Ten weeks later, Nathan Baring is standing on a boardwalk just above the waterline of a bog at Creamer’s Field in Fairbanks, Alaska. All around us the trees are sinking, slowly being swallowed by water. There was always a lake here, Nathan says. But not like this. The water has crept into the boreal forest and swallowed an entire stand of birch trees, dead all around us, drowned. Denuded of leaves with their white branches reaching skyward, their trunks are submerged. The undergrowth of what used to be forest floor is dead now, too, hugging the trunks of the birches in a woody snarl of leafless bramble. Boggy grasses have sprung up, and the dead wood that’s fallen to the wet floor is starting to grow moss.
This was already a marshy place, so parts of the trail are covered by boardwalk intended to cross shallow puddles or mud. Now, in places, the trees have fallen one into another, so that all around us they are leaning, teetering, ready to drop. It is not a place I would want to be standing in a swift wind.
This spectacle is called a thermokarst. Nathan asks Siri to explain to me what that is, but he has a new phone and the sound level hasn’t been adjusted, so Siri starts yelling at a shocking volume in the otherwise quiet bog, causing both of us to recoil from robot-speak about selectively melting permafrost.
“Oh my god, that’s so loud,” Nathan says, and turns it off.
The actual definition of thermokarst is a series of marshy pools where icy permafrost thaws. On the discontiguous permafrost that undergirds much of this area, the water rises to the surface as ice melts deep beneath the soil, creating the effect we see. As temperatures warm and more ice melts, pools become ponds become lakes.
“That’s what they say is happening here,” says Nathan. We keep walking and find a vole marooned on a root, having swum across a part of the bog. Nathan points, crouches down. “There’s so much more water. I just am looking at all those trees that are totally submerged and totally broken and dead.” Nathan thinks these trees might have been on land last he saw them. Maybe wet. But certainly not underwater. He’s been away the last year at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, hasn’t been here in a while, and the changes are striking. Looking at how uneven this ground is, he doesn’t remember that either. Nearby, a red squirrel chatters. “It really is like a ghost town, just a bunch of dead birch. They’re just waiting to fall over, basically.”
Along the boardwalk, there are educational signs describing the thermokarst, explaining why the lake is swallowing the forest and the trees are falling over. We stop to read one, and Nathan notices the logo in the lower left corner—ConocoPhillips. He reads it out loud: “Many scientists agree that the global climate has warmed in recent times, especially in the northern Boreal Forest.” The sign goes on to say that if the warming trend continues, the boreal forest will change dramatically. “That’s a super politically correct way to say that people are screwing with the climate,” Nathan says, then ad-libs what the sign doesn’t say: that humans are causing global warming and that when the forest changes, with it will come mass extinction and large-scale global die-off and an unstable future for children.
In the last year, so much has changed for youth and climate. New, daunting deadlines, worsening ecological conditions, and a rising up of youth to urge climate action. Yet so much is the same. A nation in denial.
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Nathan looks the part of that guy who might not care. Six foot four and burly at nineteen, sometimes bearded and presidentially square jawed, he’s a red-state resident who likes to hunt and fish and play with guns. But he is unique in his advocacy for this place, an outcast as a Juliana plaintiff, while Alaska is home to so much climate denialism and the unusual politics that attend it.
This summer of 2019, a long-shot Republican governor who was elected to preside over a budget crisis had been busy culling $444 million from the state budget, a huge chunk of which was to satisfy an absurd campaign promise to triple dividends to state residents from oil revenues at a time when oil prices were falling precipitously. Taxless as Alaska is, it did not have the funds to operate. And literally overnight, a galling $136 million disappeared from the University of Alaska budget, spread over three campuses. The immediate effect wiped out the scholarships of would-be students who had already packed bags and declined other universities, and the university’s Board of Regents declared financial exigency, the first step in dismissing tenured faculty.
That Governor Mike Dunleavy received a master’s degree from the very university he proposed to slash—and in a field he proposed slashing: education—was a deep study in irony. But no one had the time. At the Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks, scientists were too busy bracing for cuts while early plans looked to consolidate the three universities into one. It spelled trouble for the climate effort and especially for the Geophysical Institute—one of the preeminent polar research facilities in the world.
