Global Warming, Part1
The New York Times Magazine
January, 6, 2002
George Divoky's Planet
By DARCY FREY
1. IN WHICH GEORGE TRIES
TO BUILD A FENCE
This is a story about global
warming and a scientist
named George Divoky, who
studies a colony of Arctic seabirds
on a remote barrier island off the
northern coast of Alaska. I
mention all this at the start
because a reader might like to
come to the point, and what
could be more urgent than the
very health and durability of this
planet we call Earth? However,
before George can pursue his
inquiry into worldwide climate
change; before he can puzzle out
the connections between a bunch
of penguinesque birds on a flat,
snow-covered, icebound island
and the escalating threat of
droughts, floods and rising global
temperatures, he must first
mount a defense -- his only
defense in this frozen,
godforsaken place -- against the
possibility of being consumed,
down to the last toenail, by a
polar bear while he sleeps. He
must first build a fence.
Cooper Island, June 4, 2 o'clock
in the morning. The sky is a cold
slab of gray, the air temperature
hovers in the upper 20's and the
wind -- always the wind -- howls
across hundreds of miles of sea
ice with such unremitting force
that George has disappeared
beneath a hat, two hoods and a
thick fleece face mask covering all
but his bespectacled eyes.
Standing near the three small
dome tents that make up his field
camp on Cooper, George raises a
pair of binoculars and begins to
scan for bears. Past the island's
north beach, a wind-scarred plain
of sea ice stretches uninterrupted
to the pole. To the south, the
nearest tree stands 200 miles
away on the far side of the Brooks
Range. Here, some 330 miles
north of the Arctic Circle, with
the sun making a constant
parabolic journey around the sky,
George surveys a view that
replicates in all directions: the
snow-covered island merges with
the sea ice at its shores, the
dazzling sheets of sea ice stretch
to meet a pale gray dome of sky.
Surrounded by a vast, undulating
whiteness, he appears to be
standing in the middle of the
Arctic Ocean. He appears to be
standing on the tops of cirrus
clouds.
''So, . . . '' he says, and the rest of
his words are carried off by the
wind.
''What?''
''I said, so maybe we should put up the polar-bear fence
before we get too fatigued!''
Heading fast toward fatigue, I tell him that's a fine idea
indeed, and exactly how many polar bears does he figure
might be out there on the ice? George, who spends each
summer on Cooper Island, is cheerfully indifferent to its
dangers and discomforts and reassuring to those who
aren't. Discussing a recent incident in which some Inupiat
Eskimos had to shoot a bear that wandered into their
nearby whaling camp, I consider it bad news -- there are
bears in the vicinity! -- while George thinks of it as good:
yes, but now there's one less bear.
Still scanning the faint horizon line, George insists there's
nothing to get worked up about. For the most part, bears
stay several miles offshore, where they can gorge on
ringed and bearded seals. If a bear were to come to this
island, he points out, its massive 800-pound frame would
stand out against the sky like an approaching blimp. Even
if a bear were to wander into camp, he goes on, we are
sufficiently armed with a shotgun, cans of compressed
pepper spray (mace) and a flarelike device known as a
screamer-banger. Nonetheless, George confirms that at
least one big bear shows up on Cooper each summer,
usually to scavenge the beach for dead, washed-up seals;
and furthermore, that an encounter can be so unpleasant
that you do have to figure the odds a little differently. ''I
was out here once and injured the tendon in my knee,''
he says. ''I couldn't walk, I couldn't stay warm. I kept
thinking, If it's true predators key in on the weak and the
infirm. . . . '' He shrugs and gestures to the chilling
evidence of predation right by our feet -- a caribou skull,
several seal vertebrae, a scattering of gull's feathers and
the sun-bleached skeleton of a clean-picked walrus. ''I
guess it's safe to assume that most of our fellow
Americans are south of us, sound asleep, a lot warmer
than we are, and not preparing to put up a polar-bear
fence.''
Cooper is one of six barrier islands stretching off the coast
of Point Barrow, Alaska, where the United States -- along
with continental North America -- comes to a chilly,
desolate end. Three miles tip to tip, the island is nothing
more than a snow-covered strip of sand and gravel frozen
into the Arctic pack ice, its only vertical relief an odd
cityscape of rusted 55-gallon drums and destroyed
ammunition boxes left here by the United States Navy
sometime after the Korean War. In 1972, George came out
to Cooper as a young ornithologist and discovered a rare
colony of black guillemots -- pigeon-size, stiff-legged
seabirds -- nesting in the abandoned drums and boxes.
And for many years he pursued a rather esoteric study of
them -- mate selection, age of first breeding, ''the kind of
thing that's of interest to about 20 ornithologists,'' he says
now. Then, almost by accident, he discovered that his
birds were picking up on another kind of frequency, and
that if he watched and listened with great care, they could
tell him about something no less consequential than the
climatic fate of the earth.
