by Hope Jahren
Oomittuk served as Point Hope’s mayor for 10 years, and in those days he opposed offshore oil development. “It was time for us to take care of the animals,” he said. “They’ve taken care of us since time immemorial.” But as a steward of traditional culture, he was conscious of the Inupiat principle of paaqlaktautaiññiq—the avoidance of community conflict—and he saw that power on the North Slope was shifting. The borough had the money. Tribal councils were losing influence; people had stopped coming to public meetings unless door prizes were offered. And prominent whaling captains had become leaders in business—especially in the land-claims native corporation, the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation.
Starting out in support services for the oil fields that spidered across the region, ASRC had expanded into construction, refining, oil leasing, and government contracting, growing into the largest company in Alaska, with 10,000 employees and gross revenues of $2.5 billion. Because its shares can’t be traded publicly, ASRC is subject to few disclosure requirements and can seem opaque. The Alaska Supreme Court recently ruled that it had been unreasonably secretive about executive compensation. But big dividends have tended to quell concerns; in 2013 the Inupiat shareholders—there are 12,000, many of whom live outside the region—received an average of $10,000 each.
The corporation’s president, Rex Rock, is a prominent whaler from Point Hope; last year he was the captain of Tariek Oviuk’s crew. Rock told me it is not a coincidence that many top ASRC officials are whaling captains. “It’s the community’s whale,” he said. “The captain and crew each know their roles. You work as one to go out and provide for the community. We’ve taken that into the business world.” At the headquarters, a three-story building near the ocean in Barrow, a whaling skin boat provides the center support for a glass-topped boardroom table. But the hunt for profit tells the executives which way to steer: though the company runs television ads of squinting Eskimo hunters declaring “I am Inupiaq,” it also took the oil industry’s side in a controversial state referendum over oil taxes.
As offshore drilling became a real prospect, ASRC and the industry pressed the argument that whaling and oil could thrive side by side. Shell sponsored boroughwide projects and village feasts and agreed to seasonal drilling restrictions that pleased hunters. Meanwhile ASRC sought to neutralize village opposition. In March, I stopped by a rundown former schoolhouse in Point Hope where a man named Sayers Tuzroyluk was waiting for a computer to be installed in a recently remodeled office. Tuzroyluk, 70 and silver-haired, was the president of Voice of the Arctic Inupiat, a new organization funded by ASRC and the North Slope Borough. The idea, he said, was to line up all the region’s tribes and corporations and city governments to speak with one pro-development voice. They were frustrated by hearing anti-oil activists represent the Inupiat in the media, he said: “You have more power when you speak as one voice. We don’t speak as individuals. We speak as the whole North Slope.”
The biggest change had come in 2010, when the North Slope Borough dropped its legal battle and started working with Shell—first tentatively, then with greater enthusiasm. Last summer, when I went to Barrow to ask about the change, I was ushered into the office of Jacob Adams, the borough mayor’s top aide. Before taking office, Adams was the former longtime president of ASRC; he had come out of retirement to help run the borough as Shell’s ships were sailing into the Chukchi.
The previous mayor, Edward Itta, had also been willing to sit down with Shell, but he complained that ASRC was pushing the borough too far. “The ASRC are in cahoots with industry, and they’re not amateurs at PR,” he told me last year. “This campaign up here saying ‘I am Inupiaq.’ Claiming to be the Voice of the Natives. Well, I’m sorry, they’re not.”
Like Itta, Adams is an eminent whaling captain. An intense, compact man with gray hair and a crisply pressed business shirt, he told me that the local government could win more safety concessions by negotiating with Shell than by fighting in court. Perhaps more to the point, onshore oil production was declining, and a pipeline coming ashore would mean new roads and facilities, new jobs, more property to tax. The Inupiat, he argued, did not want to go back to hauling lake ice for drinking water, cutting up walrus for dog food, waking up in houses at 25 below zero: “We’ve created, in the past 40 years, an infrastructure that our children are enjoying now. So will our grandchildren.”
Once the whaling captains’ association followed the borough and dropped its legal opposition, the tribal council of Point Hope stood almost alone as the indigenous lead plaintiff in an environmental lawsuit against Chukchi Sea drilling. But the melting of the Arctic was drawing new international attention to the cause. Opponents from around the world called the Chukchi prospect an “unexploded carbon bomb” better left in the ground. “Kayaktivists”—inflamed by Shell’s many mishaps, including a 2012 debacle that ended with a runaway drill rig in the Gulf of Alaska—prepared to protest the Shell vessels passing through the Pacific Northwest. Caroline Cannon, who told Congress that a major oil spill would amount to “genocide,” had been awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, which came with a stipend of $150,000. Robert Redford narrated a short film about her.
In early 2014 a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Point Hope, blocking Shell’s drilling plans for the year, but the pressure on the village only grew. ASRC seemed ready to declare a moratorium on paaqlaktautaiññiq. In an open letter, an ASRC executive named Richard Glenn accused the tribes of working with outside environmental groups “to close the door on the future of our communities.” As if to emphasize the point, ASRC withdrew several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of funding for social and environmental programs run by a boroughwide tribal group that supported the lawsuit. Glenn is a disarming spokesman, a trained geologist with a canny sense of how the wider world likes to see Eskimos: impoverished and clinging to noble tradition. “This is not a Western,” he told me. “The word village has a quaint image that belies the huge dollar cost of these small cities we have built here. This subsistence lifestyle depends on a lot of money.” As he sees it, if environmentalists succeed in closing off the Arctic to oil development, the North Slope Eskimos will become climate-change victims, no less than if the ice melts away. “We’re selfish about our region,” he said. “If we sacrifice ourselves, if we shut down all the Arctic, someone elsewhere will turn the valve open a little more.”
In July 2014 the new harpoon struck. ASRC called a press conference in Anchorage to announce a joint venture with Shell, which would grant the small village-based native corporations a royalty interest in Chukchi Sea oil. Point Hope’s village corporation, Tikigaq, was in on the deal. It brought in a professional facilitator for a “visioning” session with leaders of the tribe and the city, and all agreed that without money from offshore oil, their community had no clear path forward. Though anti-oil sentiment remained strong—I was approached many times during my visits by people stressing this—a tribal election was called, and the new officers wrote a letter asking ASRC for help with a budget deficit. Caroline Cannon, the Goldman Prize winner, took a job with the borough mayor. In March 2015, Point Hope withdrew from the Shell lawsuit.
Curiously, worries about the warming Arctic had hardly figured in the region’s long debate. When I asked Jacob Adams about the prospects of subsistence in a future without ice, his answer showed a mixture of cultural pride and a hunter’s bravado. The Inupiat had always struggled with scarcity and change, he said. They would adapt. The animals would adapt too, he predicted. “Nobody knows whether the ice melting is going to threaten any species at all,” he said.
In the late 1970s, when Steve Oomittuk was going to high school in Barrow, he had a job caring for caged animals at the Naval Arctic Research Lab, north of town. Some of the work he found troubling: wolves and marmots were stressed, dehydrated, and needle-jabbed as the government searched for metabolic secrets that could be useful on the battlefield. But several decades of Cold War research were winding down, and soon the Quonset-hut la
bs were turned over to wildlife biologists working for the North Slope Borough. Under local control, research shifted toward protecting animals that are vital to Inupiat subsistence. Now the borough’s Department of Wildlife Management, with an annual budget of more than $5 million, has a mission to marry traditional knowledge and scientific methodology.
A story about the department’s origins has become a kind of creation myth for the borough itself: How Oil Saved Subsistence. In 1977 the new borough was confronted by an international effort to halt Eskimo whaling, as regulators claimed that the bowheads had not recovered from the commercial slaughter a century ago. On the advice of elders, the borough’s biologists, funded by oil taxes, undertook sophisticated acoustic studies, proving that much of the population had gone uncounted by swimming under the ice. A compromise was reached, eventually allowing Alaska’s villages a maximum of 67 whale strikes each year. (Regulators were also concerned that too many novice hunting crews, funded by the new oil wealth, were striking and losing whales, a detail sometimes overlooked in the retelling of the story.)