Seeing the thermokarst, these bits of the Alaska interior, makes it easy to understand why so many people come here just to study the earth. Launch a satellite into space over Alaska’s polar region and you can see a whole lot of it. And better yet, those same satellites pass over Fairbanks fourteen times a day, making it easy to downlink the data they collect. This explains why NASA keeps satellite dishes at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, more specifically at the Geophysical Institute, and why scientists from all over the world think of this region as a kind of living laboratory. Alaska has fifty-four volcanos that erupt every few months, plus a hundred thousand glaciers, a whole lot of sea ice, and some very strange weather. Ninety percent of the state and half of the Arctic stands on permafrost. And on that shaky land, Alaska experiences, on average, forty thousand earthquakes a year, a collection that includes three of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded.
Thus, the Geophysical Institute is one of seventeen university-affiliated research centers in America. And the State of Alaska similarly houses its key scientists there, including the state seismologist and the state’s climatologist at the Alaska Climate Research Center. This latter center plays an important part in climate science generally, archiving records, developing statistics, and writing weather summaries for Alaska’s newspapers. It’s where scientists also compile information on Alaska’s climate for whoever’s asking, including scientists from all over the world. They compile information on everything from the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere to climate variability, the weather in the upper Arctic atmosphere, and how the atmosphere interacts with land and water and pollution. Which makes it critically important to polar science, and modern climate science too.
Climate change begins and ends with ice. It is where the story of the changing world can be fully understood. For the last hundred years, Earth’s ice has been melting, reflecting less solar heat off the planet, causing it to warm. This melting ice makes the seas rise, changes weather patterns and ocean health, and all of those things promote species extinction and disease, and will eventually swamp land with water.
But this summer, while statewide rancor over cuts—to the university, Medicaid, support for people with disabilities and others—spread like stomach flu at a summer camp, the governor proposed killing off these research facilities, offered to reduce the cuts to $50 million in exchange.
Of course, what the governor proposed is illegal. Only Alaska’s Board of Regents can make decisions about how university funding will be spent. But it didn’t stop the governor from suggesting it anyway, even though the regents didn’t take the bait.
Where climate breakdown is concerned, the governor’s membership in the cult of deniability is well known. He was quoted in the Anchorage Daily News as saying, “The issue of global warming, in many respects, it’s still being debated as to how to deal with it, what exactly is causing it. . . . I know there’s a lot of folks and scientists who believe that man is contributing to this. But the question is, What is Alaska’s role in this? What is Alaska doing?”
Sound familiar? It’s a version of the same cookie-cutter quote offered by Koch Industries’ Sheryl Corrigan at a 2016 event, the same quote offered by former secretary of the interior Ryan Zinke in response to the Camp Fire in California.
Indeed, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity had just sent Dunleavy on a controversial roadshow to talk budget priorities under the absurdly named Fortifying Alaska’s Future series. This after the Republican-controlled legislature balked at his draconian cuts.
“There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the governor and especially the Koch brothers would love to shut down one of the world’s largest Arctic climate change research facilities,” Nathan tells me. We are standing at a viewpoint overlooking the thermokarst. In one direction is the deadened bog. In another, the boreal forest as it once was. Trees standing lush and tall. The earth soft but not submerged. Nathan says he remembers when this park looked more like the latter. And he is angry about what the governor’s cuts could mean for the Fairbanks economy and to climate science.
From his Gold Hill home on one ridge to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks on the next, to West Valley High School just down the hill from that, where Nathan graduated in 2018, this is his world. In the same part of town are the coffee shops where he loves to sit for hours in deep, roving conversations with friends, many of them similarly high achieving and brainy. There’s the place where he goes to haul water for 2.2 cents a gallon in the pickup his family keeps for such things. And somewhat in the middle of this, behind the Geophysical Institute at the university, running in either direction toward the various pieces of Nathan’s life, are the miles and miles of ski trails he once trained on as a high school skiier. In case I need to understand how serious these sports are to his high school, Nathan explains that Olympian Kendall Kramer, who is one of the top three junior skiers in the United States, is a student there.
Like Juliana plaintiff Tia Hatton, Nathan has spent much of his life on skis. Tia is also a competitive skier whose last high school season in Bend, Oregon, was so snowless that she and her classmates trained on dry land and had to travel to places where there was actual snow to compete. When Nathan similarly competed, he trained twice a day, six days a week on these trails. There are dozens of miles of them encircling the Geophysical Institute, mostly gliding through timber but across fields and lakes too. He could ski endlessly if he wanted. But not without snow.
This vantage from his life in Alaska is such that Nathan can see climate change daily. So can every other Alaskan. Sea ice forms later now, allowing the erosion of coastal shoreline to the south, a circumstance that’s forcing the relocation of entire villages, some the homes of Nathan’s friends. The summers are cooler and wetter. And the shifting permafrost is opening sinkholes in Nathan’s neighborhood, not to mention that some of his favorite glaciers are no longer glaciers and that wildfires are worsening by the year.
