For The Wild - SUBHANKAR BANERJEE on Defending Arctic Alaska ⧸105

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00:00:23.380 Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young.

00:00:30.000 But it's this sense of solidarity between environmental defenders and indigenous rights defenders keeps this thing going.

00:01:00.000 Today, we are speaking with Shabankar Banerjee. Shabankar is an Indian-born American photographer,

00:01:11.100 writer, activist, and environmental humanities scholar. He has been a leading voice on issues

00:01:16.960 of Arctic conservation, indigenous human rights, resource wars, and climate change.

00:01:22.900 He has done work in the America's Southwest that addresses desert ecology and forest deaths

00:01:28.600 from climate change and recently started a project to address climate change impact and

00:01:33.680 politics of ecology in the coastal temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest. His

00:01:39.000 research focuses on the intersection of art, eco-cultural activism, and environmental

00:01:44.020 humanities. Shabankar's photographs, writing, and lectures have reached millions of people

00:01:49.660 around the world. Oh my goodness, Shabankar, thank you so much for joining us today and for

00:01:55.980 working tirelessly to bring voices from the Arctic to the forefront of our minds.

00:02:01.960 Thank you, Aina, for having me on the program. It's a great pleasure to be with you.

00:02:06.840 Yeah.

00:02:07.320 Thank you. Well, I'd love to begin this interview by sharing the words of your friend and collaborator,

00:02:14.200 Gwich'in activist Sarah James. Quote,

00:02:17.360 quote, we are the ones who have everything to lose. We are the caribou people. Caribou are not

00:02:24.380 just what we eat. They are who we are. They are in our stories and songs and whole way we see the

00:02:32.260 world. Caribou are our life. Without caribou, we wouldn't exist, end quote. The threats to the

00:02:40.480 Arctic and all of its inhabitants are facing, just reveal why we cannot solely allow the story

00:02:47.200 of place to be defined by development. And I hope today's conversation will reveal how the Arctic

00:02:53.920 holds a multitude of stories beyond the expansion of petrocapitalism. So often it seems that the

00:03:00.600 Arctic becomes relegated in the minds of many as a vast and desolate expanse of ice. It is terrain

00:03:08.480 that most of us are unfamiliar with. However, back in the early 2000s, you spent 14 months

00:03:14.480 journeying in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and have since tirelessly advocated for its

00:03:19.980 protection. Contrary to popular and political depictions of the Arctic, it is actually a place

00:03:26.080 robust with life. So can you share with us how the Arctic is one of the most connected

00:03:31.700 and diverse lands on Earth? I think you really framed it well because the Arctic is,

00:03:39.460 even when it is not with a political agenda is thought of by people who live in the lower

00:03:47.880 latitudes as the far north which comes with the idea that it's remote it's disconnected from our

00:03:55.900 daily lives we are not impacting it it is not going to impact us so why shall we care so this

00:04:02.860 is in the apolitical sense and then the proponents of petrocapitalism and you use really the

00:04:09.160 correct term, would depict the Arctic in various forms, including using aesthetic frames as

00:04:17.700 barren wasteland, frozen wasteland.

00:04:21.320 And these are not just arbitrary things I'm saying.

00:04:24.560 These are actually exact statements made by United States senators and cabinet members,

00:04:31.020 a flat white nothingness, Gail Norton, former interior secretary, said.

00:04:37.220 So one of the things that as I began to engage with Alaska's Arctic and the indigenous, my

00:04:47.540 indigenous friends who are now very close collaborators, truly became my teachers.

00:04:51.900 So it was the land, the animals, and the people who became my teacher.

00:04:57.440 And today I kind of proudly say the Arctic is my university.

00:05:01.700 and one of the things we did was shift that perspective from the far north to the near north

00:05:10.300 and several historians have commented with regard to my work that shift was necessary that to

00:05:16.860 then people begin to connect with empathize with even you don't go there so let me just to give

00:05:23.240 examples like birds go like any early on we were talking about that the birds go from all over the

00:05:31.560 world, including my childhood city, Kolkata, India, to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

00:05:39.640 And that bird is actually yellowactyl. And there are birds that are going from New Mexico,

00:05:44.380 where they now leave, the snogies, to the Arctic Refuge. And this is true for all 50 states in the

00:05:50.100 U.S. and all of the continents. So that's a connection of, epic kind of a connection of

00:05:55.880 global celebration. But then there are these whales that are migrating from, for example,

00:06:00.240 the waters of Mexico all the way to Alaska's Arctic. So these are connections that is going

00:06:08.220 on all the time. And then there is the human connection, the indigenous people, because of

00:06:12.920 this richness of life. And by the way, I should mention that not just the Arctic National Wildlife

00:06:18.180 Refuge, but all of Alaska's Arctic together, the land and the sea, is the most biologically

00:06:26.360 biologically diverse as well as population-wise the most significant in the entire circumpolar

00:06:35.580 north, even though it occupies a very small percentage of the entire circumpolar Arctic,

00:06:41.400 only roughly about 10%, but it harbors the most amount of animals and the diversity of species.

00:06:49.120 It's absolutely astounding. And because of that, no surprise that indigenous people have 1.00

00:06:55.360 lived there and built not only material dependency like relying on food, but cultural and spiritual 0.99

00:07:04.880 dependency. So that quote that you started with, Sarah James, who is one of my teachers and a

00:07:11.520 world-renowned activist, captures it. Like I could not say any better than that or anyone else could.

00:07:18.000 That particular statement is so beautiful that captures what we call cosmology, indigenous cosmology, the human, non-human relations and dependencies and honoring both sides.

00:07:32.900 So what then we do with this kind of indigenous cosmology is build a frame of politics, and it's kind of in academic parlance, it's called cosmopolitics, but then it leads to what I've been framing as multi-species justice, where the concerns for the human and the non-human are deeply entangled,

00:07:56.820 And it is right now threatened by petrocapitalism, threatened by colonialism historically and

00:08:02.820 contemporary, and threatened by all sorts of things, including militarization, climate

00:08:08.380 change, of course, the extinction crisis.

