ARTICLE: "Whale Hunters of the Warming Arctic," The New Yorker (Sept. 12, 2016)
Few Americans are as bound to the natural world as the whale hunters of the Arctic, or as keenly affected by the warming atmosphere. Yet few Americans are so immediately dependent on the continued expansion of the fossil-fuel economy that science says is causing the change. The underground igloo where Oomittuk was born, in 1962, had earthen walls braced with wood scraps and whalebone, and a single electric light bulb. Point Hope today is a grid of small but comfortable homes, laid out around a new school and a diesel-fired power plant – everything provided by a regional municipality with eight thousand permanent residents and an annual budget of four hundred million dollars. Oil drilling in the Arctic has paid for nearly all of it, and Oomittuk does not want to go back.
