Women Are America's Climate Change Champions
Mayor Blanche Okbaok-Garnie walks with Victoria Herrmann along Teller, Alaska’s corroding seawall discussing climate change. Photo: Eli Keene
In recent years, women researchers, scientists, and local champions have elevated their visibility and empowered their voices across the world. The Arctic is no exception. With powerful organizations like 500 Women Scientists and local movements like Women in Polar Science and Plan A growing their reach and impact, women are sharing their personal narratives, highlighting their contributions, and supporting each other like never before. The Arctic Institute’s Breaking the Arctic’s Ice Ceiling is our team’s contribution to this movement. In a series of commentaries, articles, and multimedia posts, we are highlighting the work of women working and living in the Arctic.
The Arctic Institute Breaking the Arctic's Ice Ceiling Series 2019
- Looking Up: Women in Arctic Science
- The Gender Gap in Arctic Research Awards and Leadership – Infographic
- An Arctic Imposter’s Journey to Belong
- Women Are America’s Climate Change Champions
- Vegan at Sea-gan: The Arctic Ocean
- Golden Rule in Arctic Science and Community Partnerships
- Is the Future of the European Arctic Socially Sustainable?
- Geo-mapping in the Canadian Arctic
- Women in Polar Research: A Brief History
- It’s Our Table: Indigenous People Shaping Arctic Policy
The Native Village of Teller, Alaska sits on the most northwestern coastline of the North American continent. A remote town of around 230 residents, the community is built on a gravel spit that juts out into the Bering Strait. Surrounded by rising waters on three sides, Teller perseveres on the front lines of climate change.
About now, in mid to late October, ice usually begins to form around the gravel spit that Teller is built upon. The temperature historically hovers around 30 degrees farenheit in early fall, and the Alaskan town sees about 5 inches of snow. Now those living in more southern locations might shiver at the thought of a freezing October, but these cold temperatures and ice are critical for a community that relies on ice fishing for subsistence and snow mobile travel for visiting family and friends.
On the day that this was written, October 30th, 2018, in Teller, the temperature is 42 degrees and there is neither snow nor ice. Climate change has introduced a new normal. Because of its proximity to the North Pole, Alaska is warming twice as fast as the global average, forcing ice to form much thinner and later in the year. With less ice, Teller’s fishers face a dangerous decision: either do not fish or walk out on weak ice and risk falling through, which has been occurring all too often.
Teller’s climate concerns don’t stop with disappearing ice. Another issue that residents of Teller face is flooding. Fall-time storms that used to break on the ice a mile away from village buildings now wash through the town’s corroded seawall and into families’ homes. Instead of having a flood every 20 years, Teller now has high water warnings every single fall.
For Teller’s residents, climate change is an everyday reality – a reality that is only getting worse. The US Army Corps of Engineers has identified Teller as one of the most imminently threatened villages in Alaska from flooding and it is one of 12 communities currently exploring relocation away from the coastline further inland to higher, drier ground.
When I use Teller as an example of what climate change in America looks like in 2018, audiences are often engaged, but not connected. They listen to stories of changing traditions and try to imagine how devastating an iceless Arctic is to the people who call Teller home. But, at the end of the day, chances most people have never heard of Teller, Alaska, its history as a pioneer American town or its climate challenges today.
One of my jobs as Managing Director of The Arctic Institute and as an advocate for climate action is to share stories and bring attention to how climate change affects communities today across the circumpolar north. And I realize that it is hard to connect with a place that you have never visited and probably have never heard anything about.
But I bet many of you have heard of Teller’s neighbor, Nome. If you have read about the story of Balto as an elementary school student then you have read about the 1925 Nome serum run. A two-hour drive east of Teller, the city of Nome is perhaps the most famous historic town in Alaska. At the turn of the 20th century, Nome was the site of Alaska’s great gold rush, where tens of thousands of men sojourned north in hope of upturning riches beyond their wildest dreams. In 1925, stories of the Great Race of Mercy made headlines from New York to San Francisco as 20 mushers and 150 sled dogs raced across the Alaskan territory to deliver diphtheria antitoxin to sick children in Nome. Nome makes the news once a year as competitors of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race cross the finish line in the town’s historic downtown area.
I first landed in Nome in August 2016 on a sunny midsummer morning. I had traveled some four thousand miles north as a National Geographic Explorer in search of America’s climate change story. I wanted to know how we as a nation, from Alaska to Alabama, were responding to the dynamic and dangerous shifts along our coastlines as sea levels rise – and what could be done to better support local climate change champions.
Seeing the bronze statue of Balto and the last stop of the Iditarod in Nome was exciting, but what interested me most in Alaska’s climate change story wasn’t the famed town.