The warming Arctic became a focus for the borough’s biologists. They drew on insights of elders like Arnold Brower Sr., the Inupiaq son of a 19th-century Yankee whaler. Brower, who turned down schooling in San Francisco in order to spend his boyhood in a reindeer camp, landed more than three dozen bowheads in his lifetime, making him one of the most successful captains of his day. In 2001 he described to Charles Wohlforth, in The Whale and the Supercomputer, how the weather was undermining traditional knowledge. “You could predict to go out there and hunt all day and not think about getting stranded,” he said. “But I think we had a crazy type of change.” Brower died a few years later, during an unseasonably late freeze-up. As he traveled alone to his fishing camp, at the age of 86, his snowmobile broke through river ice.
In the fall of 2009 two biologists with the U.S. Geological Survey, on a flight south of Barrow, spotted a sandy beach littered with walrus carcasses: 131 dead, most of them young, evidently trampled in a stampede. Traditionally female walrus and their young rested on drifting pack ice over a shallow offshore feeding area in the Chukchi Sea. In the past decade, as the summer ice has disappeared early, they have been forced onto beaches, where herds are easy to panic. More worrying, they now face the possibility of a two-day commute to reach their feeding grounds.
The difficulty, as the borough’s biologists point out, is that no one is sure whether this crazy type of change is causing actual harm. Walrus, which range widely and spend much of their time underwater, are notoriously hard to count. A 2006 regional census tallied 129,000 but conceded that the actual number could be between 55,000 and 507,000. With error intervals so wide, the walrus could practically go extinct before a statistical change was detected, Robert Suydam, a biologist who works for the North Slope Borough, told me. “We’re not in a good place to predict the future, so we’re in a very poor place to do anything about it,” he said.
It’s possible that increased sunlight and productivity in the ice-free waters have helped the walrus by providing more food, but biologists don’t know. Similarly, bowheads seem to be thriving, and humpback whales, harbor porpoises, and salmon are expanding their range. But as the climate grows warmer, good fortune can turn bad. Biologists worry especially about the corrosive effect of carbon entering cold Arctic waters, which could eventually hurt the zooplankton that bowheads travel so far to devour.
Since 1975, on a barrier island near Barrow, the ornithologist George Divoky has tended a pioneer nesting colony of black guillemots. Each year, as the snow melted earlier, the guillemots produced more numerous young. It was a global-warming success story—except that the ice was drawing away from the shore faster every summer, pulling with it the Arctic cod that the guillemots fed their young. Around 2002 reproduction rates began to decline—even before polar bears, marooned on the island by retreating ice, started to ravage the nests.
Tools for addressing such slow-developing problems are limited. In 2011 the federal government, citing the effects of lost sea ice, listed the Pacific walrus as a candidate for protection under the Endangered Species Act. But for regulators looking to preserve wildlife populations, Eskimo hunters offer an easier target than major producers of carbon emissions do. In the Arctic potential limits on subsistence hunting are met with anger and disdain—not least among business leaders, who use them to argue that villagers and climate-change activists are not natural allies. Rex Rock and Jacob Adams both pointedly recalled for me that environmentalists had tried in the 1970s to stop indigenous whaling, as an illustration of why the Inupiat should mistrust “outside entities.” In recent years the North Slope Borough and ASRC joined oil-industry groups in lawsuits that opposed protections for bearded seals and polar bears, which could impinge on future oil facilities.
The village hunters adapt where they can, traveling farther across open water to the broken ice where marine mammals can be found. On St. Lawrence Island they couldn’t reach the walrus last spring; a charity shipped in frozen halibut for replacement protein. In Barrow, where ice in the spring is growing thin and unreliable, the majority of bowheads are now taken during an open-water hunt in the fall. Starting last September, whaling crews in high-speed aluminum boats harpooned 15 bowheads and towed them back to the sandy beach north of town. Meat and blubber were shared among local families and sent to relatives and friends; crew pennants flew from captains’ homes, inviting neighbors to come eat. The Inupiat were adapting, and thriving. But even in the celebrations a note of menace lurked. Several young bowheads had been found dead from attacks by killer whales, ice-averse predators that are expanding their range in the Arctic. The first such killing anyone remembered was just two years ago.
