Richard StoneClimate scientist Darcy Peter is Gwich’in Athabascan and hails from the Yukon River village of Beaver, Alaska, population 25.
There, she says, “The concept of a grocery store is overwhelming.” She laments that climate change threatens the village’s subsistence economy. “The Yukon’s channels are changing like crazy” as its banks erode, and a major source of sustenance—king salmon—is dwindling.But Peter, who studies greenhouse gases and permafrost thaw at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, is just as dismayed that to many colleagues studying Arctic warming, its impact on Indigenous Alaskans is often “out of sight, out of mind”—despite a recently launched U.S.