00:08:11.060 So, but all that said, there is a lot of work going on where the conservation community

00:08:17.140 and the indigenous community, the scientific community are working together to fight these

00:08:22.720 threats in a very beautiful coalitional manner.

00:08:26.820 I love the term multi-species justice.

00:08:30.280 It just feels so much more holistic to imagine justice for entire ecosystems connected together.

00:08:41.540 And I really appreciate that and would love to.

00:08:45.400 I can mention a little bit elaborate on that.

00:08:48.480 Please.

00:08:48.680 So, you know, the whole climate crisis has now become a household conversation.

00:08:58.280 And sadly, but rightly, it's because impacts of climate change is being felt every place on earth.

00:09:06.860 So this has become our common language now.

00:09:10.600 But the extinction crisis has not come to that yet, even though it is as large, if not

00:09:17.480 more significant than the climate crisis.

00:09:19.800 That said, so on the space of the species, there has been a significant amount of going

00:09:27.260 on over the last, I wouldn't say significant, some good work that has been going on over

00:09:33.440 the last 10 or 15 years.

00:09:35.540 And I'm talking about academic research, which we call multi-species ethnography.

00:09:43.020 And that studies, you know, relations primarily, stories, art.

00:09:48.380 And this is coming from both humanities as well as social science in anthropology.

00:09:53.080 And some of the big names there are anthropologists like Anna Singh, Donna Haraway, both at the

00:09:58.500 University of California, Santa Cruz, Deborah Bird-Rose, Tom Van Duren, both in Australia,

00:10:04.260 Ursula Heiss, who is a literary studies scholar at UCLA, many of them are friends.

00:10:11.720 So multi-species ethnography is a very active field right now.

00:10:15.640 And it's happening both through anthropology, but also some coming from literary studies.

00:10:21.560 But what I began to realize that even though there is an intention, there is really no

00:10:27.640 frame for activism yet built.

00:10:30.880 So earlier this year, I wrote a piece called On Multispecies Justice, focusing on Arctic Alaska, providing the activist frame, the grassroots frame.

00:10:40.440 Like, how do we then take all this type of stuff, but actually make it a praxis rather than theory?

00:10:46.780 So that's a shift we are making now to really bring in multispecies justice as a praxis.

00:10:54.220 And I actually saw on your website also, you have used on your mission statement or one of the pages, the term multispecies justice.

00:11:02.800 I think it's a very useful, it's a very, very powerful, very, very important, very necessary term.

00:11:08.180 And then we have climate justice.

00:11:10.400 But often in those discourses and those actions, species gets mentioned, but usually as a footnote and usually takes a secondary place.

00:11:21.300 So what some of us are now trying to do is bring the species at the forefront as well, both human and non-human, in all of this discourse, whether it's climate crisis, the extinction crisis, and other ecological crises that we are facing.

00:11:36.740 Well, speaking of the incredible species in the Arctic refuge, I've read that it's home and the nursery to just remarkable things, around 200,000 porcupine caribou, 60,000 beluga whales and millions of shorebirds.

00:11:57.620 And I think of the bowhead whale, a mammal which has a lifespan of around 200 years,

00:12:03.600 or the caribou that participate in the longest migration of any land mammal on Earth.

00:12:09.620 But the refuge is changing.

00:12:12.000 As ice disappears, more polar bears are denning onshore,

00:12:14.840 and the southern Beaufort population of polar bears has already declined by 40%.

00:12:20.180 And while the porcupine caribou travel towards the refuge to get away from predators

00:12:24.900 and graze the nutrient-rich land,

00:12:28.360 their natural migration routes have already been impacted by oil pipelines.

00:12:33.580 So have you seen the livelihood of these kin change

00:12:37.320 due to climate change and oil exploration in the past 10 years or so?

00:12:43.000 So there are two parts to some of the things you mentioned,

00:12:46.520 and I'll correct a few of the factual aspects.

00:12:50.520 So the porcupine caribou herd is indeed, it's magical.

00:12:54.900 Because of its migration, the Arctic Refuge is rightly, by some conservationists, they call it America's Serengeti.

00:13:04.500 That herd right now is numbering about 218,000 as of the last census.

00:13:11.220 And they migrate, as you correctly noted, actually 1,500 miles annually, which is the longest migration of any land mammal on Earth.

00:13:21.780 And their relationship with Sarah James's people, the Gwich'in people, on both sides of the US-Canada border, 15 villages, Gwich'in villages, who actually, if you look, there is a map that the Gwich'in nation produced, the Gwich'in steering committee produced,

00:13:42.000 which shows nearly an overlap of the Guichin homeland with the annual range of the porcupine

00:13:51.360 caribou herd except the coastal plain which is the Inupia traditional homeland. So the Guichin

00:13:58.500 have relied on the caribou for many millennia. They say 20,000 years. There are some archaeological

00:14:04.400 evidence that go back many millennia and it's this complex relationship which Sarah James

00:14:10.600 articulated very beautifully in that statement you quoted. So now what is happening to that?

00:14:17.300 So the coastal plain of the Arctic refugees, indeed, what I have called in several of my

00:14:24.200 recent essays and interviews, is really the most significant biological nursery, definitely in the

00:14:31.820 Cercopolar Arctic, but it is also one of the most significant nursery in the entire world.

00:14:38.660 And it's fascinating.

00:14:39.780 It's a narrow coastal plain, 12 to 30 miles or so, and about 1.5 million acres.

00:14:51.200 So it's not a humongous place, but it's enormous density of animals.

00:14:55.440 So there's 218,000 caribou, thousands of polar bears that are nesting there, at least a thousand.

