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| Climate tour: James McCarthy (r) of Harvard University tells Rich Cizik with the National Association of Evangelicals, how
Portage Glacier has melted due to warming. Al Grillo/AP/file |
A melting Alaska draws visitors
Warming five times faster than the rest of the world, the state is seeing ecotourism change with the climate.
from the November 14, 2007 edition
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Exit Glacier, for example, is an accessible river of ancient blue ice that is rapidly retreating from the viewing stations and hiking trails at its tidewater terminus. Tourists, especially those making return trips to Exit Glacier, see the shrinking glacier as evidence of Alaska's warming, he says. "We get a lot of people visiting who say, 'What happened to it?' " Mr. Mow says.
Plenty of VIPs make the trek to Exit Glacier, including former President Jimmy Carter, presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain, and even legislators from the Japanese Diet, Mow says.
Aside from being a draw, the climate question can also be a touchy subject at the park. One staff member was verbally attacked by an out-of-state tourist while discussing climate change during a tour, Mow adds.
Warming has changed the focus of the Begich-Boggs Visitors Center here at Portage Glacier, a popular attraction for visitors to the Chugach National Forest. In the 1980s, the glacier extended well into the lake, filling the center's plate-glass windows with close-up views of ancient blue ice. Now, its rapid retreat has inspired Forest Service managers to change the facility's focus, says Lezlie Murray, manager of the center. "We are trying to show them the breadth of the forest. And that includes glaciers still, but it also includes all of the things that live and breathe in the forest."
Also dramatic are the impacts of warming on people who live off the land and the sea, mostly Alaska natives whose cultures are tied to their harvests of wild foods.
Back in Shishmaref, members of the Harvard tour meet the cousins of Norman Charlie Kokeak, a young hunter who fell through the ice earlier in the summer and drowned, despite extensive knowledge and instruction from the elders about safe ice travel.
"[H]e was a metaphor of the death of the next generation," says Peter Heltzel, a professor at the New York Theological Seminary. "I saw that the erosion of that island is the erosion of a cultural identity."
The village, like others in Alaska, is planning to move to firmer ground inland. Progress of the ambitious relocation has stalled because of the high cost – estimated variously at $100 million to $400 million – and bureaucratic inertia. Senator Landrieu says she hopes some nongovernmental organization and charities will be able to cover some of the costs and cut through some of the federal red tape. "If these villages and cultures have existed for thousands of years and have managed, they shouldn't come to an abrupt end because of the federal government and the [US Army] Corps of Engineers."
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