Residents Starting To Leave Newtok, AK As Town Is Washed Away; COVID, Lack Of Money Delay Process
Two years ago, Lisa Charles and her family moved from their lifelong home in the town of Newtok, Alaska, to Mertarvik, a 30-minute trip by boat or snow machine depending on the season. Lisa is a member of one of the US’s first communities of climate transplants, though she is also Yup’ik, a mother of seven, a nonprofit employee, and a political volunteer. Melting permafrost has rapidly accelerated the erosion of the land under Newtok, bringing houses precariously close to the water’s edge.
All of the town’s nearly 400 residents will eventually have to make the move to Mertarvik, but a lack of funding and the global pandemic have left the village split in half, both in population and in spirit. “I think of Newtok as a little island, as swampy ground,” says Lisa. “The ground has gotten so bad that all the light poles are leaning over, the boardwalks are getting crooked and breaking apart.”
Lisa’s uncle, Teddy Tom, finally got to move to Mertarvik six months ago after two floods brought water under his house. Before he left, he took a final photo of his late parents’ home as it was demolished. It was once miles back from the Ninglick River, but by 2020, the house risked falling into the water. The land where Teddy grew up no longer exists, and he says the village grows warmer every year. As a result of global warming, the arctic permafrost is thawing more quickly than expected, causing building foundations to deteriorate. For communities like Newtok along a river or coast, climate change can also accelerate erosion. In some years, more than 100ft of Newtok’s coast has broken away into the encroaching water, and in 2004, the US Army Corps of Engineers predicted that Newtok would be completely lost by 2019.
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The relocation project was dogged for more than 20 years by a lack of resources and governmental support. Construction is expensive in rural Alaska, where supplies have to be flown in and gasoline costs $5.68 per gallon (£4.02). To Lisa and Ashley, officials have not taken the slow burn of global warming seriously enough. “We hear these top people in power not thinking climate change is real just because where they live, they’re not seeing the effects right away,” says Lisa. “Where we live, it’s impacting us really fast. We can see that it’s real, it’s bad, it’s hurting our environment.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/08/it-was-sad-having-to-leave-climate-crisis-splits-alaskan-town-in-half