00:15:00.580 and then you have millions of birds of like some close to like 90 species depending on it for

00:15:08.540 nesting feeding and so on raising their young and numerous other species that depend on that

00:15:15.280 coastal plain for giving birth and raising their young and or feeding that said that coastal plain

00:15:22.800 is right now is one of the most threatened places in North America. And it's a binational

00:15:31.380 U.S.-Canada issue. So it's not just a U.S. issue. Since the Trump administration came in,

00:15:37.540 so just to back up maybe one step, is the campaign to create the refuge started in the early 1950s

00:15:46.620 by several American conservationists, George Collins, Lowell Sumner, and later the famous

00:15:54.340 Olaus Muri and his wife, Margaret Muri, and others of their time. So that led to the creation

00:16:00.780 of the refuge in 1960. But then 1967, oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay. Oil started flowing

00:16:08.340 in 1977. And ever since Reagan came to office as the president, started pushing for oil development

00:16:17.320 in the Arctic refuge, including its coastal plain. And ever since then, the Gwich'in nation

00:16:22.820 gathered and their first Gwich'in gathering was in 1988. And ever since then, the indigenous Gwich'in

00:16:30.040 people and the conservation community, as well as many Inupiaq people, both in Kaktovik as well

00:16:36.800 outside have been working together to defend it from oil and gas.

00:16:40.400 So what happened with the Trump administration coming in, they have, with the support of

00:16:49.040 the Trump administration, the Alaska congressional delegation and the Trump administration hijacked

00:16:54.400 the budget process last fall and got drilling approved through the Tax and the Jobs Cuts

00:17:04.260 Act, which was a really very dishonest process. It was not a public process. And to sneak that

00:17:11.280 in was dishonest because they knew if they don't do that, any other open debate they would lose.

00:17:16.960 So they stuck it as part of the much larger tax act. Nevertheless, since that time, and I have

00:17:23.780 been writing nearly nonstop and organizing many things that I'll mention a little bit later,

00:17:28.400 perhaps. And ever since then, they have been advancing, since the Jobs Act got passed,

00:17:36.240 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, in late December, they have been working at a breakneck speed

00:17:42.440 to undermine both public participation, consultation with indigenous communities,

00:17:49.860 and undermining environmental laws to just get an environmental impact statement in place so

00:17:58.000 that they can start leasing as early as summer of 2019, which is absolutely unthinkable for

00:18:06.240 a project of this scope.

00:18:07.500 It should take three to five years.

00:18:09.140 But anyway, so it's a very active right now debate.

00:18:13.180 As you and I are speaking on the phone, my dear Gwich'in friend, he's a councillor for

00:18:20.220 the Vantad Gwich'in Nation in Old Crow in the Canadian side in the Yukon, just spoke

00:18:26.220 this morning at the Global Climate Summit taking place in San Francisco right now.

00:18:32.460 And there are many of our Gwich'in and the Inupiaq friends like Bernadette Demiantieff,

00:18:37.140 who is the Executive Director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee this morning, and Adrian

00:18:43.520 Blanchford, who is one of the key members of Defend the Sacred Alaska.

00:18:48.520 They're all in San Francisco right now as we are speaking, trying to defend the Arctic

00:18:53.400 refuge, trying to defend Alaska's Arctic.

00:18:55.500 So that's the politics. But I didn't mention the climate change impacts that you were asking very specifically. So as I mentioned, there are a couple of corrections I wanted to make. One was that the porcupine cargo herd has not been impacted by any pipeline because there is no industrial development that has happened in its territory, in its entire winter, summer, spring, full life cycle range.

00:19:23.520 They are protected, and that's why we are fighting so hard to protect their range.

00:19:27.800 So no development infrastructure exists today in their range.

00:19:31.580 So that's the correction.

00:19:33.020 With regard to climate change, this is kind of more nerdy science, but I'll mention it,

00:19:39.720 is Fran Maurer, who studied, who was the main biologist for studying the porcupine caribou

00:19:46.020 herd for more than two decades.

00:19:47.840 He was a federal biologist working at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Office in Fairbanks, Alaska, retired in 2002.

00:19:57.220 He, in an interview with me in an article I published in Tom Dispatch of National Institute last November,

00:20:04.380 explained to me during my visit to his home last October,

00:20:08.720 is that the porcupine caribou herd is able to and has been able to very effectively use the entire

00:20:19.140 coastal plain that stretches across the Alaskan part in the Arctic on the Canadian side very

00:20:25.340 effectively as climate change as well as the variations that came from the El Nino and La

00:20:32.500 linear cycle. And because of this, they have calved here or there. Their numbers actually

00:20:40.480 have increased. So they haven't been affected that much because they have this vast area

00:20:47.100 to calve and nurse. And that's why what the point that Fran Mauer makes is that entire

00:20:54.800 coastal plain needs to remain free of development if this herd is to thrive. So while climate

00:21:01.640 change has already had very, very dire impacts on many of the caribou herds of the circumpolar

00:21:09.760 north. Actually, most of them, some herds are actually thriving. And porcupine herd is one of

00:21:17.740 those. And one of the reasons is that there is no development or impact. And they are, of course,

00:21:23.660 struggling with climate change like every other herd. But they have been able to survive through

00:21:28.680 that because of this vast area they have available to camp. So that's why we are fighting. So that's

00:21:35.880 an example. And you are very correct in saying that the polar bear population of the Southern

00:21:41.420 Beaufort Sea has been impacted very heavily between 2001 when I started and 2010, 40% decline

00:21:50.880 in population, which would be considered as a mass die-off. And that is directly linked to climate

00:21:55.680 change because of their primary habitat, which is sea ice, is melting very, very rapidly

00:22:00.780 and disappearing.

00:22:02.780 So they are becoming more and more dependent on the coastal plain for calving, for denning.

00:22:08.160 So onshore dense, and there are scientific studies done on this as well.

00:22:12.140 So onshore denning becomes very important.

