Seen from the air, mid-July Alaska is a paradise. No frozen tundra, no Titanic-class icebergs. No igloos, or polar bears stalking their prey. The lakes are thawed and inviting; skating quickly becomes swimming. The plant life is lush, the temperature mild, the sky clear and bright. 

As our nine-seater Cessna bounces above the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, I get my first glimpse of Shishmaref. A hundred buildings huddle together in the middle of a 3-square-mile island where 600 people, most of them Inuit, live. White tents storing reindeer meat skirt the grassy perimeter above the shore; to the south runs a thin wisp of airstrip. With its placid, deep blue water and dirt roads, Shishmaref is the land time forgot—an Edenic bastion of what the Lower 48 sacrificed in the name of Progress. Not visible until we touch down is the unfortunate reality: Shishmaref is falling into the sea. 

Just a few miles south of the Arctic Circle, this is a place where winter wind chills push temperatures 60 degrees below zero. Where miles of ocean freeze so solid you can drive across them. In recent years, though, locals have watched the island’s barrier of protective ice melt earlier and increasingly violent storms pulverize a coastline left vulnerable by the thaw. Efforts to stay the progress of the rising tide seem almost comic in retrospect: Sandbags and retaining walls crumble along with the island’s eroding beachhead. The people of Shishmaref are fighting a losing battle with the sea. 
 

I’m here to witness a historic vote, one that could redefine homeland security in terms of ice sheets instead of terror threats. Tomorrow, residents decide whether to flee their island—a remnant of the intercontinental span that once connected Russia to Alaska— before it’s finally swept away. Shishmaref, the only settlement on the island of Sarichef, is one of many coastal townships in the state threatened by the rising Chukchi Sea. Even on this modest scale, moving will require a massive engineering effort, transplanting an entire town–buildings and all–and uprooting a way of life. More important, it will begin a long line of exoduses brought on by global climate change. 


In a small office in the basement of the town church, Tony Weyiouanna is drowning in a sea of paper. A portly man in jeans, T-shirt, and black AVEC cap (the acronym stands for Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, the local power company), Weyiouanna is head of the Erosion and Relocation Coalition, recently formed to defend the shoreline and solicit federal funds. He’s the man on the front lines in Shishmaref. He wears his responsibilities lightly; when I ask to see the data he’s been collecting on erosion, Weyiouanna jokes that he’ll have to charge me $2 million dollars.

His unruffled manner isn’t surprising. He’s been here before—a report that led to the first vote, in 1974, stated, “A ‘no action’ situation may result in loss of one-third to one-half of the village in one to ten years.” Waylaid by transportation costs and bureaucratic delays, Shishmaref repeated the referendum two decades later. Each time the people voted to move; each time the town stayed. 

Money is just one reason the move has been postponed. Finding somewhere to go is another. The Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 parceled out 40 million acres among tribal organizations like the Shishmaref Native Corporation, which owns several plots on the mainland. Most of these plots sit atop permafrost—the layer of iced earth 5 to 10 feet below ground sheeting much of the state—that is gradually receding due to rising temperatures and heat retained by buildings and roads. The resulting buckling and resettling accounts for more than $30 million in repairs statewide each year—not the best foundation for New Shishmaref. Even in 1974, no suitable location could be found on corporation lands. 

Talk about global warming is heating up in Alaska. Just ask Washington’s latest converts to the ecoradical cause. “There can no longer be any doubt that major changes in the climate have occurred in recent decades,” affirmed the Environmental Protection Agency in a detailed report submitted by the Bush administration to the United Nations this spring. Among the “visible and measurable consequences”: By the end of the century, the temperature in Alaska will have climbed an average of 5 degrees in summer and 10 degrees in winter, raising the sea level by as much as 10 inches. A separate study, published this summer in Science, shows how accelerated melting of Alaskan glaciers is pumping up the world’s sea levels far faster than previously believed. Little wonder that hands-off conservatives are suddenly talking like the meltdown is a matter of national defense. 

“Alaska,” laments Ted Stevens, a staunch Republican and the state’s senior U.S. Senator, “is harder hit by global climate change than any place in the world.” 

As their ancestral land crumbles away, the people of Shishmaref do what they can to keep the sea at bay. Mostly that means continuing on as though nothing’s changed. The town is renovating the school and constructing a new multimillion-dollar tannery, buildings that will have to be moved in 10 years. 

The futility of these endeavors is not lost on Tony Weyiouanna. “I don’t think we have much choice now,” he tells me on the eve of the new ballot. “Some might vote no—people so tied to the island they don’t want to leave. We’ll just have to make adjustments.” Like a wholesale migration to the mainland, an adjustment he discusses with the indifference of an engineer, not someone who’s lived here all his life. “We could move the town over an ice road. Or we could barge it. After the vote, we’re hoping to develop a comprehensive relocation plan.” This manner of dispassionate practicality is typical here. Shishmaref’s residents seem content to go where nature wills.