The front page of the Alaska Dispatch has a picture of Obama wearing mudboots, holding a salmon and looking concerned about climate change. I was there – Seward, Alaska – the day before. I was wearing mudboots too (out of necessity, not fashion consciousness, but I’m glad Obama decided to copy my trendy style), and I was watching bears catch salmon on a painfully warm daytrek that made me concerned about climate change too. (No one took my picture and put it on the front page of the newspaper, so I just had to take pictures of bears and share them with you, below.)
The fact that Obama was coming to town had people excited; the anticipation in the air reminded me of kids at Christmastime on countdown till Santa’s arrival. The awesome hole-in-the-wall soup shops and espresso places we visited in the days before he came were abuzz in Obama-centric conversation, and when our guide for a boat tour of Resurrection Bay found out that I am from D.C., she kept asking me Obama trivia “to brush up before his visit.” (Thank goodness I know how to use the Google machine on that technologic thing I keep in my pocket; she was really pleased with my “knowledge” until we went out of cell service range and I was out of luck.) The widespread enthusiasm for Obama’s visit makes sense especially since very few sitting presidents have spent much time in The Last Frontier. As a D.C. native and a disillusioned-but-still-steadfast Democrat, I can only hope that Obama does more than tell fish tales about how he’s going to make positive change for Alaskans and for the climate change he is hoping to help combat in and beyond the state. If not, talk about coal in one’s stocking in a major – nationwide and worldwide – way.
I remember way back in 2008, when he came into office on a platform of change. He certainly embodied change; “one of these [people] doesn’t look like the others,” as Sesame Street would say about President Obama’s skin color and the old white guys who have been running our country since its inception. And climate change is a good ‘change’ to be worried about, given the drastic ways that the melting permafrost, receding glaciers, eroding coasts, and disappearing sea ice (among other issues) have been affecting the quality of life for all Earthlings in recent years.
But there are already grumblings that the $20 million proposed in additional funding might not be enough to do much, since relocating some of the villages whose lands have been displaced by seawater takes closer to $100 million per village (according to the Selawik tribal leaders). Not only is that no small sum, but it’s also only a reactive move, not anything that actually goes toward resolving the main drivers of climate change.
I am hopeful that the presidential visit to this state will catalyze tremendous positive action. I’m not holding my breath, though. President Obama will need to do more than rename (and decrease the official elevation of) mountains if having an impact on climate change is really one of the cornerstones of his career in office. Can he rise to the challenge and show us the change he keeps promising, or is he just full of hot air?