00:22:15.240 And right now, the Trump administration is planning, already the Bureau of Land Management

00:22:20.560 released a draft plan, where they're planning to do seismic exploration as early as this coming

00:22:27.320 winter, where they plan to do exploration on every square inch of the coastal plain,

00:22:34.760 which is absolutely unthinkable. And it's something we are going to fight very hard.

00:22:41.080 But nevertheless, it'll have direct impact on the Denning polar bears in a very significant way,

00:22:46.740 Because seismic exploration is a very heavy activity.

00:22:50.080 So these are, yes, climate change is already having, and I have a lot of work done on that

00:22:56.460 as well, and have witnessed on the animal populations as well as on the human populations.

00:23:03.020 I wrote a very long piece called In the Warming Arctic Seas for World Policy Journal, where

00:23:08.440 I enumerated a lot of the climate change impacts.

00:23:10.760 But that said, because of that climate crisis and because of the extinction crisis and die-off, not just extinction, like the polar bear die-off, we need to protect places where animals give birth.

00:23:25.060 And what more important place to protect than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, coastal plain, which is one of the world's most remarkable nursery.

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00:24:36.320 Estimates on how many barrels of oil the Arctic holds fluctuate depending on who you're talking

00:24:44.700 to. One respected petroleum geologist, Jean Larré, estimated that there are approximately

00:24:51.760 50 billion barrels of oil and a thousand trillion cubic feet of gas. So when we put those numbers

00:24:59.340 in context with world oil consumption, the Arctic may contain anywhere from one to three years

00:25:05.880 worth of oil and 7 to 27 years worth of gas. However, only 25 to 35% of that amount is

00:25:13.700 typically recoverable. So I just, how can any of us possibly justify the risks imposed onto the

00:25:22.160 Arctic for maybe a four month supply of recoverable oil and a two year supply of gas? I mean, how is

00:25:29.360 this being justified so uh your numbers are generally correct but it doesn't quite work out

00:25:37.320 that way so the way you know it works is that let's say they start drilling and this pumping

00:25:44.600 whatever a million barrels a day or something like that is that process goes on for 30 40 50 years

00:25:52.680 so what that means so it isn't that they'll dig it all up in four months and that's that it doesn't

00:25:59.320 work that way. So what that means is that what we are trying to fight is an infrastructure project

00:26:05.520 of this scale to support this late-age petrocapitalism. It's very dangerous because

00:26:13.940 the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. calls the Arctic an integrator of our planet

00:26:21.140 climate systems, which is both atmospheric as well as oceanic. Unlike most of the other regions

00:26:27.880 of the Earth, the Arctic, because of its physical geography and the ice and everything else,

00:26:34.660 it actually controls the planet's climate systems.

00:26:37.860 And I'm not going to go into the details of the science right now, but given that is

00:26:43.120 the case, that it really is what kind of controls our Earth's climate systems and the fact that

00:26:50.040 it is the harbinger of climate change and where the first impacts of climate change

00:26:55.760 we have observed already. And the region is warming anywhere between two to four times

00:27:01.940 the global average. So if you combine all that, further changes in the Arctic affects

00:27:07.520 not just the Arctic, but the whole Earth. So in this late stage of climate crisis, how

00:27:13.440 can you allow more and more oil and gas to be dug up from the Arctic is really a large

00:27:20.500 ethical issue in addition to the species issue, that it is a very significant issue with regard

00:27:26.820 to the climate crisis because the Arctic controls our Earth's climate and the Arctic is warming

00:27:32.620 at more than any other region on the planet. So all that combined, but nevertheless, the state

00:27:39.740 of Alaska emboldened by whose economy in significant part continues to be largely

00:27:49.780 fossil fuel driven even though there is very good significant debate going on in Alaska right now.

00:27:56.180 Very good people on all sides to think about taking Alaska beyond fossil fuels. It has to

00:28:01.460 happen sooner or later anyway. And that debate is happening right now. And a lot of Alaskans,

00:28:06.660 that's why, are opposed to drilling across Alaska's Arctic or the expansion of drilling

00:28:12.340 across Alaska's Arctic. So that is sort of the climate element. But that said,

00:28:18.740 It's the Arctic Refuge, but there are other parts of Alaska's Arctic, which, you know, the Arctic Voices book you mentioned, does detail.

00:28:27.080 It's like the Tashapak Lake wetland, which is in the central Arctic, the largest wetland complex in the entire Arctic.

00:28:34.080 And the Inupiaq people of Nweksit depend on its ecology, the animal life, as well as people of Barrow and other places along the coast.

00:28:44.400 And then you have the entire Western Arctic, which has the Western Arctic caribou herd, which actually is 230,000 animals and 40 communities from three different indigenous tribes depend on that herd.

00:28:57.620 And then there is the entire coastal thing, which is extremely rich in animals.

00:29:02.780 And the Trump administration is pushing forward to open up all of the both of the seas, the Beaufort Sea and the Chukchi Sea.

00:29:10.440 So, to bring that back up and summarize that, yes, that's what the Trump administration is doing, but they are not getting all of these things done without challenge.

00:29:25.420 And most of it, if all goes well for us, we'll be able to derail and stop.

00:29:31.120 And how is that?

00:29:32.020 So since the Trump administration announced their plan, starting going back to fall of last year, not just Arctic Refuge, but also the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska, as well as the seas, I convened with assistance from a large number of colleagues, both at my university, University of New Mexico, as well as in Alaska, a symposium called The Last Oil, a multispecies justice symposium on Arctic Alaska and beyond.

00:30:02.020 And that symposium took place in February where we had about 30 indigenous artists, activists, scholars, as well as writers, conservationists, scientists and attorneys came together.

00:30:17.360 It was the first national convening to address Trump administration's Arctic policy and also to bring climate change impacts and indigenous rights issues in Alaska into conversation with similar issues in New Mexico and across the West.