It’s impossible to make a logical argument denying climate change in Alaska anymore. Yet some of Nathan’s best friends are deniers. If he lived in a liberal stronghold, say some city to the south along the West Coast, he might be inclined to break ties with these people. The social fabric of such a place would help him do it. But Nathan thinks it’s as childish to throw people away as it is to deny facts. He knows these last deniers don’t want facts—they want their lifestyle instead. If we offer them something other than regulation, he says—clean energy jobs, a new future—he thinks it won’t be hard to convince them to come along. “Climate denial from most people is a front for ‘let’s not change our economy.’ And it’s about fear,” Nathan says.
In his tiny town of Ester outside of Fairbanks, the facts of the changing world of Alaska’s interior are clear enough. Summers and winters are getting wetter and milder, and the winter rains are heavy and bring more chinooks, too, lukewarm winds that warm everything until it rains. The rain can freeze on snow in Alaska’s climate, turning everything into an icy hellscape.
There isn’t otherwise much that stops for the weather in interior Alaska. Snow days off school and work are not a thing, skis and snowmobiles being perfectly good substitutes for passable roads. A Fairbanks winter brings pastimes like dogsledding, even at the solstice when the norm is a scant three and a half hours of bona fide daylight. But this ice—it shuts down school and lots of other things. One recent storm caused a power outage for up to two weeks, marooning Nathan’s family in their home for a week. Fortunately, the weather was what Alaskans call “warm,” or about 20 degrees, so Nathan’s family kept heated by feeding a wood stove and entertained by reading out loud, listening to the radio, and trying to make meals.
“I probably read a book about climate change,” Nathan says dryly, consumer of nonfiction that he is.
Now, people are growing barley in Alaska. They can’t grow wheat yet, but if things keep going this direction, maybe they will.
This kind of thawing is less a problem if you don’t live on permafrost. But around Fairbanks, such regular thaws open sinkholes that suck up infrastructure—a parking lot at the University of Alaska is known to swallow whole cars—and also render runways useless and cause houses and buildings to shift. And melting permafrost releases methane, a greenhouse gas twenty-eight times as potent as carbon dioxide, an unsettling fact that attends the sliding earth. So it’s not just the Old-West vibe that gives Fairbanks an air of having happened fifty years ago, not just the retro architecture or that the Daily Miner, the local newspaper, has downtown real estate a decade after the newspaper industry began its precipitous free fall across the lower forty-eight. It’s more the sloping construction, the crapshoot of engineering that wears the buildings years before their time and gives Fairbanks a sort of eternal air, the sense of time much longer than a life can be, than even the life of a building can be.
For buildings and civilization, time is running out. Clear as ever to watch the polar ice melt before your eyes. And everything here—the sheer vastness of the land, the arid wind, the rivers slicing through the valley, sometimes overflowing—reminds a person how little control they have over any of it. So much of the Alaska interior is proof that nature is the boss of you. That regardless of whether people rove it, this land is bigger, older, more powerful than any silly little dominion humans believe they exert. To live here is to consent to being swallowed by the planet and its rhythms. To bow to those, and to the animals that share them with you, while you chop your own firewood and haul your own water. To understand that whatever tiny noises humans make from the moment they first breathe until the end of them are just good-for-nothing peeps, white noise in a land that doesn’t care. And if you ever forget any of this, you need only walk away from town, drift away from the urban landscape, and see how long you can last.
For many Alaskans, the land provides as much as the rest. As much as the oil fields, which employ more than two-thirds of working Alaskans and paid $749 million in wages in 2016. The salmon that run the rivers, the halibut off the south coast, the moose and the caribou sustain a hunter’s way of life. When the sun shines high twenty hours a day and sunset leaves an everlasting twilight, people fish their limits and stock freezers as wide as garage doors. Hens range from their insulated coops to peck in the yard. Berries grow like gangbusters and vegetables, too, in light that never ends, the growing season so unlike any other that the Alaska State Fair boasts a cabbage-weighing contest for the biggest cabbage that can be grown in any year. (In 2019, the winning cabbage weighed 138 pounds.)
