ABSTRACT
Climate change is a lived, immediate experience and ever present reality for many residents of the Circumpolar North. This is particularly so for indigenous hunters in northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland who travel on thinner sea ice in the winter and spring or on increasingly stormy waters during summer, reindeer herders in Fennoscandia and Siberia who struggle to find good pasture for their animals, or communities facing the dangers of thawing permafrost or coastal erosion (e.g. Hastrup 2009; Henshaw 2009; Marino 2015; Nuttall et al. 2005). Climate change also challenges anthropologists to understand how people not only respond to and live with such shifting conditions and environmental transformations, but how they reflect upon those variable and extreme weather events they may have been witness to and affected by in the past, and how they negotiate present circumstances and anticipate possible future conditions.