I was interested in the lesser known, less visible village of Teller, because it is there, in small, unseen towns of America that women are quietly leading a climate change adaptation movement.
One of the best examples of women leadership in climate change is Blanche Okbaok-Garnie, the Mayor of Teller. When I think of climate change champions, I visualize Blanche on the first day I met her in August 2016. We were standing together on the shoreline of her community just above the corroding seawall, and with a compassionate but serious tone, she explained Teller’s history, their challenges, and her vision for a brighter future.
Although Blanche lamented the lack of action taken by the State of Alaska and the United States at large, I saw a strength in her and could tell that she was determined to take things into her own hands. Just a few weeks after we met up in Teller, Blanche traveled across the state of Alaska to a conference on adapting sewage and water infrastructure to climate change. This was important and relevant because the village of Teller has no sewage system – residents use buckets as toilets and empty them into a sewage lagoon located just behind the corroded sea wall. When fall storms wash into town, the lagoon floods and spills sewage into the streets. Blanche was determined to find a solution at this conference to help her community, and she did. She identified a system that could replace the sewage lagoon and is now working to implement that system, keeping Teller healthy and safe.
She is one of the most insightful and innovative local leaders I have met. Despite the imminent threat rising seas bring to Teller, Blanche is rising to the challenge.
I like to tell the story of Blanche because through my work, I have found that when we think of climate change leaders, we rarely visualise women. If you type the phrase climate change leader into Google, the first ten images are all men. They are leaders like Al Gore, presidential nominee and director of the critically important documentary An Inconvenient Truth; Bill McKibben, environmental activist and founder of the 350 movement; Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York City and urban climate action trailblazer; and former US President Barack Obama and current President Emmanuel Macron for their leadership in guiding the Paris Agreement negotiations.
McKibben, Bloomberg, Gore, Macron, and Obama are all important climate change leaders– but where are the women?
When I imagine the faces of climate change leaders, I think of Blanche and the hundreds of other local women leaders like her.
In 2016 and 2017, my research partner and I traveled across America’s eroding edges to interview more than 350 leaders working on the frontlines of climate change adaptation. Funded by National Geographic and partnered with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, our goal was to identify gaps in assistance at the national level to better support American communities facing climate impacts today.
I expected to find strong local leaders acting on climate, but I’ll admit that I did not expect to find that the face of climate champions in America is overwhelmingly female. Through my work, I met women leaders in every corner of this country who have dedicated their lives work to save their cultures, traditions, and communities.
When I sat down to write this contribution to The Arctic Institute’s Breaking the Ice Ceiling series, the first leaders that came to my mind were Blanche in Alaska, and Queen Quet, chieftess of the Gullah Geechee Nation in the sea islands from North Carolina to Florida, an international advocate for climate action.
I thought of Dr. Kristina Peterson in the bayous of Louisiana, using her emergency management insights, and her retirement savings, to make sure every bayou community is ready for the next hurricane. I thought of Nerelle Que in American Samoa, a social media coordinator by day and sustainability champion by night, who just coordinated a territory-wide cleanup day.
Blanche, Queen, Kristina, Nerelle – these women are the true, invisible heroes in America’s climate change story.
There is a discrepancy in America’s and the world’s climate change narrative. Climate change in policy negotiations, expert interviews on television news, and even marches in the environmental activist movement are visually led my men.
When women show up in climate change stories, they are often victims. It is well-documented that women and girls are disproportionately affected by climate impacts, whether its mothers working harder to find clean water or grandmothers opening their homes to shelter extended family members in the aftermath of storms.
Socio-economic vulnerabilities do not equate to victimhood. Women are strong, resilient knowledge holders, and they – just as much as anyone – are leading the transition to a sustainable, resilient future from local adaptations to international negotiations. We are already doing the work. We must now change the visible story of climate change and write women leaders into the narrative.
As a female leader in my own field, I understand how challenging finding and sustaining visibility can be. I am the managing director and president of The Arctic Institute, a nonprofit organization working to help shape policy for a secure, just, and sustainable Arctic through objective, multidisciplinary research. As director, I lead a team of 23 researchers across North America and Europe implementing capacity building programs to support renewable energy systems, climate adaptation projects, youth empowerment initiatives, and smart city strategies, just to name a few. I’ve presented our work at UN climate change negotiations and White House meetings, and we’re been recognized as one of the top US think tanks working on climate change and energy research.
I’m incredibly proud of what our team has accomplished since I joined The Arctic Institute in 2014, but when I rewind my own narrative back to when I was an undergraduate college student, I could have never imagined that I would end up leading a nonprofit working on climate change research in the Arctic.