00:30:31.360 So that symposium took place, following which one of the symposium speakers co-wrote and co-organized a letter campaign called Scholars for Defending the Arctic Refuge, which was very soon thereafter was endorsed by 500 scholars from 20 countries and 40 academic disciplines endorsed the letter,

00:30:53.460 which then on June 15th, the letter we formally submitted as part of the environmental impact

00:30:59.960 statement process on June 19th. So that took place. And this week, actually, I'm publishing

00:31:07.680 a book called The Last Toil Students Respond, a 222 page book, which will be all free and available

00:31:14.360 online, the entire publication, where basically how that symposium affected our students and what

00:31:21.440 did they think of it? And now there is a very large binational coalition, as I said, both

00:31:29.420 the U.S. and the Canadian side are fighting every part of the Trump administration Arctic

00:31:36.400 policy by using grassroots action. Like I mentioned, my friends are in, indigenous friends

00:31:42.500 are in San Francisco right now with the Global Climate Summit by grassroots action, by taking

00:31:49.040 Actually, a large part of the fight will be legal, but I can't quite speak on that yet.

00:31:54.940 Some of that is sensitive information, but there will be legal battles inevitably, just

00:32:00.580 because of the way the Trump administration is approaching this whole thing.

00:32:04.360 And then there will be educational campaign, which is where I come in.

00:32:08.020 I provide a lot of the national frame for educating the public so that the public gets

00:32:13.700 involved.

00:32:14.740 But there is an enormous amount of work going on.

00:32:17.500 And that's why for the while that all what you folks do and do so well with both your projects, research projects, which I looked at online, as well as podcasts like this, is to inform and educate the public about the threats.

00:32:33.400 And just one last factoid I'll give, and then I'll stop this thread, is Yale published,

00:32:40.560 Yale publishes something called the Yale Climate Opinion 2018, which was published just last

00:32:46.360 month, and it shows, among many other categories, that 63% of the American public are opposed

00:32:53.460 to drilling in the Arctic Refuge.

00:32:54.960 So it's a national issue, but the Trump administration has been ignoring the public completely and

00:33:01.760 the participation.

00:33:02.420 or I won't say completely, but basically most of it.

00:33:06.380 They're just undermining the public process.

00:33:08.420 So that's where we will challenge them.

00:33:10.700 And that's where a lot of the fight will come in,

00:33:12.780 both at grassroots as well as legal battles.

00:33:16.700 I have so much respect for you and the Gwich'in

00:33:20.240 and all the other people that are fighting

00:33:23.800 for the protection of the refuge.

00:33:26.500 It is so important on a multi-species justice level

00:33:30.840 on a global climate change level. There's just so much there. And I want to actually go a little

00:33:39.060 deeper into the climate change issues and also ice. For instance, since the 1980s, the area

00:33:46.000 covered by Arctic sea ice in the summer has shrunk by 40%. Then we have the albedo effect

00:33:52.380 due to the loss of white surfaces like ice and snow is already responsible for about 25%

00:33:58.140 of global warming and then there's this whole issue around permafrost and how permafrost which

00:34:05.400 traps huge amounts of carbon is already thawing across alaska canada and siberia but we hear less

00:34:12.980 about the arctic's offshore permafrost which happens to be incredibly rich in methane so what

00:34:18.540 are the possible threats to our global community say if those offshore layers begin releasing carbon

00:34:24.540 and some of the issues I'd mentioned about the ice?

00:34:27.880 This is the most important subject as well.

00:34:32.260 So on that subject, I'll highlight a couple of things.

00:34:34.940 So one of my dearest colleagues and friend, Professor Peter Wadhams.

00:34:40.780 Peter is the person who was a professor at University of Cambridge for nearly 50 years.

00:34:49.040 He retired in 2016.

00:34:50.200 and the scientist who has continuously studied the polar sea ice,

00:34:57.220 largely the Arctic sea ice, but also Antarctic,

00:35:00.020 for continuously for more than 45 years.

00:35:03.220 So his book called Farewell to Ice came out in 2016 by Oxford University Press.

00:35:10.780 And I had the great privilege, because I was at University of Cambridge

00:35:14.740 before coming to University of New Mexico,

00:35:17.120 I had the great privilege to review the entire manuscript and provide feedback.

00:35:22.220 That book is a key document, along with another that has been published by Princeton University Press last year.

00:35:31.200 The title is Skipping My Mind by the very eminent scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center

00:35:40.360 that provide great depth and detail on what is happening to the Arctic sea ice and its global

00:35:47.220 impacts. So there was actually a very significant political moment that took place with regard to

00:35:53.780 offshore methane that you are talking about. Peter Wadhams and his two colleagues, another

00:35:59.880 person also at Cambridge and the third colleague was in Amsterdam. They published a paper in the

00:36:06.380 prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature by highlighting, this was 2013, by highlighting

00:36:13.260 the impact of offshore methane that is already getting released in the East Siberian Arctic

00:36:19.800 shelf, which they at the time claimed would have extreme impact if what they call the

00:36:27.680 methane pulse plays out the way it seems to be happening and will have a, on an average,

00:36:34.100 they said, an economic impact on the global economy in the order of $60 trillion, on an

00:36:41.120 average, but $240 trillion.

00:36:43.160 I mean, these numbers are, of course, incomprehensible.

00:36:45.740 But nevertheless, when that major article came out, both The New York Times and Washington's

00:36:52.480 Post just squashed it.

00:36:54.480 One of them called it, one of those newspapers headlined it, methane mischief.

00:36:59.240 So Peter Wadhams went ahead and wrote a rebuff, which fortunately was published in Washington

00:37:05.880 Post.

00:37:06.880 So our national media has been doing great disservice, including both of those newspapers,

00:37:12.960 New York Times and Washington Post.

00:37:16.100 But nevertheless, it's a great threat since that time.

00:37:19.280 We have also come to know that offshore seabed methane is getting released in other parts

00:37:25.620 as well, off of the Norwegian Arctic as well in the Laugh Tip Sea.

