we don’t yet know about. All of this is piled on top of an ongoing raft of familiar ecological threats, including habitat destruction, invasive species, and pollution.
Compared with other places, habitat loss and pollution are less severe in Alaska, northern Canada, the Nordic countries, and eastern Russia, where vast boreal forests, tundra, and mountains hold some of the wildest and least-disturbed places left on Earth.306 However, northern ecosystems also have far simpler food chains and fewer species than, say, the Amazon rain forest. Indeed, much of it is a colonizing landscape, still in the early stages of soil formation and biological expansion after being encased and pulverized by glacier ice just eighteen thousand years ago.
When imagining 2050, I anticipate that a globally unfair assortment of some winners and many more loser species will be very apparent by then. Already the world’s plants and animals are in the midst of their biggest extinction challenge in sixty-five million years. Out of perhaps seven million eukaryote species found on Earth, nearly half of all vascular plants and one-third of vertebrates are confined to just twenty-five imperiled “hot spots,” mostly in the tropics and comprising just 1.4% of the world’s land surface.307
Even in the far North, a specialized ecosystem adapted to frigid cold will be under attack by advancing southern competitors, pests, and disease. It is possible that the vast boreal forest—girdling the northern high latitudes from Canada to Siberia—might convert to a more open, savannah-like state.308 But total primary productivity—meaning plant biomass, the bottom of the food chain—will be ramping up. Certain mobile southern invaders will enjoy growing viability in a vast new territory that is larger, less fragmented, and less polluted than where they came from. Longer, deeper penetration of sunlight into the sea (owing to less shading by sea ice) will trigger more algal photosynthesis, again increasing primary productivity and reverberating throughout the Arctic marine food web. The end result of this can only be greater overall ocean biomass, more complex food webs, and the invasion of southern marine species at the expense of northern ones.
The ecology of the North is imperiled and changing. But it will be anything but lifeless.
Hunters on Thin Ice
People rely on sea ice too. For millennia the Inuit and Yupik (Eskimo) peoples have lived along the shores of the Arctic Ocean and even out on the ice itself, hunting seals, polar bears, whales, walruses, and fish. It is the platform upon which they travel, whether by snowmobile, dogsled, or on foot. It is the foundation on which they build hunting camps to live in for weeks or months at a time.
These hunters have watched in astonishment as their sea-ice travel platform—dangerous even in good times—has thinned, become less predictable, and even disappeared. People’s snowmobiles and ATVs are crashing through into the freezing ocean. Farther south, they are crashing through the ice covering rivers and lakes. In Sanikiluaq, Canada, I learned that weaker ice and a two- to three-month shorter ice season is impairing people’s ability to catch seals and Arctic char. In Pangnirtung a traditional New Year’s Day bash celebrated out on the ice has become unsafe. In Barrow, two thousand miles west on the northernmost tip of Alaska, I learned hunters are now taking boats many miles offshore, hoping to find bits of ice with a walrus or bearded seal.309
This is a serious matter. In the high Arctic, eating wild animals is an essential part of human survival and culture. In Barrow I was welcomed into the home of an Inuit elder, who explained that three-quarters of his community relies on wild-caught food.310 I was struck by this because Barrow is one of the most prosperous and modernized northern towns I have seen. There is a huge supermarket with most everything found in the supermarkets of Los Angeles. But groceries are two or three times more expensive because there is no road or rail to Barrow, so everything must be flown or barged in. Most people at least supplement their diet with wild food; many crucially depend on it. Alongside Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant (which has surprisingly good food and is apparently visited by members of the Chicago Bulls basketball team) I saw plenty of bushmeat in Barrow. My host’s kitchen and backyard were festooned with racks of drying meat and fish; in his driveway was a dead caribou. Another driveway had two seals, yet another a massive walrus. In the Arctic, obtaining “country food” is not for sport—it is as important to people’s diet as thin-crust pizza is to New Yorkers.
Of all northern peoples, the marine mammal-hunters living along the Arctic Ocean coast are suffering the most from climate change. Less sea ice means more accidents and fewer ice-loving animals to eat. It means faster shoreline erosion from pounding by the waves and storms of the open ocean. The Alaskan village of Shishmaref has lost this battle and will need to be relocated farther inland. But even in coastal towns, nearly everyone I meet bristles at the notion of being cast as a hapless climate-change refugee.
Even as they express frustration at having their lives damaged by people living thousands of miles away— and think it only fair that those damages be repatriated—they also point to their long history of adaptation and resilience in one of the world’s most extreme environments. They are not sitting around idly in despair, or gazing forlornly out at the unfamiliar sea. They are buying boats, and organizing workshops, and setting about catching the fat salmon that are increasingly moving into their seas.
There is more to this story than climate change. Later, we will discuss some profound demographic, political, and economic trends now under way that promise to be just as important to northerners’ lives in the coming decades.
Greenland’s Fine Potatoes
One of the more vivid media images of 2007 was one of happy Greenlanders tending lush green potato fields against a backdrop of icebergs melting away into the ocean. The diminished sea ice was wreaking havoc on seal hunting—Greenland’s finance and foreign affairs minister observed that subsistence hunting crashed by 75%—but people were beginning to plant potatoes, radishes, and broccoli. “Farming, an occupation all but unheard of a century ago, has never looked better,” trumpeted
What could be a more iconic symbol of the world in 2050 than seal hunters turned farmers in one of the coldest places on Earth? But in terms of sheer caloric output, any climate-triggered boons to agriculture will not be realized on the narrow, rocky shores of Greenland, or indeed any other place in the Arctic. Similarly to what we saw for certain wild organisms, the pressure is a gradient from south to north, not a leap to the top of the planet. Summers there will always be brief, and its soils thin or nonexistent. A short-lived vegetable garden is one thing, but when it comes to producing major crops for global markets, any significant increases will be realized at the northern margins of present-day agriculture. There will be no amber fields of grain waving along the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
In 2007 I watched some of the world’s top agronomists and plant geneticists debate how best to save our temperate crops from the rising heat, droughts, and pathogens forecast for the coming decades.312 Their solution was part biotech—genetic modifications, for example—and part ancient practice: Move over, water- guzzling corn, here come the best drought-tolerant sorghums and millets . . . from Ethiopia! Without adaptation, the group concluded, the prospect of food insecurity in the low latitudes was a serious threat.
I was particularly impressed with presentations by Stanford University’s Dave Lobell and Marshall Burke, who used twenty different climate models to statistically map where the food insecurities were most likely to emerge. Apparently, by the year 2030 South Asia, Southeast Asia, and southern Africa are especially vulnerable.313 By 2050, agricultural projections for sub-Saharan Africa get even worse, with average crop production losses of ?22, ?17, ?17, ?18, and ?8% for corn, sorghum, millet, groundnut, and cassava, respectively.314 By century’s end, things become still rougher, with one study concluding it is more than 90% likely that future growing season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will exceed anything we’ve ever seen before, with bad implications for food crops. “With growing season temperatures in excess of the hottest years on record . . . the stress on crops and livestock will become global in character,” wrote the paper’s authors. “Ignoring climate projections at this stage will only result in the worst form of triage.”315
