(The impact of global warming will be greatest on the poor as this
article would demonstrate.)
NY Times, May 27, 2007
Engulfed by Climate Change, Town Seeks Lifeline
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
NEWTOK, Alaska The sturdy little Cessnas land whenever the fog
lifts, delivering children's bicycles, boxes of bullets, outboard
motors and cans of dried oats. And then, with a rumble down a gravel
strip, the planes are gone, the outside world recedes and this
subarctic outpost steels itself once again to face the frontier of
climate change.
"I don't want to live in permafrost no more," said Frank Tommy, 47,
standing beside gutted geese and seal meat drying on a wooden rack
outside his mother's house. "It's too muddy. Everything is crooked
around here."
The earth beneath much of Alaska is not what it used to be. The
permanently frozen subsoil, known as permafrost, upon which Newtok
and so many other Native Alaskan villages rest, is melting, yielding
to warming air temperatures and a warming ocean. Sea ice that would
normally protect coastal villages is forming later in the year,
allowing fall storms to pound away at the shoreline.
Erosion has made Newtok an island, caught between the ever widening
Ninglick River and a slough to the north. The village is below sea
level, and sinking. Boardwalks squish into the spring muck. Human
waste, collected in "honey buckets" that many residents use for
toilets, is often dumped within eyeshot in a village where no point
is more than a five-minute walk from any other. The ragged wooden
houses have to be adjusted regularly to level them on the shifting soil.
Studies say Newtok could be washed away within a decade. Along with
the villages of Shishmaref and Kivalina farther to the north, it has
been the hardest hit of about 180 Alaska villages that suffer some
degree of erosion.
Some villages plan to hunker down behind sea walls built or planned
by the Army Corps of Engineers, at least for now. Others, like
Newtok, have no choice but to abandon their patch of tundra. The
corps has estimated that to move Newtok could cost $130 million
because of its remoteness, climate and topography. That comes to
almost $413,000 for each of the 315 residents.
Not that anyone is offering to pay.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/us/27newtok.html
