Episode IX–Jeff Hallowell
The Native Village of Kivalina, a federally recognized Indian Tribe living on a barrier island in the Chukchi Sea, 80 miles north of Kotzebue and above the Arctic Circle, has a series of existential, compounding problems that render life there scary.
There is no escape road from the island if threatening seas, now ice free later in the season, inundate the entire settlement, whose elevation is 13 feet.
If that's not enough, there’s pollution, a lack of sanitation, and scarce and overcrowded housing.
Like many communities in Alaska, there is also a suicide crisis, villagers and sometimes youth without hope and seemingly without a future.
These are the impacts of Climate Change on a far flung island where villagers try to stay safe hunting Bowhead whales from increasingly dangerous ice.
As Mens Journey so noted in the article, “The Last Whale Hunt for a Vanishing Alaskan Village,” October 12, 2016, https://www.mensjournal.com/features/the-last-whale-hunt-for-a-vanishing-village-kivalina-alaska-w443825/
"Outsiders who spend time in the village sometimes feel as though they’ve traveled in time to some not-too-distant future in which the government has finally imploded after years of dysfunction, leaving the people to fend for themselves, like Mad Max but with snowmobiles. In most of the houses, the toilet is a bucket.”
Jeff Hallowell is a man with an idea. Formerly a Silicon Valley engineer, for companies like Xerox, Netscape, and Oracle, he became a “serial entrepreneur.”
Working with Launch Alaska and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation program to “Reinvent the Toilet," Hallowell takes on the now less dirty job of returning carbon from human waste to the earth, for agriculture, erosion prevention, and carbon sequester, buttressing the shore, and restoring dignity and safety to Americans living in what we presume to be 4th World conditions, dangerous and distressing, right here at home, in the richest country on Earth.
Have we forgotten the people of Kivalina? Or could there be a partial solution? And is there time, with imminent relocation perhaps necessary by 2025?
"Climate Change Ground Zero ” Episode 9 of Nature’s Touch; Climate Change is Here may be heard on Apple Podcasts.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/climate-change-is-here/id1562953592
Copyright Agence RLA, LLC, Robert Lundahl