by Hope Jahren
De Merode’s expectation is that electricity will catalyze economic development. “The reason there isn’t industry is there’s no access to cheap energy. That’s really what the park can offer,” he said. That this will lead to a flowering of entrepreneurship is far from a sure thing. “There aren’t any business role models here,” the soap factory’s managing director, 29-year-old Leonard Maliona, told me. “Young people have nothing to aim for, other than being a politician or joining a militia.”
The notion of Virunga as the region’s “economic engine,” to use de Merode’s terminology, conjures up a spectacle that some may find unusual. Among other things, the scenario suggests that Congo’s leaders have essentially consigned the fate of one region of their country to a single park and its director, who shares his Belgian heritage with the country’s former colonial power. It also risks replacing a population’s lingering hostility toward the park with an intense dependency on it. De Merode’s gamble is unapologetically high stakes. And it rests heavily on young men who agree to beat their swords into plowshares and do an honest day’s work on little farm roads like the one up to Bukima.
The two laborers, both in their mid-20s, wore fluorescent orange vests over their T-shirts and were filling potholes on a shady stretch of the road. The taller of the two, with hooded eyes, was named Bushe Shukuru; the shorter one, with a quiet but easy smile, went by Gato Heritier. The two were childhood friends. Each time armed insurgents came, causing the villagers to run for miles until the sounds of gunfire had diminished, the teenagers would make it a point to search for each other at the refugee camps. On separate days during the spring of 2013, first Shukuru and then Heritier were caught in their village by M23 soldiers who tied their arms and marched them off to the place where they again found each other: the military base in Rumangabo, near the park’s southern sector, which had been taken over by M23. They joined a thousand or so young men who were also involuntary conscripts at the rebel faction’s training camp.
The commanders told Shukuru, Heritier, and the others that the government had failed eastern Congo. With proper training, they said, M23’s new warriors would take over the region and then advance westward and conquer Kinshasa. They were taught how to shoot, march in formation, attack, and withdraw. For their shortcomings, they were beaten with wooden sticks—some of them to death, right in front of the others. Others died of starvation from the paltry daily rations: a single cup of cornmeal. Three months of this, and then Shukuru and Heritier were sent to battle. By November both could see that M23 stood no chance against the army and UN forces. They fled and found each other again that month, in a UN compound.
Now here they were, in matching vests. The road they tended was, by rural Congolese standards, almost sleek. Yam and corn farmers, cattle and goat herders, schoolchildren and churchgoers negotiated the sloping path in half the time it once took. “The road’s really had a big impact,” said Heritier as he sat on a log and wiped the sweat off his face. Shukuru agreed: “That’s why I don’t mind doing this job. You can tell it’s helping this community.”
But, they acknowledged, $3 a day for eight hours of backbreaking work was not where they saw themselves for long. As a small child, before he understood what life in eastern Congo had to offer, Heritier had imagined himself as “some kind of big guy. A doctor. Maybe even the president. I mean, why not?” If he saved his money, perhaps he could be a mechanic, and Shukuru might one day open a shop of some sort. A small and quiet but honest and peaceful destiny that began with this road, leading uphill to the mountain gorillas. From there the peace would spread northward to Rwindi station, where Theo Kambale was also daring to harbor modest dreams. Recently, he had heard, a lioness and her cub had been spotted watering themselves on the banks of the Rutshuru River. And he had heard something else—that along with the slow return of wildlife, the long-abandoned Rwindi Hotel may also return, if the park can find the money to restore it.
It was, as Kambale told the young men on the road, the beginning of life.
TOM KIZZIA
The New Harpoon
FROM The New Yorker
The spring hunt started promisingly last year for the village of Point Hope, on the Chukchi Sea in northern Alaska: crews harpooned two bowhead whales and pulled them onto the ice for butchering. But then the winds shifted. Out on the pack where the water opened up, the ice at the edge was what is called sikuliaq, too young and unreliable to bear a 30-ton whale carcass. The hunters could do nothing but watch the shining black backs of bowheads, breathing calmly, almost close enough to touch.
