Free In the Empire of Ice by Gretel Ehrlich Page B

summer camps there. The women picked greens and preserved them in seal oil. Then we waited for the ice to come in.”
    Now the inland hunters from farther south tell Winton that there are lakes drying up, landslides along the rivers, and no berries. Warm winds come all the time from the west and the willows are bigger. There are no muskrats, no beavers, and ice collects on the caribou’s feet and makes it hard for them to travel. Like walking on broken glass.
    “These days there is no more multi-year ice. No old ice at all,” Winton says. “That’s what we all depended on for water because all the salt had percolated out. We started losing it maybe 10 or 15 years ago. That’s how long ago things like wind and ice began to go fast.”
    The Arctic is always changing. Twenty-three million years ago Alaska had the same climate as Pennsylvania today—the very same species of trees. A mass extinction of ice age animals began 15,000 years ago. Grasslands turned into bogs and grazing animals starved. Now the interglacial paradise in which we’ve been living is coming to an end as human-caused climate change escalates. While we should be headed for a new ice age as determined by Earth’s orbital cycles, the level of CO 2 and methane emissions and the heating they are causing is overriding the natural cooling trend. A new wave of mass extinctions will surely come.
     
    JOE AND I VISIT the new houses at the shore. They’re roomy, but none have proper insulation or hurricane-proof stabilization. People complain about heating bills. Many, like Pete and Lena Sereadlook, can’t afford a phone. A wind turbine that could generate cheap energy for the whole village stands motionless. I ask why it’s not running. No one knows. “It’s owned by a Kotzebue energy company. It hasn’t worked for a while.”
    Pete and Lena live so close to the water it’s possible that the pack ice could come through their front window. Lena is feisty and tomboyish; Pete is older, frail, soft-spoken. Joe and I have come to look at the footage Pete has been shooting for 40 years, but it’s all on 8mm and his camera is broken, so there’s nothing to see.
    He says he was born in a sod house in the old part of the village. “It was real good. We played outside all year round. We skated and played football with a ball made of reindeer skin. We made it ourselves. You don’t need to buy much. We had a big dogsled and seven dogs. I had my own windmill out there. It worked good, not like these new turbines. They aren’t even running. I guess they’re here for decoration! We had gas lamps and woodstoves, no toys. We used cans and rocks for toys. They work just as good. Dad made our skates from the frame of a steel bed. We tied them on over our mukluks. We didn’t believe in going to church. Whenever we heard the church bell ring, we ran away and skated out on the frozen ponds or else played Eskimo baseball. There are still two sod houses 15 miles up the beach at Sinauraq. That’s where my parents were born.”
    Pete says there were lots of whales and walruses back then. “We listened for them. You could hear them in the spring when they started coming up a lead. Now what you hear is snowmobiles.”
    Joe and I walk along the shoreline. There are skin boats, kayaks, and “aluminums” on racks. A yellowish hump at the shore looks like a pouting lip, but it’s only rotting ice. The bowhead whale hunters divided themselves up into family and working units headed by captains. There are four in Wales. One of them, Frank O., comes by. Young and fast talking, he grew up learning weather and ice from his father and uncle. “Now the barometer rises and falls too fast. And our seasonal storms, the ones that had winds of 30 to 50 mph, are 90 mph,” he says.
    His eyes narrow as he looks across the Bering Strait. “Our polar bears’ homeland is melting,” he says. “Can you believe it? This year we’ve had only one bear visit. Usually they’re all over the