global climate change

Cool lessons from Utqiaġvik, Alaska

Rena Malai — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 17:21:32 +0000

Cool lessons from Utqiaġvik, Alaska Rena Malai Wed, 08/23/2023 - 13:21

This summer, computer modeling and the Arctic ecosystem converged at the top of the world. Professor Elise Miller-Hooks and a team of National Science Foundation (NSF) researchers convened at the Barrow Arctic Research Center. These NSF Navigating the New Arctic researchers traveled to the remote location to attend the Permafrost and Infrastructure Symposium in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, some 320 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The symposium brought together scientists, regional planners, village leaders, project managers, and federal and local policy makers. The team attended to learn and grow their research–and to share. Miller-Hooks described what she learned as massive.

“It was nothing like I expected. When I entered Utqiaġvik, I found myself in a tough environment with mostly dirt roads. The other researchers told me these roadways are built on permafrost,” she said. “Later on, they convinced me to lower myself into a cave underground to see 16,000-year-old permafrost.”

Elise Miller-Hooks analyzes permafrost in Utqiaġvik.

The people of Utqiaġvik live on the permafrost and they still fish and whale in the surrounding seas, as they have for centuries. Whaling is not a hobby, or for profit. They whale to survive. It is their food supply and more.

“It [whaling] is their culture. It is what they raise their kids to do. It's what their songs and dances are about. It's truly everything. They say that if you take that away from them, it's like killing them,” said Miller-Hooks. All of this could be threatened by more shipping traffic as the polar ice caps shrink and Arctic sea ice diminishes.

Most of the researchers at the symposium were there to study the permafrost which is thawing because of human-made climate change; when the permafrost thaws, the land under the structures that have been built on it sinks. Miller-Hooks described the situation as the base falling out from under them and said that they need to find solutions now, not tomorrow. With very limited access to materials, finding a solution is especially challenging.

Miller-Hooks’ research focuses on forecasting and modeling shipping and maritime transportation changes that will come as the permafrost thaws and the sea-level rises. She said she doesn’t get out in the field much in her line of work but found the experience life changing.

“What I learned from the community and tribal leaders was invaluable. I learned that they really want co-production. They want to be heard. They want us to understand what they know and bring it into our research. We must not ignore their experience and try to push research findings on them, but instead, learn together and jointly develop solutions.”

This idea crystalized after Miller-Hooks presented her research at the symposium. After her presentation, one of the village leaders expressed concern and skepticism about the math.

He said he thought she was looking at the wrong thing. He told her that more shipping in the Arctic would harm the whales and could harm whaling.

Miller-Hooks explained that her research creates the tools that can help forecast changing Arctic traffic, and how these projections and analyses can be used to help make cases to mitigate the impact on the whales and their breeding, other marine life, whale hunting, and indigenous people’s subsistence way of life.

“Now I have a much better understanding of the power of the results that we will get, and how they can be used from many new angles that I hadn't thought of,” she said. Miller-Hooks hopes to collaborate with the communities and work with them to uncover how increased maritime traffic and related industrial activity in the region will impact their way of life, and how the U.S. and other Arctic nations can prepare to do the right thing.

Research Sponsors: Funding for the symposium came from the NSF Arctic Sciences program, the U.S. Department of Transportation's Center for Safety Equity in Transportation, and UIC Science, a subsidiary of the Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation providing logistical support to scientists and researchers working in Alaska's Arctic.

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Elise Miller-Hooks

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Climate change might be fueling ethnic violence. PhD candidate Emily Sample explores why

Mariam Aburdeineh — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 19:49:37 +0000

Climate change might be fueling ethnic violence. PhD candidate Emily Sample explores why Mariam Aburdeineh Fri, 02/04/2022 - 14:49

In This Story

Douglas Irvin-Erickson

Emily Sample. Photo by Shelby Burgess/Strategic Communications/�鶹��Ƶ

As a junior and senior at Annandale High School in Virginia, Emily Sample spent her summers as a docent at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She was a teenager who had just lost a friend to police violence, she said, and joining the museum’s Young Ambassadors Program resonated with her.

“I was fascinated and continue to be fascinated by this highly illogical idea of genocide,” said Sample, a PhD candidate at �鶹��Ƶ’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Since then, Sample has built her career around atrocity prevention. In addition to earning a master’s in human rights and genocide studies from Kingston University London, she has worked as a genocide scholar and educator for Holocaust Museum Houston in Texas. She currently works for the Fund for Peace, where she said she supports their portfolio on human rights and international peacebuilding.

“The best way to prevent genocide is to help make violence not an option,” Sample said, explaining that an “us-versus-them” mentality can develop when people believe there is scarcity of resources, and are manipulated into thinking ethnic violence is an answer.

She’s further studying this at �鶹��Ƶ, with a case study in West Nile, Uganda, where she lived and conducted research while enrolled at Kingston. Her dissertation examines structural mass atrocity prevention through the lens of climate change adaptation and gender.

Emily Sample (right) and her research partner Lina Zedriga in Uganda in 2013. Photo provided.

“If we make the climate better, if we empower women and have better access to clean water, then [Ugandans] will not be forced into making decisions about whether or not their family lives and the next family dies,” said Sample, who is interviewing Ugandans over Zoom.

Sample is also looking at the effects of environmental racism, where negative environmental impacts disproportionately affect people of color.

“The day-to-day life of someone in Uganda may be much more impacted [by climate change than a Westerner’s] because they’re having to adjust their farming season, and the type of seeds and livestock they’re buying,” she said.

These impacts have gendered implications, Sample said, as women often tend the gardens, cook, and walk to retrieve water.

Increasing education and environmental justice, such as reparations for environmental racism, while reducing scarcity fears, could alleviate many atrocity issues, she said.

Sample said she came to �鶹��Ƶ because she wanted to dive deeper into the genocide prevention field.

“My hometown university has one of the best [conflict resolution] programs in the country,” said Sample, who also works with �鶹��Ƶ’s Raphaël Lemkin Genocide Prevention Program.

“The Carter School is extremely unique in how many scholar-practitioners we have,” she said. “They integrate students into their work in unique and really pivotal ways that allow students to become practitioners.”

Though the PhD journey is demanding, Sample said her studies have been worthwhile.

“Every single professor is approachable, interesting and has contributed to me seeing the world in a variety of different ways,” she said.

“Emily is a rising star in genocide studies and conflict resolution, and the nexus of these fields with the practice of peacebuilding,” said Douglas Irvin-Erickson, director of �鶹��Ƶ’s Genocide Prevention Program. “She’s a brilliant social analyst with many years of ethnographically informed research experience, and her deeply rooted sense of justice endears her to those with whom she works the closest.”

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Sample conducts interviews for her dissertation virtually. Here, two Ugandan men communicate with her from Africa via Zoom using a smartphone (bottom right). Photo provided.