When I first got to university, I was the attentive but silent student – I was eager to learn everything I could, but would go an entire semester without speaking in class (to the detriment of my participation points). Part of it was my shy personality, but I also felt like I didn’t belong. With my father working at our family’s metal manufacturing factory and my mother as a receptionist, I knew little about the world of higher education and even less about possible career paths. As I watched my fellow students effortlessly speak up and speak out in class, it seemed like I had missed some introductory professional course on how to read critically and articulate your viewpoint in an intellectual discussion.
I never truly overcome the feeling of not belonging (or spoke up in class), but I worked hard in college, both in and out of the classroom, to make up for my self-perceived deficiencies and found a passion in climate change research and activism.
Following that passion, I took my first job in Washington, DC working on climate change policy in some of the largest cities in the world as a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I helped research and support sustainable climate solutions in Mexico City, São Paulo, Beijing, and New York, all while finding my first strong female mentor in my boss. While I loved working with dedicated city leaders, I realized that cities already have access to a wide range of financial and technical resources because of their size and economic prominence. For every megacity, there are thousands of smaller, more rural communities that are struggling to get the support they need to withstand immediate climate impacts.
As someone privileged enough to attend college and pursue my passion, I felt compelled to use my position to help connect remote, climate-impacted towns and villages with the resources they need to achieve their own vision of a safe, resilient community.
And so, I shifted from working in the most populated places on earth to one of the least populated – the Arctic. I packed my bags and headed north to Canada on a Fulbright Award to listen, learn, and honor the experiences, histories, and Indigenous knowledge that make the four million people that call the Arctic home some of the most resilient societies on earth.
The experience was awe-inspiring. The more I learned, the more I poured myself into my work. In 2014 I joined The Arctic Institute as the US Director. Together with the Leadership Team, I worked to incorporate the Institute as a nonprofit in America and expand our network of researchers, scholars, and events on this side of the globe.
And yet, the more professional meetings I attended in America and later across Europe as I began my PhD research at Cambridge University, the more I was reminded of the feeling of not belonging. Because no matter what continent or country I was in, there were a few salient characteristics that immediately jumped out at every gathering – the room was overwhelmingly white, male, and over 50.
For the first few meetings, I sat silently, overwhelmed by a feeling of exclusion. But remembering the strength of my former boss to challenge the status quo with her creativity and courage, I slowly found my voice. Since joining The Arctic Institute four years ago, women colleagues, friends, and newfound family across the Arctic region have supported me to challenge more and push further.
Today as Managing Director of the Institute, I am one of only 16 women leaders in the top 100 think tanks in the United States, and at 28 I am the youngest of all 100. Being a young female leader in an overwhelmingly older male space is challenging and exhausting.
I get called darling instead of doctor, I am mistaken for an intern instead of a director, I am questioned on my qualifications simply because of my gender, and I am mansplained what my own doctoral research is about by those less educated but more emboldened than me. I’ll admit I feel demoralized, hurt, angry, and exasperated on a monthly, weekly, and sometimes even daily basis.
But here’s the thing: Being a young female leader is exhilarating. I get the chance to challenge the status quo and break glass ceilings, all while supporting and being supported by other female leaders. I get to travel across our country and get motivated to do more by strong climate champions like Blanche, Queen Quet, and Nerelle. And with my current project, Rise Up to Rising Tides, I’m giving that support back to these local leaders by creating a skills-based volunteering platform to connect communities in need of climate change adaptation projects with the affordable resources they need to not only survive, but thrive.
When working with women on these projects, for the first time I feel like I belong.
For me, it was not enough to simply be present; to truly contribute I had to challenge my own status quo. And for any young women just beginning their journey to leadership, you must strive to do the same. Be courageous and creative in finding new solutions in your field, your sector, or your firm; support each other and lift others up as you rise. And above all else, do not let others push you or your work out of the frame of visibility. In a society where women are taught from a young age to stand silently to the side while men do the heavy lifting, it is all too easy to have your work be invisible.
Do not be invisible. We need you, your passion, and your persistence now more than ever before. We are facing overwhelming challenges from every angle. Just this month the UN reported that we have 12 years to contain a climate change catastrophe. I’ll admit, when 6,000 scientists tell you that we are racing against time to avert mass extinctions and the current US administration does not believe in climate change, it’s hard not to feel hopeless and helpless.
But then I remember the words of fellow Cambridge graduate Sir Isaac Newton from 1675, at a time when there were no women allowed at my alma mater: “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” To be hopeful that we can make a difference and advert a climate catastrophe, I stand on the shoulders of Blanche, Queen Quet, Nerelle and now all of you, because the world needs every single one of you to be visible, empowered, and a giant in your field as a woman leader to be hopeful in the face of every challenge we face.