 Popular Science article "The Arctic might be a methane time bomb—or not."

What Are the Particular Impacts of Thawing Permafrost on Indigenous Communities?

In addition to the threats to Arctic indigenous communities posed by colonial settler practices (historic and current), personal and structural racism, and extractive industries (oil, gas, and mining), these communities have to face the threat of climate change, which goes beyond physical threats to pose an existential threat to their cultures. Permafrost thaw is literally uprooting their way of life.

For example, reindeer herders in Siberia have observed disturbances to historic migration routes and pastures due to thawing permafrost: the land they and their ancestors depended on for thousands of years is turning into unpredictable swampland.

There is also the problem of increased isolation for communities that depend on stable permafrost and ice to access food and medicine in the shoulder months of winter, not only exacerbating threats to physical health, but mental health. Check out "Indigenous mental health in a changing climate: a systematic scoping review of the global literature" by Middleton et al. (2020) for an overview of the current research on the latter.

Additionally, there is the more direct problem of falling into caverns in the ground and holes in the ice as these elements of natural infrastructure destabilize. Denise Pollock (then of the Alaska Institute for Justice) presented at the National Adaptation Forum in 2017 about the dangerous conditions now faced by the hunters in her home village of Shishmaref: "We don't have words [in Inupiaq] for how ice is forming now."

In some cases, entire indigenous villages might be lost due to destabilized natural infrastructure leading to displacement. The sudden loss of fresh water due to the collapse of thermokarst lakes has threatened to displace indigenous communities in Chukota, Russia, including the villages of Neshkan, Enurmino, and Uelen, as well as many coastal villages (per Eduard Zdor, a Chukchi marine mammal hunter and academic based out of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks).

Newtok

In Alaska, there is the famous case of the village of Newtok being threatened with erosion as a nearby riverbank recedes due to thawing permafrost, forcing the village to plan to build a new village nine miles away. The new village, Mertarvik, saw its first settlement in 2019. Catastrophic erosion due to permafrost thaw -- "usteq" in Yup'ik ("surface caves in") -- is now addressed in Alaska's State Hazard Mitigation Plan (2018). According to that document, in 2016 usteq "claimed at least 40 feet of ground between Newtok and the Ninglick River [...], with blocks of tundra the size of minivans slumping and being carried away by floodwaters. The town is built on permafrost plateaus just 6-10 feet above river level, and the ground is disintegrating." One-third of Newtok's population has moved to Mertarvik, where residents report finding conditions far healthier (though they had some trouble voting in Alaska's August 18, 2020, primary election, since the state says it didn't realize people were living in the new village). The other two-thirds is awaiting funding to move. 

(Check out the Alaska Institute for Justice presentation on community-led relocation of Alaska Native villages from the National Adaptation Forum in 2019.)

Norilsk

In 2020, Siberia experienced an unprecedented fuel leak caused in part by thawing permafrost, resulting in the contamination of a lake on which the local indigenous peoples (including Nenets and Evenki) depend for food. The leak took place in Norilsk, Russia, the most northern city in the world, and the largest (with over 175,000 permanent residents) built on permafrost inside the Arctic circle. It is home to the largest known nickel, copper, and palladium deposits in the world, and its largest employer is Nornickel, whose subsidiary failed to maintain the fuel reservoir that leaked 21,000 tonnes of diesel fuel into the Ambarnaya River on May 29, 2020, contaminating a 350 square kilometer (135 square mile) area. It eventually reached an important source of food and fresh water for local indigenous communities, Lake Pyasino. The lake was declared "dead" after the spill by the head of the local branch of the Russian Federal Fisheries Agency. The event is unprecedented for several reasons: it is the first (known) significant spill of its size or kind in the Russian Arctic, it was almost immediately associated with climate change-induced permafrost thawing, and it resulted in an unprecedented fine for Nornickel (148 billion rubles, or about 1.9 billion USD), an ethnological impact assessment (which determined there was measurable harm to 700 indigenous individuals), and a 2 billion ruble (about 26 million USD) settlement for the local indigenous peoples. (It should be noted that there are divisions in the indigenous communities regarding the impact of the spill on traditional food sources, described in this excellent blog post by political geographer Dr. Mia Bennett). The government's prosecutor general I. Krasnov ordered safety checks on all "particularly dangerous installations" built on permafrost in the Russian Arctic in the wake of the spill.

What's going on with the walruses?

