The Attacking Ocean Read Online Free PDF Page B

prohibitively expensive high seawalls. Such an adaptation scenario would also require the construction of storm shelters and the preparation of evacuation plans that could be implemented in very harsh weather and at short notice.
    A third option: Move to neighboring villages or to larger communities such as Anchorage, Kotzebue, or Nome. Joining nearby subsistence-based villages would place local food resources under threat, apart from the complexities of traditional rivalries, some of which go back generations. Migrating to cities or towns would mean the immediate loss of a subsistence lifeway that dates back many centuries and is the last surviving element of a once-thriving culture. Both Kotzebue and Nome, with populations in the range of three thousand to four thousand, are prepared to accept the villagers, but how would the hunters and fisher-folk support themselves in their market-driven economies? To add to thecomplications, they would come from a totally dry community to towns that have serious problems with endemic alcoholism.
    There remains a fourth option: Move Shishmaref and other threatened barrier island communities to higher ground. The idea was first mooted as early as 1973, but it was not until 2002 that the villagers voted to move to a new site over a period of years. Shishmaref’s new site on the mainland is known as West Nantuq, across a lagoon. An Army Corps of Engineers study in 2004 estimated the cost of relocation at $180 million, including moving 137 homes across the frozen lagoon in winter and bringing in some additional prefabricated houses by barge. The federal government is expected to pay for everything, including the complete infrastructure for the village and a new harbor. Shishmaref may have ten to fifteen years before it vanishes. Meanwhile, relocation plans move along glacially slowly.
    Other coastal Alaskan villages also wrestle with rising sea levels, among them Newtok on the Ninglick River considerably farther south, a place close to the Bering Sea that fisherfolk and hunters have visited for at least two thousand years. Some three hundred Yupik Eskimos live in the village, which is rapidly being washed away by erosion caused by the ever-widening river. The villain is rising temperatures, which have reduced ice cover, brought more frequent storm surges, and thawed the permafrost, which formed a buffer against the Bering and formed a solid foundation for Newtok. Now the underpinning is turning to squishy mud; buildings including the old school and community church have buckled and are sinking. Wooden boardwalks connecting the buildings literally float on the muddy ground. The river gobbles up as much as 27.5 meters of dry land each year. Newtok is below sea level and sinking, an island caught between the Ninglick and a nearby slough. The village will have vanished within a decade or so.
    Newtok has but one future—to move to a site on Nelson Island, 14.5 kilometers away, which the villagers acquired in 2003 through a land swap with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They named the new settlement Mertarvik, “getting water from the puddle.” The community then obtained funds for building a barge landing for offloading thematerials needed to construct the infrastructure for the new settlement. Infrastructure is being installed slowly; house construction started in 2011. The cost of the move is unknown, but government estimates of two million dollars a household seem absurdly high.
    There are no normal provisions in federal or state budgeting for funds for a community facing not the devastation of a fast-moving climatic event like Hurricane Katrina, where emergency funding was available in short order, but rather a slow-moving disaster that will eradicate a village of isolated subsistence farmers after decades of slow death. None of this will be cheap and none of it easy for the local people, who are severing ties with village sites where their ancestors lived for many centuries.
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