Kivalina
A Climate Change Story
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The true story of an Alaska Native village destroyed by flooding and erosion caused by climate change—and how they fought for help.
Warming Arctic temperatures have been making coastal areas of Alaska increasingly uninhabitable. In 2008, the small Alaska Native village of Kivalina filed a legal claim against some of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies for damaging their homeland and creating a false debate around climate change. Academic and former journalist Christine Shearer explores the history leading up to the lawsuit, its connections to disaster management and adaptation, and its relationship to past misinformation campaigns involving lead, asbestos, and tobacco. Kivalina’s struggle for safe relocation, the book argues, is part of our common struggle to acknowledge and address climate change before it is too late.
2012 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award (Honorable Mention)
Praise for Kivalina
“Moving, infuriating, ominous . . . . Shearer provides an impressively concise and comprehensive history of the growth of corporate power in America; its influence on, entwinement with, and corruption of government; [and] corporate obfuscation of industrial hazards.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“Best book of 2011: one of the most timely and important books to be published in 2011—and in the past decade.” —Jeff Biggers, The Huffington Post
“In novelistic detail, Shearer recounts the science, politics, legal battles, and human experience at one of the leading edges of climate change impact. In doing so, she . . . tells the story not just of one village in Alaska, but of us all.” —The Society of Environmental Journalists
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shearer, a journalist and academic educated in sociology, tells a moving, infuriating, ominous story of a remote Alaskan Native community's struggle to relocate its village, Kivalina, which is being lost to flooding and erosion due to climate change induced melting permafrost and retreating sea ice. Kivalina's residents originally moved to this narrow island in the early 20th century, when the U.S. government ordered them to settle permanently on the island or face imprisonment. The villagers, who "are able to survive in the harsh Arctic region through an understanding of and close connection to the cycles and rhythms of the land," first noticed erosion of the island in the 1950s, voted to relocate in 1992, and chose a new site by 1998. Their attempts to relocate were frustrated by U.S. agencies who contradicted their knowledge of the area, so the community filed a climate change lawsuit. Shearer provides an impressively concise and comprehensive history of the growth of corporate power in America; its influence on, entwinement with, and corruption of government; corporate obfuscation of industrial hazards, culminating in the fossil fuel industry's frighteningly successful campaign to prevent regulatory action on increasingly confirmed global warming; and the cultural disconnect between Native Alaskans and American agencies whose clumsy, often patronizing management of Kivalina's dire situation has only exacerbated the community's problem.