On a trip to the ice edge, Tariek Oviuk, a hunter from Point Hope, felt a strange sensation: the lift of ocean waves beneath his feet. The older men, nervous about the rising wind, hurried back toward shore, but the younger hunters remained, stripping blubber from a few small beluga whales. Then the crack of three warning shots came rolling across the ice, and the hunters scrambled for their snowmobiles. “As soon as we heard those shots, my heart started pounding,” Oviuk recalled.
As Oviuk told me the story a few months later, we were sitting in the kitchen of his friend Steve Oomittuk, a former village mayor, eating strips of maktaaq—chewy beluga blubber—off a piece of cardboard that quickly grew sodden with whale oil. Oviuk is 35, tall, and square-jawed, a former basketball star for the Point Hope high school team, the Harpooners, and a member of a local troupe that performs traditional storytelling dances. “That was our way of communication,” he told me. “That was our people’s iPhones since time immemorial.”
Oviuk said that when he heard the shots he started running, then jumped into a passing sled filled with slippery blubber. “That’s not a beautiful thing, to be in a sled full of maktaaq,” he said. Another snowmobile driver swung by to rescue him, and Oviuk scrambled aboard. Then they stopped: a gap of blue water 100 feet across had opened between them and the shore-fast ice. The driver, in a parka and ski pants, said, “Hold on.” Accelerating, their heavily laden snowmobile leaped off the ice and skipped over the surface of the Chukchi Sea. Others followed, engines screaming, until everyone was across. “I didn’t believe in global warming—I’ll tell you that straight up,” Oviuk said. “But I teared up out there. I was thinking, ‘Every year we don’t know if it’s the last time we’re going to see the ice.’ ”
Point Hope sits at the northwesternmost corner of North America, on one of the oldest continuously settled sites on the continent. Eight hundred people live near the eroding tip of a 15-mile gravel spit thrust into the Chukchi Sea, a peninsula that the Inupiat call Tikigaq, or “index finger.” For 2,000 years the digit, stuck into coastal migration routes, has provided an ideal hunting perch. Tikigaq was a capital of the precontact Arctic, whose prosperity depended on a subtle understanding of the restless plains of ice that surrounded the community in winter.
In Paris last winter, 195 nations agreed to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and slow the warming of the planet. President Obama, speaking at the Paris conference, called for the global economy to move toward a low-carbon future, citing his own recent trip to Alaska, where melting glaciers, eroding villages, and thawing permafrost were “a glimpse of our children’s fate if the climate keeps changing faster than our efforts to address it.” The goal in Paris was to hold the average global increase in temperature to less than two degrees Celsius. The Arctic, which is warming at twice the rate of lower latitudes, has already shot beyond that: average annual air temperatures have increased by about three degrees. If trends continue, northern Alaska is expected to warm another six degrees by the end of the century.
These days the ice disappears so fast in spring that villagers struggle to catch bearded seals, whose skins are traditionally used in Point Hope to cover hunting boats. Ice cellars in the permafrost, packed with frozen whale meat, are filling with water. People are worried about these changes. Like most families in the village, Oomittuk’s survives on wild game; much of the living space in his small house was taken up by two big chest freezers. Vill
ages in Alaska’s Arctic consume nearly 450 pounds of wild game and fish per person each year, according to a recent study. “Without the animals, we wouldn’t be who we are,” Oomittuk said.
With a warm July wind battering the peninsula, Oomittuk took me on a four-wheeler ride for a glimpse of Point Hope’s past glory. Years ago elders on the tribal council had picked Oomittuk as a kind of tradition-bearer. An amiable 54-year-old with a long wisp of chin hair, he had grown rounder and softer since his own whale-hunting days, when he once helped repel a polar bear nosing into his tent by brandishing a cast-iron skillet. He explained that the lumps in the tundra, visible in all directions, were the husks of prehistoric earthen homes.