00:37:30.880 So that's a very, very dangerous, catastrophic thing that's potentially catastrophic that

00:37:37.220 is taking place, the offshore methane getting released, because there is huge amount there.

00:37:42.860 And that happens on the shallow beds, because the shallow bed, the water column becomes

00:37:47.280 warm, the methane melts, and this huge amount of trapped methane comes out.

00:37:53.860 Onshore methane, and I made a very important photograph, and I'm not uting my own horn,

00:38:00.020 I mean the photograph itself, is in the Arctic refuge, coastal plain, the permafrost is melting

00:38:07.320 very significantly.

00:38:09.060 And because of that, obviously, the methane is coming out, even though I'm not seeing

00:38:12.860 it, nobody else is seeing that.

00:38:15.140 So in 2006, I made a photograph of, it's a ghastly image where the permafrost melted

00:38:22.300 away completely around a buried coffin. So the coffin came to the surface and presumably

00:38:30.660 a grizzly bear broke open the coffin and scattered the human remains. But what the significance

00:38:36.400 of that image was, it connected 19th century because my Inupiaq friend Robert Thomson speculated

00:38:45.460 that that is not the coffin of an Inupiaq. Inupiaq would not put a coffin like that.

00:38:50.300 So it's likely from a 19th century whaler.

00:38:54.320 So the image immediately connected the petrorush or the oil rush of the 19th century, which

00:39:02.100 was oil oil, with the petrorush of the 21st century and the late 20th century.

00:39:09.260 And climate change is the connector.

00:39:13.120 So it's a very disturbing image.

00:39:15.620 So yes, that is all happening.

00:39:17.460 And I have a lot of other climate change impacts in the refuge, as well as across Alaska's

00:39:22.580 Arctic.

00:39:23.860 And much of it has to do with combination of both melting of the permafrost, which we

00:39:28.940 have already documented, as well as melting of the glacier ice, extreme melting of the

00:39:36.420 sea ice, of course, which is having impact on every ice-dependent species out there,

00:39:40.800 and very severe impact on the coastal communities because coastal regions are getting just washed

00:39:49.100 out big time. And some of it has, of course, gotten national attention, like places like

00:39:55.240 Kivalina, Shishmarath, and other places which have to be evacuated. But in the Arctic Refuge

00:40:01.320 coastal plain, where Robert and I camped, 400 feet of that land is already gone. And none of

00:40:06.920 that has gotten any national media attention. And I've documented some of that in that World

00:40:11.580 Policy Journal essay I wrote in 2015. So yes, climate change is very significant, but its

00:40:18.520 impacts do not stay in the Arctic. It affects the entire Earth. So we experienced last year

00:40:25.560 the Harvey, Maria, Irma, and this year Florence. Fortunately Florence became from a hurricane

00:40:32.720 or becoming from a hurricane to a storm, these things are having enormous impact, particularly

00:40:40.000 on core and marginalized communities and communities of color.

00:40:43.840 Very, very severe, heartbreaking impacts.

00:40:46.600 And Arctic is playing one of the biggest roles in that.

00:40:49.660 So we need to think about the Arctic not just as a remote place, but whatever is happening

00:40:53.980 up there is affecting people in Puerto Rico, people in the Far East Asia and everywhere

00:40:59.880 else.

00:41:02.720 Thank you.

00:41:32.720 Thank you.

00:42:02.720 I've actually been in Alaska for the last two and a half months this summer, working on campaigns mainly in Southeast and then went up to Valdez and Cordova, Anchorage, the Kenai Peninsula, and have been speaking with people around mining issues, old growth logging, the trans Alaska pipeline.

00:42:23.800 and it's just been honestly really mind-blowing to learn about the oil economy that has been

00:42:32.320 Alaska for the past you know at least 50-60 years and and that really it always comes back to

00:42:39.980 economy because um it has been an oil economy that's how Alaska has made its money and how

00:42:48.220 so many of its roads have been built and schools have been built and so on and so forth but it's

00:42:53.320 interesting, you know, just to think about how the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates

00:42:57.920 that, for instance, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline will be shut down by 2026. And then meanwhile,

00:43:04.060 the company plans to close all but four pumping stations, seeing as oil flow peaked 24 years ago.

00:43:11.260 And, you know, procedure for the pipeline's ultimate removal is continuously updated,

00:43:15.660 as Alaska law actually requires pipelines to be removed after oil extraction is complete.

00:43:21.220 So we have this whole issue with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and not to mention the oil spills

00:43:27.880 in Prudhoe Bay, the huge Exxon Valdez spill that we did an incredible interview with Dune

00:43:33.320 Lankard about, and we actually spent 10 days with him on the Copper River Delta learning

00:43:37.960 even more about that.

00:43:40.320 And so this is kind of a long thought out question.

00:43:44.220 But so on one hand, I'm thinking about this oil economy and the destruction, its rot,

00:43:50.680 the trans-Alaska pipeline, the fact that there isn't a lot of oil being pumped out, that's

00:43:55.540 partially, I think, why the Arctic has had so much pressure to find more oil in the Arctic to almost

00:44:02.140 replace what Prudhoe Bay is, how Prudhoe Bay is shrinking. And so then it goes, okay, well, if we

00:44:08.800 don't, this is where my mind goes, okay, well, if we're trying to support Alaska and moving away from

00:44:14.580 an oil industry, oil and gas industry, what's next? And then I think about how you've written

00:44:21.040 that what initially led you to the Arctic was an experience you had in Canada, where you went to

00:44:27.500 photograph the polar bears. But then upon your arrival in Manitoba, you were overwhelmed by

00:44:33.140 the magnitude and mentality of tourists. And so I'm curious about what your thoughts are

00:44:38.720 on the status of wildlife tourism especially in the arctic region a place where so many

00:44:44.640 are flocking to say goodbye but without any recognition that in doing so they're contributing