All this makes Nathan very aware of where he comes from. And from what kind of life. The day we meet in summer 2019 in Fairbanks, Nathan’s family has just added forty-five salmon to a freezer already stuffed with moose and caribou. He’s just been fishing for Arctic grayling on the Chatanika River too. And because he hasn’t taken his gun safety course to get his adult hunting license since starting college in Minnesota, he’s gone to the shooting range in the last few days just to blast off a few shots while it is all that he can legally do. Among other outings are “popping squirrels,” which means shooting them and harvesting the legs. He tells me, “If you’re a good shot, you can get all four.”
He wants this, all of this, preserved. And he says on our walk through the thermokarst that even though he likes to hunt and fish and sometimes just shoot things, he doesn’t necessarily think that any of that should interfere with his desire to thwart climate change, or his belief that it is real and threatening and that it is coming for his way of life before a lot of others. That he has friends who disagree, friends who don’t believe in climate change at all, is a thing that he values, not a thing he resists. He knows very well just from living here what it takes to communicate with people who don’t share his ideas. And he also knows, thoroughly and deeply, that he would not have joined the Juliana case if he did not believe in trying.
“I think of my friends in this capacity as representatives of that side of America that is just still wanting to cling on to this economy, and I think that’s a valid perspective if it’s the skills that you have. I enjoy being friends with them because it keeps me grounded in the whole picture and not just the fiery-brand, Bay Area, save-the-earth people.” Then he apologizes for being derogatory, assures me that he holds nothing against Bay Area people. Then he goes on, says his father is a teacher, his mother a school nurse, both publicly funded jobs. “I have to remember that my parents’ salaries are paid for by oil. I come from a state where 90 percent of the general unrestricted funds in the state budget come from oil. It’s a one-track pony. It’s like Venezuela.” He knows what threats a new economy brings. When he talks about climate remediation, he talks about how people from interior Alaska—people from rural communities everywhere in America—will find economic anchor in a world that tries to halt the climate breakdown. Without that, he says, we will be leaving vast numbers of Americans behind.
Last summer, Nathan interned with Senator Lisa Murkowski and befriended another intern who now works as Dunleavy’s secretary. “She’s the one who makes sure he eats his cheese sticks on time and goes to his meetings . . . so I am by no means living in an echo chamber,” he says. Her father is the deputy general of the administration, so Nathan met the man and tried to have a conversation about his concerns. “Not that he would care. I’m just a kid,” Nathan says, but he tried all the same.
What he took away from this talk were details of the man’s life, of his relationships to his wife, his children, his church, and a bit of politics. Nathan knows people expect that as a radical, he will begin this conversation like an enemy combatant, but his goal is friendship first, politics second. He thinks hyperpartisanism is toxic, and he found lots to like about the man. That he is a lawyer, which Nathan aspires to be. That he’s a jack-of-all-trades, built his house.
“I do know that this view of the world is incredibly privileged. I don’t have an identity that is vilified. In fact, I fit in with many of these groups. I have the ability to go into the quote-unquote lion’s den without being vilified. And I kind of think it is a personal responsibility to be a peacemaker.” It is not the usual firebrand activism. But it is his.
He says the man offered perspective on the administration, about how his job is simply giving advice, and how ideological politicians tend to have ideological ideas. As he does in a lot of conversations, Nathan listened, said what the man could hear.
I ask Nathan what his friend, the man’s daughter, thinks of his advocacy for climate, and about climate change generally, despite her work for the governor.
“She thinks it’s a joke,” he says. Then he turns and starts down the stairs to the sodden boardwalk, the tree trunks leaning over the trail.
Fairbanks is the home of the Museum of the North. It’s where they keep the steppe bison mummy found near here forty years ago, and the tusks of mastadons and woolly mammoths too. They’re among the animals that used to range on Alaska’s plains back when Alaska had plains. This was about twenty thousand years ago, when the earth was colder, the sea level lower, and the land not so spongy and plagued by the kind of shrubs that foul the diet of an herbivore. Caribou were around then too. And muskox. They used to wander in herds across the Bering Land Bridge—the bit of land that once connected northern Alaska with Siberia.
The theory is that caribou and muskox have bigger hooves than the animals that didn’t survive when the earth warmed. North America stopped being a block of ice and sea levels rose around Alaska. Steppe bison and horses, mastodons and saiga antelope all went extinct in the region when the Bering Land Bridge sank into the sea, plain became tundra, and food got scarcer right about the time the animals had to walk farther for it. Some just couldn’t do the walking, sank into the boggy land instead, their diets unable to adapt to the plants. These were the end times for the Pleistocene epoch. Humans roamed then, too, lived once with the mastodons and the mammoths. They survived for the simple reasons of having the right diet and the right kind of feet.