VANISHING ALASKA

The prospect of relocating whole Eskimo villages--global warming's first American refugees--is gathering political support. Last January, Shishmaref citizens voted to move to a site called Tin Creek, 12 miles away, across a lagoon. And last June, Alaska's powerful Senator, Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, convened federal, state and local officials for a two-day hearing in Anchorage to hear impassioned pleas from village leaders who want help repairing their infrastructure or relocating. Among the most eloquent was Eningowuk, 54, a mother of six who heads the Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition. "Shishmaref is where it is because of what the ocean, rivers, streams and the land provide to us," she testified. "We are hunters, and we are gatherers. We have been here for countless generations. We value our way of life. It provides for our very existence."

But moving Shishmaref to a more protected location could be prohibitively expensive, especially given the high cost of building in the Arctic. When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looked at relocating Kivalina, a nearby village of 380 people, the price tag was $100 million to $400 million--roughly $1 million for each resident.

And it wouldn't necessarily stop there. A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found four villages, including Shishmaref, to be in "imminent danger" and 20 others to have serious problems. Overall, 184 out of 213 Alaska native villages face some flooding and erosion, the GAO report noted, although how much is due to global warming and how much to the natural movement of rivers and coasts is uncertain.

Although most Shishmaref residents want to relocate, they also are worried about moving inland. Nayokpuk fears that the cost of living will double if fuel has to be transported over land. And Stanley Tocktoo, the vice mayor, says that it will be harder to dig the ice cellars the villagers use for fermenting their meat in the mud beneath the Tin Creek site than it was in Shishmaref's sand. As his son Harvey, 11, watches a Jackie Chan movie and picks fermented-walrus morsels off his father's plate, Tocktoo reflects that the farther away the village has to move from the ocean, the more trouble it will be "to get access to all this good food."

An expensive precedent may be set here. If global warming ever begins washing away coastal towns in the rest of the U.S., the cost of mass relocations would be unimaginable. But Shishmaref's villagers are adamant about their need to stay together, and they greet with horror any suggestion that they be dispersed to Nome or Kotzebue. The village--where everyone knows everyone else's name, and everyone is more or less related to everyone else--must relocate as a whole, or it would be the "annihilation of our community by dissemination," says Eningowuk. Whatever the solution, the Inupiaq are looking for it to be paid for by the folks who sent them global warming in the first place. And who would that be? "The Nalauqmiu--white people," says Eningowuk with a rueful smile.