{"id":3475,"date":"2020-02-12T00:27:31","date_gmt":"2020-02-12T00:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/atnitribes.org\/climatechange\/?p=3475"},"modified":"2020-02-12T00:34:48","modified_gmt":"2020-02-12T00:34:48","slug":"3475","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atnitribes.org\/climatechange\/2020\/02\/12\/3475\/","title":{"rendered":"How Native Tribes Are Taking the Lead on Planning for Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

Original article published by YaleEnvironment<\/span>360 at this link<\/a><\/p>\n

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Members of the Swinomish tribe in Washington state prepare a new clam garden. PHOTO COURTESY OF SWINOMISH INDIAN TRIBAL COMMUNITY<\/p><\/div>\n

How Native Tribes Are Taking the Lead on Planning for Climate Change<\/span><\/figure>\n

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With their deep ties to the land and reliance on fishing, hunting, and gathering, indigenous tribes are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Now, native communities across North America are stepping up to adopt climate action plans to protect their way of life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

BY\u00a0NICOLA\u00a0JONES<\/a><\/span>\u00a0\u2022<\/span>\u00a0FEBRUARY\u00a011,\u00a02020<\/span><\/p>\n

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On a hot summer\u2019s day, marine ecologist Courtney Greiner walks the shore of a rocky Washington beach at low tide with a handful of staff and interns. They stake out the ground and hunch down, digging up the top two inches of mud, silt, and gravel looking for baby clams.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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For thousands of years, the indigenous peoples of the West Coast would build rock walls at the low tide line, allowing sand to pile up behind them, making the slope of the beach gentler, and expanding the area of the intertidal zone that clams like to call home. These simple\u00a0clam gardens<\/a>\u00a0are effective at boosting shellfish numbers, and have long been used to improve food security for traditional peoples.<\/p>\n

Now the Swinomish are reviving the old idea to build the\u00a0first modern<\/a>\u00a0clam garden in the United States. Greiner, who works for the Swinomish tribe, is collecting the data that will help the tribe determine the garden\u2019s best location. The project aims to boost clam numbers, providing both a sense of purpose for the community and additional food as other resources, like salmon, decline.<\/p>\n

This is just part of the Swinomish\u2019s plan to ensure the ongoing prosperity of their people in the face of a changing climate. \u201cThey were the first native community \u2014 and really one of the first communities, period \u2014 to make climate adaptation a priority,\u201d says Meade Krosby, a conservation biologist with the University of Washington\u2019s\u00a0Climate Impacts Group.<\/a>\u00a0The tribe\u2019s climate proclamation came out in 2007, and their action plan, published in 2010, was one of the first such documents in the United States. \u201cThey\u2019re early adopters and really innovative,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The Swinomish have already launched projects aimed at helping the community adapt to a shifting climate in the Pacific Northwest. To protect salmon runs, the tribe is working on the Skagit River to create better spawning beds and is planting trees to provide shade and reduce river temperatures. In addition, the tribe is fighting to\u00a0block mining operations<\/a>\u00a0in the headwaters of the Skagit in British Columbia, which could impact waters downstream.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cTribes have always been adapting to climate change \u2014 now we have to adapt even faster,\u201d says one Navajo leader.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Another project aims to restore a healthy population of native Olympia oysters, long threatened by pollution and crowding out by competitive Pacific oysters and now impacted by ocean acidification. Workers have brought in truckloads of oyster shells and dumped them on beaches to provide new homes for\u00a0imported natives<\/a>; the imports grow well, says Greiner, but so far have yet to produce a next generation of shellfish. \u201cIt\u2019s a learning process,\u201d she says. A site for the first clam garden should be chosen by next year. And a wetlands project is documenting the local\u00a0plants<\/a>\u00a0that have ecological and cultural importance to the Swinomish, as part of efforts to better manage the changing coast for\u00a0salmon and farmers<\/a>\u00a0alike.<\/p>\n

Across North America, other indigenous communities are stepping up to formulate and enact climate action plans to protect their way of life. In 2019, the\u00a0Karuk tribe<\/a>\u00a0of northern California released its climate adaptation plan with a recommendation to return to prescribed burning, an old idea that might\u00a0help to ease<\/a>\u00a0California\u2019s wildfire problems. The Tulalip tribes of Washington state are relocating\u00a0nuisance beavers<\/a>\u00a0from urban areas back to traditional watersheds to help lower river temperatures and aid salmon populations; they are also redirecting agricultural runoff for\u00a0electricity generation<\/a>. The Jamestown S\u2019Klallam tribe in Washington is\u00a0removing invasive butterfly bushes<\/a>\u00a0from the banks of the Dungeness River to help protect its salmon. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana are gathering and planting seedlings of the whitebark pine that are more resistant to warming-related diseases such as blister rust. Alaskan tribes are using microscopy to identify\u00a0harmful algae blooms<\/a>\u00a0spurred by warming waters. The\u00a0list<\/a>\u00a0goes on.<\/p>\n

\u201cIndigenous peoples have always been on the front lines,\u201d says Nikki Cooley, who grew up without electricity or running water on the Navajo Nation reservation and now co-manages the\u00a0Tribes and Climate Change Program<\/a>\u00a0for the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP) in Flagstaff, Arizona. \u201cTribes have always been adapting to climate change. Now we have to adapt even faster.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Tribal program manager Mike Durglo Jr. examines what remains of a 2,000-year-old whitebark pine on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, where trees are dying from warming-related diseases. CHIP SOMODEVILLA\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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As Krosby puts it, indigenous peoples \u201chave unique connections to the land and are feeling impacts the earliest and most severely.\u201d One study found that coastal indigenous communities eat\u00a015 times as much<\/a>\u00a0seafood as non-indigenous people in the same country \u2014 food that is being heavily impacted by everything from pollution to\u00a0warming waters<\/a>\u00a0and ocean acidification. In the far north, buildings are collapsing and indigenous communities relocating as\u00a0permafrost thaws<\/a>, and traditional practices like\u00a0reindeer herding<\/a>\u00a0are being threatened as winter snow changes to freezing rain, which locks up winter forage like lichens under ice.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s happening all over the world,\u201d says Brian Cladoosby, chairman of the Swinomish tribal community. \u201cI have seen an elder standing on their cemetery in [the Pacific island nation of] Tuvalu and it was covered with water \u2014 they can\u2019t bury their people there anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are communities that have relied on the land for generations, building an intimate knowledge of the natural cycles of plants, animals, and weather. Unlike the traditional Western worldview that humanity can and should seek dominion over the environment, indigenous populations tend to view humanity as part of an\u00a0interconnected whole<\/a>. \u201cWe knew if we impacted one part of the web, the whole thing could fall apart,\u201d says Cladoosby.<\/p>\n

Adds Cooley, \u201cWe put our non-human relatives first, meaning the trees, the sky, the water. We don\u2019t treat them as objects to be studied in a lab. We revere them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Indigenous communities tend to think many generations ahead when planning how to utilize resources.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n