All over the Alaskan interior, people in remote villages are reporting sudden changes. Around Huslia, a small Athabaskan Indian village 300km west of Fairbanks, entire lakes have disappeared. I visited the village to see for myself. From the air, Huslia was just a little grey airstrip and a few dozen cabins. That evening, I went for a walk. Demolishing my assumptions about Indian villages, modernity was everywhere - televisions flickered inside most of the houses, and on a makeshift basketball court two wiry teenagers were sliding about on the ice, taking turns shooting the ball. Like other kids I'd seen elsewhere in the US, they wore baggy jeans and sneakers, and moved with a disinterested, thoroughly urban cool.
Although village life looked relaxed enough, the relationship between modernity and traditional lifestyles is never easy - in Huslia as in other Native villages across Alaska and the US generally. The Koyukon Indian language - part of the Athabaskan language group that includes the Apache and Navajo as far south as Arizona and California - is dying. Alcoholism is a huge problem, even in "dry" villages such as Huslia, and several recent teenage suicides have shaken the community's confidence to the core. No summary can explain the social crisis underlying this kind of tragic behaviour, but loss of culture is surely a central problem, contributing as it does to the breakdown of community values and roles, alienation, loneliness and poor self-esteem.
In a way, these wider cultural changes ran parallel to changes in the surrounding environment. In the past, people derived meaning from the regular progression of the seasons - from the migration of the caribou to the first appearance of the salmon in early summer. These rhythms, and the subsistence lifestyle, explained the world and made the people feel part of it. But now the salmon sometimes failed to appear on time. Hungry bears were ranging closer to the village. Willow trees were springing up where there used to be standing water, and most of the beavers had disappeared. The world was unravelling.
Next day I was riding a snow machine, trying to keep up with Harold "Farmer" Vent, a Huslia old timer and councillor. Abruptly, he drew to a halt. "This is it," he announced. We were in a large bowl-shaped area, a kilometre or so across. Much of the snow had melted, leaving dusty grass and a tangled mat of dried-up pond weed. It was only then that I realised, with a jolt, that this had once been a lake. "The water's just draining out," Farmer said. "I don't know where it's going." The area around Huslia used to be covered with lakes; now they fill up with water in spring and then it all drains away. I asked what difference it made to the animals. He shook his head sadly. "Ducks, beaver, muskrat ... We used to shoot muskrat off this hill right here, but everything is drying out, so we can't get nothing. With beaver it's the same thing. They're all moving someplace, I don't know where." We stood in silence as Farmer stared at the ground. "Every year it's getting harder and harder to live up here."
The total area of Arctic sea ice is diminishing rapidly: satellite data shows an area one and a half times the size of Wales is lost every year. This reduction is bad news for marine life. Walruses, for example, need sea ice thick enough to hold their weight but in shallow enough water to allow them to dive and feed on the sea bottom. Similarly, ringed seals depend on sea ice as a habitat for pupping, moulting, foraging and resting.
The melting permafrost and the disappearance of sea ice are a disaster for Alaska's people, wildlife and natural heritage. So who is to blame? Partially - and here lies the irony - the chain of causation leads straight back to Alaska itself. Oil extraction has dominated Alaskan industry for more than 20 years, and this oil has been contributing directly to rising temperatures through the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere during its combustion.
You'd be hard pressed, however, to find anyone in Alaska prepared to admit this. With 80% of state revenues coming from royalties paid by drilling companies, and many of the highest-paying and most reliable jobs based on extraction and oilfield services, no one wants to rock the boat. Oil money has poured into the coffers of state politicians, with both Democrats and Republicans competing to offer the industry tax breaks and incentives. And ordinary Alaskans benefit, too - every year, every state citizen, from the oldest grandad to the youngest baby, gets a payout from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which now totals more than $20bn, collected from decades of oil company royalties. In 2002, the dividend cheque came to $1,500, free money for everyone, and a convincing reminder of the rewards paid by Big Oil.
Many articulate environmentalists have found a place in Alaska, but they are marginalised and vilified by the political establishment. Greenpeace ran a long battle against a new BP offshore facility in the Prudhoe Bay area in the late 1990s, but was practically run out of town by a coalition of local Eskimos and oil drillers. More recently, the debate about whether the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should be opened up for oil extraction has polarised the situation still further. Although polls show that most Americans want the refuge protected, Alaskan politicians almost unanimously demand it be opened up. The coastal plain of the refuge, under which somewhere between 2bn and 10bn barrels of oil are thought to lie, has been called "America's Serengeti". According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, it is vital for the caribou, golden eagles, snow geese, polar bears, lynx, musk-oxen, arctic foxes, wolverines, grizzlies and countless other species.