Along the coast where people hunt and camp, Oomittuk said, there are haunted places where no one ever stops. (In 1981 the ethnographer Ernest Burch identified four such zones, avoided because of “nonempirical phenomena.”) Explorers and whalers in the 19th century described Point Hope as an open graveyard, with skeletal remains arrayed for miles atop funerary racks of bleached whalebones—essential building materials in a land without trees. Episcopal missionaries at Point Hope eventually persuaded villagers to bury the human remains—as many as 1,200 skulls, according to one account—in a single mass grave, surrounded by a picket fence of repurposed bowhead mandibles. At an abandoned village site nearby we found a line of the weathered-gray bones, staked into the tundra by missionaries a century ago to help converts find their way through the blizzards to church.
We drove to the beach overlooking the Chukchi Sea, where the evidence of erosion was plain. The peninsula used to extend considerably farther out. Prehistoric settlements have eroded away, and artifacts wash up after fall storms. “I love my way of life,” Oomittuk said in a soothing baritone. “My grandfather’s life. The cycle of life. The connection to the land, the sea, the sky.”
Few Americans are as bound to the natural world as the whale hunters of the Arctic, or as keenly affected by the warming atmosphere. Yet few Americans are so immediately dependent on the continued expansion of the fossil-fuel economy that science says is causing the change. The underground igloo where Oomittuk was born, in 1962, had earthen walls braced with wood scraps and whalebone, and a single electric light bulb. Point Hope today is a grid of small but comfortable homes laid out around a new school and a diesel-fired power plant—everything provided by a regional municipality with 8,000 permanent residents and an annual budget of $400 million. Oil drilling in the Arctic has paid for nearly all of it, and Oomittuk does not want to go back.
There is a cost, though. Over the horizon from the beach where we stood that summer, Shell Oil had assembled a floating city. The project was opening an entirely new part of the Arctic Ocean to oil drilling. The dangers posed to the Tikigaq hunting culture by a massive spill were never far from Oomittuk’s mind. But he worried too about how the village would survive if there were no more oil industry. The tradeoffs have racked Alaska’s Inupiat communities. For nearly a decade Point Hope pressed a lawsuit against the offshore leases, becoming the last stronghold of indigenous opposition. Finally, in the spring of 2015, the village dropped the suit. On the day the thin ice nearly carried Tariek Oviuk out to sea, his whaling captain had been in Houston, meeting with Shell officials.
The first oil boom in the Alaskan Arctic was devastating for the Inupiat. It began in 1848, when Yankee whalers, having depleted the sperm whales of the Pacific, discovered an unexploited population of bowheads north of the Bering Strait. In two decades the fleet killed nearly 13,000 of the oil-rich whales, and then it turned to decimating the walrus. Eskimo hunting communities, already struggling with alcohol and diseases brought by the whalers, faced another scourge: hunger. In the early 1880s a government revenue cutter that landed on St. Lawrence Island, south of the Bering Strait, found that a thousand inhabitants had died of starvation. At Point Hope dozens of people starved, but only after eating their dogs and making soup from the skins off their boats.
The second boom came after 1968, when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay, and this time the Inupiat were better prepared. A pipeline had to be built across Alaska to a tanker port, and the Inupiat, along with other Alaska natives, asserted rights to the federal land along the way; the question of aboriginal land rights had gone unresolved since Alaska was bought from Russia.
In 1971 Congress awarded the natives a huge settlement: 44 million acres and nearly $1 billion. In another age the settlement might have been used to create reservations, to sequester aspects of a traditional life. Instead the land went to 12 new for-profit corporations owned by native shareholders. Some natives were ambivalent about entrusting their future to a corporation and worried about losing hunting and fishing grounds to sale or bankruptcy. But the more urbanized leaders saw a means of forcing their way into Alaska’s modern economy: one activist said that native corporations would be “the new harpoon.”
When Steve Oomittuk was growing up, Point Hope, the once-great capital of the Arctic, had receded to the margin of the civilized world. People lived in small frame houses and in a few last underground homes, scavenging materials by dog team from abandoned whaling and military sites. Oomittuk recalled that the most exquisite treat available at the village store was a roll of Life Savers.
In the decade after oil was discovered, regional leaders organized a municipal government and set out to reverse a long history of neglect. The North Slope Borough, encompassing the town of Barrow and seven small villages in an area the size of Minnesota, was given authority to collect property taxes from the new production facilities and pipelines. The borough built power plants, schools with swimming pools, sewer systems with heaters to prevent freezing. Today the government subsidizes a tribal college, child care, bus service, heating oil, and a $35 million public safety department. In 1997 the borough’s helicopters rescued 173 whalers drifting into the fog on a breakaway slab of ice.
In Point Hope, Oomittuk’s father served on the local tribal council and helped launch the new government. The entire community was moved two miles from the fast-eroding tip of the peninsula, and the population doubled as wages and transportation lifted the air of deprivation around village life. Oomittuk began working as a carpenter and started a family.
He was uneasy about some of the changes that the new prosperity brought. During a no-bid construction boom in the 1980s, he watched a corruption scandal bring down a borough mayor. New tools like outboards and snowmobiles improved hunters’ productivity but required cash; Oomittuk had one of the village’s last dog teams, until a power line blew down and landed in his dog yard. On the other hand, Oomittuk was on the borough’s payroll for a decade as village fire chief—one of many positions that set North Slope communities apart from the 200 or so other villages in Alaska. Point Hope today has a spotless fire station, with a full-time staff of four and a fire engine, a tanker truck, and an ambulance. By contrast, when a fire last spring in Emmonak, a village in the southwestern part of the state, roared through a fish-processing plant, residents could only stand beside their broken-down equipment and watch.
The cultures of the Arctic were known for being quick to adopt new technology, but subsistence-hunting traditions remained at the heart of Inupiat life. Oomittuk joined the tribal council and worked as a harpooner in his uncle’s umiak, or skin boat. In the North Slope villages, whaling captains continued to serve as leaders of the community. These captains tended to be the best village hunters: shrewd judges of ice and men, affluent enough to support a crew and a camp, passing down their equipment and know-how to generations of whalers. In general the captains embraced the opportunities of the oil age—as long as the oil was drilled on land, away from the marine hunting grounds.
When oil companies made efforts to drill in the Beaufort Sea, the captains’ association, along with the North Slope Borough, raised alarms about the intrusion of industrial traffic and noise in the migratory corridors of the whales and seals. Above all they feared an uncontrolled oil spill in an icebound ocean, far from
clean-up reinforcements. In 2008, Shell Oil bid heavily for federal leases in the Chukchi Sea, and a series of clamorous hearings began on the North Slope. Feelings were particularly strong in Point Hope, which had an unusual history of activism: in the early 1960s the village stopped a plan by government scientists to use “peaceful” nuclear weapons to blast a harbor out of a nearby valley. “There were some very harsh words said about oil companies at meetings here,” Oomittuk said. Villagers invoked memories of the starvation that followed the Yankee whalers. Caroline Cannon, an activist who led delegations to Washington, D.C., said at the time, “It feels as if the government and industry want us to forget who we are . . . as if they hope we will either give up or die fighting. We are not giving up.” The North Slope Borough and the whaling captains sued to stop the first federal permits, and Shell was forced to retreat. To succeed, the company realized, it would need to find allies among the Eskimos.
A towering wooden fence, 15 feet high and a half mile long, runs across the north side of Point Hope, built by the borough to protect against winds that descend from the North Pole. Before the fence was built, Oomittuk’s work as fire chief included shoveling houses out of drifts, sometimes relying on their stovepipes to find them. When I returned to Point Hope last March, I walked along the fence, freshly buried in snow, on the way to Oomittuk’s house for a dinner of raw whale meat and caribou stew. The sky was blue and the air calm, but ominous drifts tapered to the south of every house. Soon the wind came, and the next morning Oomittuk’s house was frigid: the stove had run out of oil. The wind chill was 38 below, according to my phone. Dishes on shelves on the north wall rattled with each gust. Oomittuk went out in the storm and slipped a two-by-four under one end of the fuel tank to get the oil flowing again, then sent his son off with buckets in search of borough-subsidized fossil fuel.