By the time Shell’s offshore drilling finally got underway, last summer, the operation had taken on the familiar air of an Alaska gold rush. The cost of the operation was enormous—$7 billion—and reports of the expense encouraged rumors of a big find. Why else would Shell have gambled so much? State officials were hoping to refill the Alaska pipeline, which was down to one-quarter capacity. In Barrow, Jacob Adams envisioned tax revenues providing for his grandchildren. In the villages there was talk of royalties, corporate dividends, and jobs.
Then, at the end of September, Shell delivered a shocking announcement: it had failed to find sufficient oil in its Chukchi Sea exploration well and was withdrawing from drilling in Alaskan waters “for the foreseeable future.” ASRC’s president, Rex Rock, predicted “a fiscal crisis beyond measure” for local communities. He blamed excessive federal regulation—rules that had been largely intended to prevent oil spills and protect wildlife. Environmentalists welcomed the retreat as a sign of a new era, but industry analysts suggested that Shell’s decision had less to do with a post-Paris future of carbon budgets and carbon taxes than with conventional economics: the low price of oil and the high cost and uncertainty of drilling in the Arctic.
The argument will surely continue. In March the Obama administration proposed a new five-year plan for offshore oil leasing that includes future sales in the Beaufort Sea and the Chukchi Sea. But diminished expectations of an offshore bonanza are now drawing attention to a different scenario, in which the Inupiat no longer struggle to choose between oil and subsistence: instead they could lose them both.
While I was in Barrow last year, I drove north along a beach road, which runs past the old naval research labs and ends at a small landmark in the world of climate science: a yellow clapboard house on the tundra with a three-story scaffolded tower. In April 2012 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Barrow observatory was one of the first places on Earth to record a monthly average of 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That average is now typical for the entire planet. At the Paris climate conference last December, the threshold that raised concerns was 450.
At the NOAA facility two young technicians led me to a rooftop platform looking across the tundra, where polar-bear sightings
sometimes bring a squad car from the borough police, with a second car for backup. They described how prevailing winds off the ocean provide pure readings of the carbon dioxide that drifts over the pole from Europe. The technicians pointed out the Dobson spectrophotometer: a small silver dome standing alone, like a miniature planetarium, and tracking changes in the earth’s ozone layer. Forty years ago, when scientists first installed a dome there, the world was awakening to concerns about ozone-erasing chlorofluorocarbons. The chemicals began to be phased out in 1989, and now, decades later, the stratosphere shows signs of stabilizing. The dome on the tundra seemed a small shrine to hope.
When I returned to Point Hope in March, however, none of the optimism and resolve of the Paris agreements had made its way north. The Arctic had just seen two months of record temperatures, in a winter that researchers were calling “absurdly warm.” The polar ice pack was thinner, and its maximum extent was the smallest ever measured. Approaching in a small plane, I could see open water stretching for miles south from the Tikigaq peninsula. Hunters in the village had already spotted a bowhead, a month early, and were wondering if they might have to set up their spring ice camps on the beach.
A cold snap was settling in, however, and a frozen skim had formed beyond the rough cuticle of shore-fast ice. In town, snowy streets gleamed like polished marble. I stopped by the school complex to see Steve Oomittuk, who had a new job as shop teacher. He told me he had turned it into Inupiat shop, making tools like the unaaq, a staff with a hook and a pick that hunters use to probe the ice pack for holes. The school, which has 238 students, was undergoing a $41 million renovation, including a new gym that could seat the entire village on bleachers. This was not just a testament to the popularity of the Harpooners (and Harpoonerettes). Point Hope had been moved, at great borough expense, to a beach six feet above sea level; the gym, on high pilings, will be the safest refuge if a storm crashes through town.