None of this concern cuts any ice with Alaskan businessmen or politicians. Indeed, a well-funded lobbying group in Anchorage called Arctic Power exists expressly to campaign for opening up the Refuge. Looking for the oil driller's view of the situation, I visited Arctic Power's offices. The director Cam Toohey, born and raised in an Alaskan fishing community, was personable and chatty, and wore a perpetual smile - until I asked him about global warming. "Well, you have to understand that 10,000 years ago we were in an ice age." I should therefore realise, he informed me, that climate changes were natural and happened all the time.
"Yes, but do you accept that the human-enhanced greenhouse effect is currently underway and having an impact in Alaska?"
"Well, I think the jury's still out about how much of a contribution the public has made to the greenhouse effect in their consumption of fossil fuels. No one has determined that we can stop consuming fossil fuels today and still have a healthy environment and a healthy economy ... " In the meantime, he concluded, it was better to drill for oil on home territory than to depend on unstable dictatorships in the Middle East. So the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge had to be prised open. Toohey was clearly no dummy - yet there was no sign of doubt, nor any suggestion that precaution might be a good policy given the potential magnitude of climate change. There was no alternative, he had said. Economic development must march forward, whatever the weather.
Since I conducted that interview, Toohey has been appointed by the Bush administration's Interior Secretary, Gale Norton, as her special assistant for Alaska. During the first 90 days of his new role, legislation was proposed to allow increased numbers of tourist cruise ships back into the fragile Glacier Bay, despite an earlier decision to restrict their numbers on environmental grounds; Clinton-era mining restrictions were put under review; new oil-drilling leases were proposed in offshore Alaskan waters; and, of course, he continued working to achieve his lifetime ambition of opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Having had my first lesson in the oil industry mindset, I felt it was time to visit the heart of the beast - Prudhoe Bay itself, located on the northern Arctic Ocean coast of Alaska, the largest oilfield ever discovered in the western hemisphere, stuck out in the freezing flat tundra of the North Slope. With the sea coast ice-bound for most of the year, the oil is transported 1,200km south to the warm-water port of Valdez via the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The scale of the development is only really apparent from the air: literally scores of drilling pads stretch along the shore of the Arctic Ocean for nearly 200km. Every drop of oil extracted eventually ends up being burned in the cars, trucks and aeroplanes that keep America's economy turning.
Most of the Prudhoe Bay area is off-limits to the public, officially for security reasons, but I was able to get in anyway thanks to the deputy manager of the local hotel, who ran his own minibus tours. As we bumped along the gravel roads, he explained the Prudhoe Bay lifestyle. Although about 1,500 people worked in the oilfields, he said, there were only 25 permanent residents. Everyone else worked shifts: two weeks on, two weeks off. On the way back we detoured via Pump Station One - the very beginning of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. There was a section cut out of the outer pipe-casing so people could put their hands in: the inner pipe was warm, like blood, and vibrated slightly as the black liquid surged away southward.
Back in the hotel I was stopped in the corridor by Max, a half-Eskimo guy, who regarded me suspiciously. "You from Greenpeace or something?" No, I was a journalist, I told him and asked him what he thought about global warming. "I think it's all hype," he snorted. "We had snow in the first week of May in Fairbanks." An older man, a policeman from Barrow, joined in. "Global warming don't come from here, it comes from Chicago, New York, where all the emissions are." He jabbed his finger forcefully. "The whole world depends on oil, so why are we always the bad guys?"
Like most outsiders, I have long been conditioned to think that indigenous people usually fight against the oil industry, so finding out that the North Slope Eskimo communities were some of the industry's strongest supporters came as a shock. As the mayor, George Ahmaogak, puts it in a glossy brochure: "North Slope oil has already provided immense benefits to our people and to our country. Well-meaning Americans crusading against Coastal Plain development would deny us our only opportunity for jobs - jobs providing a comfortable standard of living for the first time in our history."
It was time to visit one of the closest Native settlements to Prudhoe Bay, and the only human habitation within the boundaries of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - the Inupiat Eskimo village of Kaktovik. At first sight, it was clear that the oil industry had done well for the people in the area. Many of the houses had pick-up trucks as well as snow machines. There was proper water and sanitation, too - something which Shishmaref had notably lacked. Oil money had also brought the village a high school, a fire station, a police department, a community centre, a water plant and a power plant.
