The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [73]
When imagining 2050, I anticipate that a globally unfair assortment of some winners and many more loser species will be very apparent by then. Already the world’s plants and animals are in the midst of their biggest extinction challenge in sixty-five million years. Out of perhaps seven million eukaryote species found on Earth, nearly half of all vascular plants and one-third of vertebrates are confined to just twenty-five imperiled “hot spots,” mostly in the tropics and comprising just 1.4% of the world’s land surface.307
Even in the far North, a specialized ecosystem adapted to frigid cold will be under attack by advancing southern competitors, pests, and disease. It is possible that the vast boreal forest—girdling the northern high latitudes from Canada to Siberia—might convert to a more open, savannah-like state.308 But total primary productivity—meaning plant biomass, the bottom of the food chain—will be ramping up. Certain mobile southern invaders will enjoy growing viability in a vast new territory that is larger, less fragmented, and less polluted than where they came from. Longer, deeper penetration of sunlight into the sea (owing to less shading by sea ice) will trigger more algal photosynthesis, again increasing primary productivity and reverberating throughout the Arctic marine food web. The end result of this can only be greater overall ocean biomass, more complex food webs, and the invasion of southern marine species at the expense of northern ones.
The ecology of the North is imperiled and changing. But it will be anything but lifeless.
Hunters on Thin Ice
People rely on sea ice too. For millennia the Inuit and Yupik (Eskimo) peoples have lived along the shores of the Arctic Ocean and even out on the ice itself, hunting seals, polar bears, whales, walruses, and fish. It is the platform upon which they travel, whether by snowmobile, dogsled, or on foot. It is the foundation on which they build hunting camps to live in for weeks or months at a time.
These hunters have watched in astonishment as their sea-ice travel platform—dangerous even in good times—has thinned, become less predictable, and even disappeared. People’s snowmobiles and ATVs are crashing through into the freezing ocean. Farther south, they are crashing through the ice covering rivers and lakes. In Sanikiluaq, Canada, I learned that weaker ice and a two- to three-month shorter ice season is impairing people’s ability to catch seals and Arctic char. In Pangnirtung a traditional New Year’s Day bash celebrated out on the ice has become unsafe. In Barrow, two thousand miles west on the northernmost tip of Alaska, I learned hunters are now taking boats many miles offshore, hoping to find bits of ice with a walrus or bearded seal.309
This is a serious matter. In the high Arctic, eating wild animals is an essential part of human survival and culture. In Barrow I was welcomed into the home of an Inuit elder, who explained that three-quarters of his community relies on wild-caught food.310 I was struck by this because Barrow is one of the most prosperous and modernized northern towns I have seen. There is a huge supermarket with most everything found in the supermarkets of Los Angeles. But groceries are two or three times more expensive because there is no road or rail to Barrow, so everything must be flown or barged in. Most people at least supplement their diet with wild food; many crucially depend on it. Alongside Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant (which has surprisingly good food and is apparently visited by members of the Chicago Bulls basketball team) I saw plenty of bushmeat in Barrow. My host’s kitchen and backyard were festooned with racks of drying meat and fish; in his driveway was a dead caribou. Another driveway had two seals, yet another a massive walrus. In the Arctic, obtaining “country