00:44:50.360 to its demise by prioritizing the consumption of experience above all else you know will the

00:44:57.000 development of tourism as an economic replacement for the oil industry in places like alaska

00:45:02.100 create a different set of problems you know seeing as both industries are rooted in exploitation

00:45:08.120 and you know if if also if anything comes to mind is what is an economic solution that actually

00:45:14.900 could support this region rather than just taking taking taking yeah so alaska i mean you you packed

00:45:23.220 some incredibly important things in your remarks and very very good very very correct and by the

00:45:29.940 way dude lankert is another dear friend uh carol hoover who is the executive director of the yak

00:45:34.780 Preservation Council, another very close friend. Oh, I love Carol. Yeah, and Carol is a big

00:45:40.000 defender of Arctic Refuge. Carol and I did a very major, created a very major ad that was published

00:45:46.340 in the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today back in 2005. So you backed a lot in there

00:45:55.140 and I'll mention a couple of things. So one thing is that as far as the state of Alaska goes and

00:46:04.220 the Alaska congressional delegation, they are precisely looking to replace Prudhoe Bay

00:46:09.060 with yet another Prudhoe Bay.

00:46:10.700 In their, of course, in their frame of mind, that's what they want to see happen.

00:46:14.880 And even though there has been a significant number of discoveries in the last few years

00:46:19.860 that has taken place in the state lands, as well as part of the National Petroleum Reserve

00:46:27.860 Alaska, which is federal lands, and some of that production is already ongoing.

00:46:32.400 And so Transalaska Pipeline throughput actually has gone up in the last couple of years.

00:46:43.400 And this research is primarily done by Lois Epstein, another close colleague, who is the Arctic Program Director at the Wilderness Society.

00:46:52.420 So Lois and I just co-authored a nearly 5,000-word piece with a very kind of the kind of questions that you're asking.

00:47:00.720 It's coming out from a publication based in Berlin at the House of World Cultures.

00:47:09.980 They have a publication called Technosphere.

00:47:13.280 So we look at what does sort of this onrush of the technosphere look like and its potential impacts and how they're advancing that and how we are fighting that.

00:47:23.520 So, anyway, so that is just the background as far as Alaska State goes and the congressional delegation goes.

00:47:34.640 They want to see all of Arctic Alaska turned into what we are calling in this article a reckless technosphere.

00:47:43.440 But, of course, we are finding that what is the alternate economy?

00:47:48.620 So I'm trying to remember the name of the Alaska state senator who, and the only reason I remember this, the day I opened Last Oil Symposium at University of New Mexico, he gave a 15-minute passionate speech on Alaska's economy on the Alaska state Senate floor.

00:48:14.740 What's the name of the senator?

00:48:16.860 Again, I'm bad with name, but that's one way people could search, your listeners could

00:48:21.540 search, is the same day, which was February 21, 2018.

00:48:26.380 And his speech was probably the most significant one where he laid out how Alaska's economy

00:48:33.120 will move forward.

00:48:34.280 And that has nothing to do with ecotourism.

00:48:36.800 So Alaska, again, he talked about largely a lot of the alternate economy, I mean, the

00:48:43.600 renewable energy stuff that Alaska was. He talks about how he was a pioneer in this and that and

00:48:49.220 other things. Then he lays out the foundation. And some of that work is already taking place.

00:48:54.280 I'm not an expert in that. Some other person could give you more details on that renewable

00:49:01.100 energy sector, what is going on in Alaska. But I will mention the work of at least one dear

00:49:05.860 colleague, Brian Hirsch, who is doing alternate energy economy for now nearly 20 years for

00:49:13.320 rural Alaska and actually installed the first solar panel, which is actually in my first

00:49:18.900 book, a photo of which is in my first book, Seasons of Life and Land, Arctic National

00:49:23.040 Wildlife Refuge.

00:49:24.440 So Brian installed the first solar panel in Arctic Village above the Wachit area back

00:49:30.880 in 2001.

00:49:32.620 So even though some of that effort because of lack of economic incentive and other thing

00:49:37.980 has not expanded as rapidly as many would have liked,

00:49:41.920 but that work has not gone away.

00:49:43.740 That work is actually ongoing.

00:49:45.680 So people like Brian Hirsch could give you a very clear picture

00:49:49.440 of where things are, or the senator that I'm mentioning,

00:49:51.980 whose name is skipping my mind, state senator,

00:49:54.800 not the federal senator.

00:49:57.020 So that's going on.

00:49:58.200 With regard to your specific question about ecotourism,

00:50:02.580 I, in an academic essay called Long Environmentalism,

00:50:06.400 after the listening session, which came out in a book called, also available from my website,

00:50:12.420 in a book called Eco-Criticism and Indigenous Studies. And in that, I had precisely critiqued

00:50:18.980 what you just brought up. And that is exactly already happening on the Arctic seas with marine,

00:50:27.340 along with marine shipping, marine tourism has become a big deal. And it's extremely destructive,

00:50:33.580 extremely damaging to the Arctic ecology as it scales up.

00:50:39.200 While small-scale tourism does provide economic incentives for local communities,

00:50:45.740 and I'm in support of some of that, but I'm also very critical of, again,

00:50:51.980 any kind of industrial-scale tourism in the Arctic because this would be just as damaging as anything else.

00:50:58.360 But it's a hard subject, right?

00:51:00.200 For outsiders, it's easy to make one or the other decision. 0.70

00:51:05.760 It's hard, but it is true.

00:51:09.440 But some aspects of local economy could be arts and crafts,

00:51:14.020 renewable energy, and many things Alaska has to offer

00:51:16.680 with its other cultural production could provide that transition

00:51:22.300 which isn't really rooted in extractive economy.

00:51:26.420 But unfortunately, Alaska's economy has been extractive,

00:51:29.140 Not just oil, though.

00:51:30.500 It goes back 200 years with the fur trapping and the entire fur industry that went on with

00:51:37.640 the Russians first and then the Americans and others.

