The true story of an Alaska Native village destroyed by flooding and erosion caused by climate change—and how they fought for help.
Warming Arctic temperatures have been making coastal areas of Alaska increasingly uninhabitable. In 2008, the small Alaska Native village of Kivalina filed a legal claim against some of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies for damaging their homeland and creating a false debate around climate change. Academic and former journalist Christine Shearer explores the history leading up to the lawsuit, its connections to disaster management and adaptation, and its relationship to past misinformation campaigns involving lead, asbestos, and tobacco. Kivalina’s struggle for safe relocation, the book argues, is part of our common struggle to acknowledge and address climate change before it is too late.
2012 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award (Honorable Mention)
Praise for Kivalina
“Moving, infuriating, ominous . . . . Shearer provides an impressively concise and comprehensive history of the growth of corporate power in America; its influence on, entwinement with, and corruption of government; [and] corporate obfuscation of industrial hazards.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“Best book of 2011: one of the most timely and important books to be published in 2011—and in the past decade.” —Jeff Biggers, The Huffington Post
“In novelistic detail, Shearer recounts the science, politics, legal battles, and human experience at one of the leading edges of climate change impact. In doing so, she . . . tells the story not just of one village in Alaska, but of us all.” —The Society of Environmental Journalists
