I am sure that environmentalists and environmentally conscious individuals ponder what has been accomplished since the beginning of the movement in the U.S. There have been many notable successes, and yet things seem to be getting worse. And, of course, much traction was lost during this U.S. presidency as laws were rolled back or changed. It is time to do some serious introspection and cold assessment of the strategies that have been used, otherwise, I believe, we will continue to experience pendulum swings of public support for environmental causes.

I chaired the science Working Group for an international conference of arctic indigenous peoples called Snowchange in August of last year (www.snowchange.org). There were several other working groups. Indigenous leaders from Greenland to Siberia gathered to share their stories of what they are seeing in changes to fish, wildlife and habitat. The list of observed changes grows longer each year:

–beaver are now in the arctic as the tree line moves north

–salmon are showing up with lesions and parasites in greater frequency

–weather is much more unpredictable, causing danger and death to hunters

–more and more salmon are appearing in the Chukchi Sea

–water levels in lakes and rivers are going down

–permafrost is melting

–reindeer are having difficulty accessing forage due to freeze-thaw-freeze cycles,

covering tundra with ice

–migratory birds are arriving earlier and leaving later

One of the beautiful aspects of being an Alaska Native is that we have incredibly wise elders. We call certain people “elders” because of their life wisdom that is informed by their life experiences, the traditions they carry that are passed down for countless generations, and stories which may go back perhaps thousands of years. An older person is not necessarily an elder in this context. There are acknowledged elders who are young by most peoples’ standards.

I am an Alaska Native, an Aleut, born and raised in the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea off the west coast of Alaska. My people have lived in intimate connection with the Bering Sea for almost ten thousand years, and we are still here with our connection still strong. Because of our intimate connection, we are able to notice the subtlest changes to the Bering Sea, and the fish and wildlife dependent on it, long before any highly trained scientist. Aleuts of the Pribilof Islands first noted anomalous things about wildlife that indicated that food stress was likely beginning and that this was likely an ecosystem-wide phenomenon. St. Paul Island, my home and home to some 500 Aleuts, was truly a magical, mystical place, hidden from the world by dense blankets of fog throughout the summer months. St. Paul was home to some of the largest cliff nesting seabird colonies in North America, two and a half million strong. And it was also the home of some 1.2 million northern fur seals (the largest fur seal colony in the northern hemisphere), as well as thousands of steller sea lions. In 1977, our people noted adult birds with their breast bones protruding, with chest muscles “caved in”; murre and kittiwake chicks (cliff nesting seabirds) falling off of cliff ledges and dying in larger numbers than normal; fur seal pelts so thin that we could see light through them when the fat was fleshed off; and sea lions chasing after and eating fur seal pups in greater frequency than any other time in living memory. From this, Aleuts knew that there was big trouble, and that it encompassed the entire Bering Sea because near-shore foragers, distance foragers, depth foragers, and surface foragers were all indicating food stress. Indeed, since this time, these animals having been precipitously declining in populations.