00:51:42.740 And the book that I would highly recommend your listeners is by another dear colleague,

00:51:48.940 Professor Maria Williams of the University of Alaska Anchorage called Alaska Native Reader

00:51:53.900 History, Culture, Politics.

00:51:55.120 So it details that entire history of extractivism in Alaska.

00:52:00.940 So there is no easy solution, to be very honest, but many people are working on it and trying

00:52:06.640 to find a more sustainable path forward for Alaska, because oil is not going to last anyway,

00:52:11.740 whether it's another 30 years or 40 years after that, it's done.

00:52:15.020 So why damage just this incredible richness of life and life waste along the way?

00:52:21.920 there is so much that you said in there one thing that really stood out for me was

00:52:27.200 the concept you coined long environmentalism i really resonate with that outlook that

00:52:35.960 there is longevity to these battles so to speak and how to really stay committed and dedicated and

00:52:45.500 not burn out over the long haul when we're working towards these huge environmental protections

00:52:51.800 cultural protections and and so on and i guess i'm just wondering you know what strategies do

00:52:58.840 you think have contributed to the success and longevity of this multi-decade struggle for

00:53:03.740 justice in the arctic and what new strategies must be adopted do you see and you know in that

00:53:12.400 in that essay long environmentalism as i point out that the campaign to create and protect the

00:53:17.800 Refuge is globally the longest continuously running environmental conservation and environmental

00:53:24.680 justice campaign anywhere in the world.

00:53:27.100 It's going on now in its seventh or eighth decade.

00:53:31.340 So it's really long.

00:53:32.640 So what has sustained it?

00:53:34.300 What has sustained it is really is intergenerational.

00:53:40.040 So what has sustained it?

00:53:41.180 Because if you look at the young, which in people, and in that essay I write about that

00:53:45.560 intergenerational thing, that the elders took it on, then another generation came in, then

00:53:51.220 another generation came in, and it's already like three generations working on the just

00:53:55.440 campaign.

00:53:55.960 And people have gotten married, like my dear friends on the Canadian Goichin side, Joe

00:54:02.360 Tetlechi and Glenna Tetlechi.

00:54:04.560 Joe is the chairman of the Portbucket and Caribou Management Board.

00:54:08.420 And what has sustained is, to be very honest, is deep solidarity among the indigenous and the environmental conservation defenders, environmental defenders and the indigenous rights defenders.

00:54:23.420 Really deep solidarity and it's very sincere, which is not necessarily everywhere, but in this case it is.

00:54:29.540 And Alaska's campaign has a lot to teach us.

00:54:32.980 Along with that, what I sustained is stories, songs, visual art, music, because whenever 1.00

00:54:40.500 you have one of these Gwich'in gatherings, oh boy, it's like three, four, five days of 0.99

00:54:45.900 24 hours food, music, song, dance, even as we discuss politics.

00:54:51.540 So even as we go to Washington, D.C., and so on.

00:54:55.300 So there is a lot that the rest of the other campaigns could learn from, that there is

00:55:01.640 deep sense of solidarity that has not fractured and that has not gone away. And it is only

00:55:08.920 emboldened. And that's why, you know, a lot of the efforts that we did with the Last Health

00:55:13.360 Symposium, the Scholars for the Defending the Arctic Refuge letter, my multi-species justice

00:55:18.360 essay, which came out this summer, edited by another dear colleague, Macarena Gomez-Baris,

00:55:24.660 a very prolific, very renowned scholar. The strategy is not to burn out. And the way to

00:55:30.440 not to burn out is solidarity, stories, art, food, music, gathering. All of these matters so that we

00:55:39.900 renew our resolve to keep going. Yes, for some, it becomes extremely tiresome. But people like

00:55:46.300 Sarah James has been doing this for 40 years, while Bernadette Damien Thiep has come on board

00:55:52.960 within the last few years. But she's an extremely powerful voice now. And she's from the new

00:55:57.600 generation, young generation, and the Defend the Sacred Alaska, which is really largely all young

00:56:03.460 women, mostly indigenous, but some non-indigenous leaders who are actually providing sort of the

00:56:10.440 radical age of the fight now. So it just gets picked up along the way, which is what is so

00:56:16.360 inspiring that you would think people will burn out and that's that, but that hasn't happened yet.

00:56:22.400 Individual burnouts have happened. Even I get tired a lot, like this past almost a year now. I've been extremely tired and exhausted all the time. But it's this sense of solidarity between environmental defenders and indigenous rights defenders keeps this thing going.

00:56:38.680 thank you for this this has been such an incredible conversation i can't wait to listen

00:56:45.380 over to it and really sink into all of that you brought up and i would absolutely really

00:56:51.780 love to stay connected and uplift each other's work so i will be in touch please please i'm so

00:56:58.860 glad to be very honest this is the most the most beautiful soulful interview i've done in a long

00:57:05.360 time because you're so so you're so connected to these issues because it's one thing to give

00:57:11.240 an interview and and and blot out a bunch of things and whatnot but this has been a very very

00:57:16.220 meaningful interview thank you thank you thank you so much and we'll be in touch soon yeah

00:57:22.900 wonderful okay and all the best in alaska okay okay we'll do bye

00:57:35.360 Thank you for listening to For the Wild podcast.

00:57:53.320 I'm Ayanna Young.

00:57:54.660 The music you heard today was from Zenara.

00:57:57.420 I'd like to thank our podcast team,

00:58:00.300 our co-producer and editor, Andrew Storrs,

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00:58:22.420 And subscribe and rate us on iTunes and Spotify.

00:58:26.280 Alright, until next time.

00:58:32.560 away from this wild open sky

00:58:34.600 on the concrete trails of wine

00:58:36.560 through the candles

00:58:38.400 dark and white

For The Wild - January 30, 2019

SUBHANKAR BANERJEE on Defending Arctic Alaska ⧸105

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