State of Change

Our complex relationship with the natural world often mirrors our own struggles to connect and adapt, presenting mysteries that overwhelm our comprehension. Having spent my life exploring Alaska’s mountains—witnessing both the advance of glaciers and then their rapid modern retreat into milder winters—I set out in 2018 to understand why the urgent narrative around climate change so often falls on deaf ears.

Sidestepping distant pundits, a single cold call to a geophysicist snowballed into a sprawling journey across Alaska, taking me from the shores of the Arctic Ocean in Utqiaġvik to the decaying ice of Wolverine Glacier to speak directly with the scientists and indigenous residents living on the front lines. Through thousands of miles of travel by bush plane, helicopter, and on foot, I built deep friendships and listened to those navigating this shifting landscape, realizing that our environmental crisis is inextricably linked to our own cultural and social dysfunctions. It was during this extensive fieldwork that I found myself quietly captivated by the 1957 suicide of Dr. Richard Hubley, an enigmatic researcher who died alone on the McCall Glacier in Alaska's Brooks Range; his unfinished story serves as a poignant metaphor for our internal vulnerabilities. Ultimately, this project pushed me to stop simply collecting information and begin synthesizing a new narrative—one that looks beyond the media's standard doom and gloom to explore the profound, intensely human side of the changes we face.

This essay was published in the Spring 2019 edition of Forum Magazine and was supported by a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum.