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Stopover 01/4

Our testimony: the local impact of climate change on Point Hope

27 July 2020

In 2016 we arrive in Point Hope after traversing the Bering Strait. We discover how the descendants of the First Men to inhabit the American continent are changing and adapting their traditions to face climate change. 

We are bombarded with news about the climate, global warming, fires in Siberia…but, except for the great summer heat waves that are more and more common, the shorter winters, here in Europe we struggle to understand the real, concrete impact of climate change on our daily lives.

The effects of climate change are mostly endured by isolated communities with fewer means to adapt than Europeans. Our commitment is to use our nomadic platform –Maewan- to meet those people on the frontlines whose lives are already being affected by climate change. 

The Arctic is one of the world’s fastest heating regions. It is warming up twice as fast as the rest of the globe. We have recently been hit by the images coming from Siberia of wildfires raging in the tundra. This is a quite recent phenomenon. At Point Hope, we spoke to people that for decades are obliged to change and adapt their ancient traditions to new phenomena disrupting their lives. 

 

Here below Erwan’s tale of our stopover in Alaska: 

 

It’s early September and we are finally sailing south towards the Beering Strait. The North-West passage is behind us. We fled the floating ice and won’t be stuck waiting for the next year’s summer thawing. 

The wind blows and the sea of the Bering Strait is stormy. Here the current is strong and the sea bottom is shallow. The sea becomes quickly dangerous while we try to reach Point Hope, a little village whose peninsula will protect us while we rest and fuel-up after a long navigation. 

We drop the anchor and just as we put our feet on the land, Steve waves at us from the first floor of this house. He lets us in and speaks about his town, his hunting habits, and his lifestyle marked by opposing seasons: the summer, too hot, where the sun never ceases to shine on the horizon, and winter, with its dancing Northern Lights, the moon, the stars, shining on the permanently frozen land and sea 

But things change. The soil hardened by the cold becomes soft, the beach’s riverbanks once protected by the ice are fading away. The village that hosts us is not the same as the one from Steve’s childhood. Point Hope has moved further away from shores some years back so that it would not be submerged by the sea, which is year-by-year engulfs more of the coastlines. Point Hope is where America’s first inhabitants installed themselves after arriving from Asia, crossing the frozen Bering Strait by foot, with solid ice under their feet. 

Steve invites us to visit the remains of the ancient town. The traditional houses are still there, food reserves are still used, flowers still adorn his ancestry’s graveyards. Like many villages in the north, their inhabitants have broken hearts by having to leave behind the soul of the native village to move further south, where life is less suitable for their traditional way of life. Fish areas are further away, the paths used for the transhumance are less accessible, and clean water sources are less natural…

Global warming is a daily conversation topic around here, where a few degrees difference disrupts how life is organised, from the subsistence methods to the community’s culture and memory. 

Photos from Jeremy Bernard 

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