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October 21, 2005
Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

We’re Losing Dorothy

     Turbulence.

     Gusts of winds whipped across the tundra and tore at our house. Hearing the roof groan, I began to gain the suspended apprehension one gets when the flight attendant calls out that the captain has turned on the fasten seat belt sign.

     Be prepared, they say around here, it will only get worse.

     The last time our village shook like this, it was swamped a day later, the ocean lapping at base of the post office.

     Earlier in the afternoon, my students and I discussed the weather outside. The wind pressed against the glass, making it appear to breathe. On the board, I drew the earth in blue and green, then a sun in red. I showed with red arrows how the sun’s rays strike the earth then bounce away. “What keeps some of the rays from rebounding from the earth?” I ask. “Ozone,” a student says. “Clouds,” says another.

     I use a black marker to draw factories and cars, and then I scribble circles to form a layer of pollution. “So what happens when this stuff—carbon dioxide—fills the air? Can the sun’s rays bounce away?”

     The students and I talk about hurricanes, glaciers melting, forest fires, permafrost, the polar ice cap and flooding. I wave my arm toward the wind: “The weather is getting worse, villages are having to relocate just up the coast from here. What are we going to do about this?”

     A student stares at the board then asks, “Why isn’t our government doing anything about it?” We talk about the Kyoto Protocol and how America, responsible for third of all greenhouse gases, is the only country refusing to sign the treaty.

     “Why?”

     “Oil = $”I write.

     One student is going to Fairbanks for the AFN Convention and I suggest she deliver the message. She smiles shyly.

     Later, I check my email, all the while wondering if the wind will interrupt access.

     I get a note from my buddy, Carl, better know out here as Nayiq of the Yupik Nation.

     “Pretty amazing stuff,” he writes. “Imagine, Alaskan young people trying to find a way to pay for schooling, and the oil industry is taking $20,000,000 every day out of this state. The state is probably getting close to $10 million a day and Frank Murkowski has the nerve to come to Bethel and say, ‘rural Alaska doesn't contribute to the economy of Alaska.’

     “He must be out of his freaking mind to say that. His mind is actually in Dallas at Exxon Mobil's top floor. Get Frank out of Alaska. He's out of touch with reality.”

     By early morning, the wind had shifted, and then died down. A full moon glared from the sky. It is the eye of the storm, where everything is somehow made startlingly clear. A rusty, swing set stirs in a soft breeze, the man in the shadow is actually just an old pump, and the dark green lake has crept, like a mold, over its bank.

     I gaze across at a distant bank of clouds in the peaceful clarity of the opaque light. The wind-shaped landscape appears pleased. Someone took the time to look.







Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com.
- Columnists -

Editor's Desk
by Aaron Selbig

Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

Alaskan In Exile
by Neil Zawicki

The
Bramble Bush
by Kevin Morford





- also by this writer -

Frank Wants Access
Copyright 2005 Insurgent Media. All Rights Reserved.
in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership.