Changing world. Racist world?

The world is changing. Literally.

A hot topic here in Alaska is the state or un-state of global climate change and it's effect on us as human beings.  And before we go any further, yes, I completely believe in the climate change theory.  I find I cannot call it 'global warming.'  That simple term is too simple, and suggests so much and confines an understanding of what might be happening.  But I live too close to the arctic to believe anything else. 

There are at least 300 scientists in Barrow Alaska alone in a state of the art brand new science facility, and most travel all over the North slope doing research.  We hob nob with scientists whose data you will not see for 10-20 years, driving them around in the wilderness to observe and take samples.  But most importantly we have cultural memory to rely on.  Both with elders that have intimate experience with this vast wilderness in their extensive life spans and with oral and artistic histories that have survived thousands of years. 

Did you know that the Inupiaq have a dragon?  Not really a dragon, but more like a large crocodile, a scaled being that thrived in the hot humid temperatures of yore.  Here in what was eventually named the 'arctic.'  Yes our memory goes that far back, beyond knowing how to butcher and prepare mammoth meat even.  We even have Memory and Story of glaciers and animals that people insist are just legend.  The polar people are very adaptable, it is our strongest attribute.  We adapt, we learn, we even have 30% higher spacial intelligence just to be able to mentally manipulate and predict this environment and what it might do in the future or what it did in the past. 

Our whole culture is built on knowing and living in this environment;  intelligence and 'goodness' is judged on how proficient you are at observing the world around you, how much knowledge you absorbed from elders, how much knowledge you retain, how much knowledge you pass on. For thousands upon thousands of years only the people that could memorize a full ecological system would survive.  Your life literally depended on how good your memory was, and your children's lives depended on how well you passed on that memory.  And Alaska has only been a state for 50 years.  Less than a single lifespan.  

So yes we know the arctic changes and did not look like it did.  But we also know is what gradual normal change feels like, versus violent immediate unnatural change.