In the Nov. 12 interview I touched on the loss of sea ice leading to walruses increasingly using land-based haul-outs, leading to the deprivation of coastal indigenous communities of this important food source. Basically, when walruses haul out on land, it leads to crowding and -- in the presence of perceived threats, such as a marine mammal hunter -- stampedes that can easily kill baby walruses. So, it isn't safe to hunt walrus in these haul-outs. There was a hubbub last year when a Netflix documentary ("Our Planet") included 2017 footage of a fatal walrus stampede over a cliff. In that particular case, the footage was spliced from different events to make a more dramatic narrative, and that stampede off that cliff likely had nothing to do with running away from a threat or the reduction in sea ice (read Ed Yong's 2019 piece in the Atlantic on the subject). Fatal stampedes in land-based walrus haul-outs is not a new phenomenon. However, they will become more of a problem as walruses are increasingly forced into hauling out on land. For this reason and others, walruses are particularly vulnerable to extinction because of climate change. (Read more in this 2017 NPR piece "On Thin Ice: Walruses Threatened After U.S. Declines To List As Endangered.")

Good places to look for more information on the implications of thawing permafrost for indigenous communities:

- Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center (USGS/University of Alaska Southeast).

- Alaska Institute for Justice (helping Alaska Native communities navigate relocation).

- Aborigen-Forum (Russia)

In particular check out its campaign to ask Elon Musk to not buy nickel from Nornickel.

Also, check out Indigenous-Russia.com, which aggregates news relevant to Russia's indigenous peoples.

- International Arctic Research Center (based in Fairbanks, AK).

- The Barents Observer

- The LEO Network - The Local Environmental Observer (LEO) Network is facilitated by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, and its mission is to document any unusual changes seen in the Arctic. (Access the LEO webinar archive.)

- The 2017 Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic (SWIPA) report (288 p.) by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme ("conducted between 2010 and 2016 by an international group of over 90 scientists, experts and knowledgeable members of the Arctic indigenous communities"). See the report press release, with associated videos and regional report links.

-  Climate Change in the Bering Strait Region (68 p.), a 2015 report by the Center for Climate and Health at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.  

About Cimpatico

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"This year [in 2020] Cimpatico launched its first channel, the Climate Adaptation Channel, hosted by Doug Parsons. This summer Cimpatico is launching more channels that address a spectrum of environmental and social issues across every industry and sector.

"Sign up here (yes, it's free!!) to learn, network, and collaborate with a global community of media professionals, policymakers, researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and students united by common interests."

Why did Cimpatico ask me to talk about the implications of thawing permafrost for indigenous communities?

Cimpatico contacted me back in September 2020 asking me to come on their adaptation channel, and they didn't specify the topic. I suggested a few topics that I care about and know something about. Among the topics I suggested, they said they had not yet had anybody on talking about thawing permafrost, or its implication for indigenous communities, although they had featured Barrett Ristroph talking about the relocation of Newtok in Alaska on a few occasions. This is a topic that is dear to my heart. In 2004, working at Pacific Environment, I heard from a colleague in Siberia about how permafrost was thawing and causing reindeer herders to lose their traditional pastures, to sink into the muck... to me it is the most heart-breaking of all current climate impacts: cryospheric cultures cannot survive climate change intact.

So I agreed to talk about this topic, and made the rounds checking with friends who work more directly and recently with indigenous communities in Alaska and Siberia to make sure I had the latest news. Particular shout-outs to Galina Angarova at the indigenous rights group Cultural Survival, Jennifer Castner at the Altai Project, and David Gordon, consultant/former Executive Director of Pacific Environment, for their help preparing for this interview. Also thanks to Barrett Ristroph, Chanda Meek, Eduard Zdor, and Anatolii Lebedev for their input, and the rest of the Sosnovka Coalition (an initiative of Pacific Environment).

I am neither a geomorphologist nor actively engaged in helping indigenous communities adapt to thawing permafrost, but I tried to reflect the reality of the situation for indigenous communities as best I could. Hopefully the next time Cimpatico has someone on their adaptation channel talking about this, it will be someone who can share first-hand experience of thawing permafrost from an indigenous perspective.

Check out the Nov. 5, 2020, National Adaptation Forum (NAF) webinar on displacement  that was a great help in preparing to talk about the situation in Alaska: Part 5, "Policy Considerations at Multiple Scales," featuring (among others) Robin Bronen of the Alaska Institute for Justice, and Don Antrobus of the Alaska Tribal Native Health Consortium.

Also: Check out the recordings from the whole 2020 NAF webinar series on displacement.

Check out Barrett's Cimpatico interviews about Newtok:

Climate Relocation: It Takes a Village (and more) to Move a Village (36 min., link to Cimpatico) -  2020, "This Is," S. 1, Ep. 1 (the video isn't dated, but it looks like it was posted to Cimpatico in March 2020).

Avoiding Maladaptations to Flooding and Erosion: A Case Study of Alaskan Native Villages (30 min., link to Youtube) - December 10, 2019, "Research Review," S. 1, Ep. 1.  

Also: Check out her Youtube channel for other presentations about Newtok and other community relocation efforts.

Fire and Plague

California has a million acres on fire right now, caused by a rare summer thunderstorm between August 15 and 19 that brought on 10,800 lightning strikes, causing 367 fires. (See an incredible composite time-lapse video taken from space showing the sparkle of lightning storms and the subsequent blossoming of fires.) Some fires are being allowed to just burn-- there aren't enough fire fighters to contain them all. 

Photo: Jeff Head (CC PDM 1.0)

At the same time, Covid-19 has been spreading across the state over the past six months, caused by an incredibly dangerous novel coronavirus that has adapted such that infected people are MOST infectious right before symptoms become evident, and it seems from population studies that half of infected people are asymptomatic but still able to spread the disease. The secondary impacts of both of these crises include skyrocketing unemployment, housing insecurity, and all of the mental health impacts of people being trapped in their homes by wildfire smoke and fear of infection. 

Add to that the numerous outrageous attacks by police and the police-adjacent in the last few months on unarmed African Americans (including Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, now Jacob Blake) and the protesters coming out to show solidarity (including Summer Taylor  -- now adding two killed yesterday in Kenosha, Wisconsin -- a full 32 deaths associated with policy brutality protests between the end of May and now)... 

And add to that the ever-slimmer likelihood that the U.S. will have a presidential election free of significant tampering by the current administration and its cronies come November... 

it's a stressful moment.

One of my coping strategies is to treat it all as a subject for study, and share what I find out with my friends to help them feel grounded in what passes for facts. I want to park a few helpful links related to the wildfire crisis here.

California Dept. of Public Health one-stop online resource center for Covid-19 + wildfire + extreme heat: Guidance and Resources for COVID-19, Climate Change, and Health Equity

A few researchers from Stanford’s Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research, Kari Nadeau and Mary Prunicki, answer some questions about Covid-19 x wildfire smoke: Stanford researchers discuss wildfires’ health impacts (by Rob Jordan, Aug. 26, 2020). TL,DR: people with higher exposure to air pollution are more vulnerable to Covid-19. 

Covid-19 is not an equal-opportunity infector: it is hitting low-income communities and communities of color far harder than other demographic groups (here's a very readable article on the subject, Moving From The Five Whys To Five Hows: Addressing Racial Inequities In COVID-19 Infection And Death, from July 2, 2020, on the health policy blog Health Affairs). It is well-documented that these communities have higher exposure to air pollution across the state. In particular: Wildfire Smoke Poses Greatest Risk to Low-Income Residents, People of Color, Experts Say (by Sarah Mizes-Tan at Cap Radio, Aug. 20, 2020)

The news reports percent containment in regard to wildfire. This is not the same as percent extinguished. What does "containment" mean when it comes to wildfire? Check out this helpful thread from Michael Wara, Director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment; he also serves on California's Commission on Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery.

How is climate change contributing to California's wildfires? Some answers surface in this conversation with climate scientist Daniel Swain on KQED's Forum by Michael Krasny (43 min.):  The Link Between Climate Change and Wildfires (Aug. 25, 2020). In this interview he emphasizes the need to return to the landscape a fire regime closer to the frequent, low-intensity controlled fire regime that was used to maintain the land under management by California Native communities.

More Daniel Swain explaining the link between climate change and wildfire, including the factoid that as climate impacts go, wildfire might not be our biggest emerging problem: California’s Climate Tinderbox: A Scientist Explains the Fire Crisis (by Eric Roston, Aug. 25, 2020)

From that interview:

We’re currently developing a statewide disaster-contingency scenario for an extreme flood event. It’s the most foreseeable disaster that everyone's going to say came by surprise. Think about what happened in 1862 in The Great Flood [a "megaflood" that swamped large swathes of California for 6 months: read more]. We know it's already physically possible, since it already happened without climate change. Today it would be a multi-trillion dollar disaster. We already showed that we think that the likelihood of this happening over the next 40 years is about 50-50. Over the next 60 years, it’s right around 100%.

Read Dr. Swain's Aug. 21, 2020, blog post about the recent lightning storm and wildfires here.