In coming to the Alaskan Arctic year after year, George is
following the logic of many other scientists -- that to
understand Earth's mysterious and changing climate, you
should go directly to its extremes. In the last two decades,
scores of researchers have come to the nearby town of
Barrow, hoping to learn why the Arctic is warming so
significantly and how the changing polar climate may
affect the planet as a whole -- if the Arctic sea ice were to
one day disappear, it would cause drastic changes in the
climate of the Northern Hemisphere. But while many
scientists gather their data from remote sensing devices --
satellites, buoys, robotic airplanes -- or come to this
frozen, inhospitable region on brief, well-equipped trips
before returning to the comforts of the ''Lower
Forty-Eight,'' George spends three months of each year
sleeping in a small yellow dome tent, warming himself
over a two-burner propane stove and crawling around on
his hands and knees, up to his binoculars in guillemot
scat. Thousands of miles away from the debates on
greenhouse-gas emissions, relatively unknown even
within the scientific community, George, now 55, has
come out to Cooper Island every year for more than 25
years, often with no financial or institutional support. It is
not too much to say that he has staked his entire adult
life on this barren gravel bar and its avian inhabitants.
And now, as he continues to scan the island with his
binoculars under bright, 2 a.m. skies, it is not too much to
say that his life is staked on whether he can successfully
erect that polar-bear fence.
The fence became an essential part of George's repertory
for survival after he awoke in his tent one night to the
crunch, crunch, crunch of approaching footsteps. When he
crawled out to investigate, however, he thought he must
have been dreaming: he was alone on the island. The next
morning, the 16-inch tracks in the snow told him
otherwise. If it's possible to see your life flash before your
eyes in retrospect, that's what happened to George: a big
female bear and her cub had walked within 20 yards.
While the cub stayed put, the mother came up to the
doorway of his tent, evidently sniffing George's placid,
sleeping head before he woke, unzipped his sleeping bag
and inadvertently scared both bears away.
''All right, let's see what we've got here,'' George says,
shaking the many parts of the fence out of its canvas bag
onto the snow. George's fence is made up of 30
three-foot-high garden stakes that he and I, fueled by the
adrenaline of our recent arrival, now try to place in a circle
around our tents. Each stake has a small pulley, through
which we thread a fine piece of cord. The cord makes a
perimeter around the tents and meets up at the home
stake, which is connected to a spring-loaded mousetrap,
an eight-volt battery and a car alarm with a large plastic
horn. The fence operates on the principle that a bear
wandering into camp will push the cord, the cord will
trigger the mousetrap, and the closing of the mousetrap
will complete an electrical circuit that turns on the alarm,
thereby waking George and me to the dangers at hand.
That, at any rate, is the principle. For more than an hour,
we struggle to drive the garden stakes firmly into the
snow, and each time we test the fence by pushing at the
cord, a stake pulls loose and the cord slackens, preventing
the triggering of the mousetrap. Then, when George turns
his attention to the car-alarm horn, a sharp crack echoes
in the air, followed by the gentle sound of his voice:
''Uh-oh. I think I broke it.''
Although George has spent more summers on Cooper
Island than he often cares to count, he seems, upon first
meeting, an unlikely candidate for the solitary hardships
of fieldwork in the high Arctic. Handsome, boyish, with
disheveled hair and a face deeply creased by abundant
laughter in subfreezing temperatures, George lives nine
months of the year in Seattle, and there is about him the
unmistakable air of the overcaffeinated urban neurotic.
He wakes up talking and, rushing to get the words out,
keeps up a rapid, digressive chatter -- about George Bush
and the Kyoto Protocols, the challenges of romantic
commitment and the latest from Philip Roth -- almost
until the moment, 18 hours later, that he falls directly
asleep. It seems a waste of his conversational gifts for him
to be on Cooper Island alone. It's also somewhat alarming.
When I first met George in Barrow last February, I
watched in wonder at his interactions with the mechanical
world -- forgetting to keep his car engine running when
the outside temperature dropped to 30 below; or, when he
parked and did remember to plug his engine block into an
electric heater, forgetting to unplug before driving off --
snap!
But for almost three decades, he has hurled himself to the
very ends of the earth and met its risks and challenges
with tireless enthusiasm. When his new stove broke on
the first day of one field season, he kept a series of
bonfires going all summer; when he ran out of freshwater,
he placed tin cups around his tent to catch the rain; when
his radio broke, he tried calling for help with an old signal
mirror from World War II. (He also tried spelling HELP on
the beach with large pieces of driftwood, but came up one
log short, inadvertently announcing to the skies a
pressing need for KELP.)
Now, holding the two halves of the car alarm in his hands,
he shrugs and says, ''To be honest, the fence doesn't keep
bears out; it just lets you know that one is about to eat
you. Really, it's just a placebo.'' He looks around at our
camp -- one tent for cooking and two for sleeping that
we've pitched far enough apart for privacy while also
keeping, in George's words, ''within screaming distance.''
For our campsite, he chose what seemed the safest, most
sheltered location near the island's south shore -- out of
harm's way, and back from the thick, upended slabs of
sea ice that have rammed up against the island to the
north. But as far as I can see, we are nothing if not in
harm's way: like a Bedouin camp in the desert, our three
yellow tents are the only signs of life in this
white-on-white landscape -- the only signs of food, come
to think of it, to an animal so wily that it stalks prey by
sliding on its belly behind a moving block of ice and is
said to raise its white paw to cover its black nose for
camouflage in the snow. ''Any bear that shows up on this
island is probably very hungry or very deranged,'' George
says fatalistically, ''and there's not much you can do to
keep Charles Manson out of the suburbs.''
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