Many of the young men and women of Kaktovik work in Native-owned oilfield contracting companies As I talked to people, I rapidly got the impression that not even the elders felt nostalgic for the days when the Eskimos had lived entirely off the land. It had been a difficult existence: life expectancy had been much lower, and during the worst winters whole families had starved to death. That's not to say that the subsistence aspect of daily life has been completely ditched: Kaktovik's annual whale hunt, carried out by the men in a flotilla of small boats, is the year's social high-point, and caribou, seals and fish are still vital parts of people's diet and culture. In fact, this conscious dependence on a clean sea leads to the one area the Eskimos do stand up and oppose the oil industry - in its moves towards offshore drilling. A spill under the ice would be nearly impossible to clean up, and would spell disaster for fish, whales and seals alike.
I was invited to a family house. Jack Kayotuk was slicing up squares of beluga whale blubber in a bucket, a delicacy known as muktuk. "Yep, it's mighty fine tasting stuff," he said, as I chewed some of it. It tasted like fishy rubber, fatty and impossibly rich. "I've never been south of the Arctic Circle," Kayotuk told me with a grin. "It gets too damn hot down there." I asked if he supported the oil industry. "Yeah, and I'd like to see oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, too. I think it would be all right for Alaska and for this town. It would give us all the jobs we need." He mentioned how high the cost of living was in communities where everything had to be flown in.
I had expected Kaktovik to be hostile and bleak because of the oil connection, but it was just as warm and welcoming as the other Native villages. Another thing that impressed me was the concern the Inupiat Eskimos had for their local wildlife. Everyone in Kaktovik is obsessed with polar bears. People don't seem to shoot them as they do in Shishmaref - instead they drive to the end of the airstrip, where the whalebone dump is, and sit in their pick-up trucks to watch entranced while the huge bears lumber around sniffing for any bits of remaining meat.
There are only 20,000 polar bears left in the world, and on my last evening in Kaktovik I was keen to see one in the wild. Travelling to the end of the airstrip with a local hunting guide called Robert Thompson, we circled the whalebone dump, but it was empty. We travelled east, to a spit of land where the sea ice had piled up high against the beach, making a ridge about 20 feet high. Thompson stopped the snow machine and dismounted, moving gingerly forward, revolver cocked. "Sometimes they can come straight at you from behind these ice mounds," he told me. "I don't want to take any chances."
It was well after midnight, and the sky was cloudy, with a strange reddish light. The wind was bitter, blowing spindrift between the mounds of ice. "There's no one between here and the North Pole," muttered Thompson, as he scanned the horizon with binoculars. Then I saw it - a distinct yellow dot moving in the distance. "There!" Thompson whipped round. "Oh yeah, I got him. Quick - let's go closer." We leapt back on to the snow machine and headed north. Suddenly the bear popped up right in front of us, and then - startled by the noise of the engine - quickly loped off. It stopped again 200m away, the black dots of its eyes and nose among the yellow fur clearly visible to the naked eye. It yawned and lay down for a while, before lumbering off again at a surprisingly fast rate towards Kaktovik.
I felt immensely privileged to have seen a polar bear - the more so because of how threatened these beautiful animals are going to become. With temperatures rising ever faster and sea ice coverage shrinking fast, polar bears - together with other ice-dependent animals like seals, walruses and belugas - are going to be squeezed on to a smaller and smaller remnant of floating polar ice during 21st-century summers. Once that perennial ice disappears for ever - as it is likely to do within the next hundred years, according to the latest predictions - the entire Arctic marine ecosystem, as we currently know it, will be destroyed. The frozen North Pole will cease to exist, leaving open water at the top of the Earth. The polar bears will have nowhere left to go, and their extinction is near certain.
Time is running out, too, for the land areas of the Arctic. With 21st-century warming predicted as high as a staggering 10¡C, much of the remaining permafrost is likely to thaw - further damaging forests, houses, roads and other infrastructure, and raising the spectre of massive releases of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane from bogland hitherto inert and frozen. The bitterest irony is that an overwhelming majority of state residents still seem deadset on pumping out their fossil fuel reserves for as long as the oil keeps flowing - whatever the eventual cost to their climate.
This dissonance shows how difficult it is to tackle societal denial based on wilful ignorance and self-interest. But it also illustrates the wider struggle that modern civilisation in general is going to face if it is to change its ways in time to head off the worst of the looming catastrophe that lies ahead.
In this sense, the dilemma facing the residents of America's largest and most northerly state is one which faces all of us, each time we boil a kettle, switch on a light, drive a car, or vote. It's not unique to Kaktovik, Fairbanks or Anchorage. In this modern, interconnected, energy-hungry world, we are all Alaskans
· This is an edited extract from High Tide: News From A Warming World, by Mark Lynas, published on March 1 by Flamingo at £16.99. To order a copy for £14.99, plus UK p&p, call 0870 066 7979.
