Alaska Voices: Recent Episodes
Alaska Voices
"I've seen an artistry come out of Alaska, it has changed, the way in which we've articulated in which our resources are important to us and how we've done that through art, and other type of expression, that makes me really hopeful." - Davin Holen
“An actual inch of rain between November and March had only happened one other time in the climate record.” - Eric Stevens
“We landed and when we landed the basin was finishing draining. So the glacier ice where we landed was still settling and cracking, it was very disconcerting.” - Eran Hood
“We asked them if they could tailor their models from the Martian landscape to Earth permafrost landscapes and from there we developed some early calculations of impacts of climate change on permafrost.” - Cathy Wilson
“Once we destroy those natural areas it's very difficult to get them back.” - Emily Fort
“Creating doesn't have to be a scary thing where you have to go into your special corner and turn a light on and turn the world off and think about how awful life is.” - Rebecca Lawhorne
“Droughts and floods I think are the particular climate events that I think we'd be most concerned about.” - John Walsh
“Venetie at one time in the 40s and 50s was a major gardening center and they would trade potatoes and carrots, things like that, they would go down and trade for salmon on the Yukon and supply vegetables and such for the steam boats.” - Lance Whitwell
“I'd spent all of my time learning about cultures around the world and I didn't know anything about the cultures of my own state or the area that I lived in.” - Davin Holen
“And I think positive self talk is the kindest thing you can do to yourself. Being able to say 'It's OK, it takes time.' You know what you need to do, so why not start?” - Dina Abdel-Fattah
“If all my legacy is that I have produced one scientist, that's enough for me.” - Elena Sparrow
Alaska Voices is back March 15 with new episodes. Project leads Jessie Robertson and Bob Bolton also give a quick update on future Alaska Voices recordings.
The first season of Alaska Voices is coming to a close. Stay tuned for updates on future developments as we explore what comes next for the project. Thank you to our contributors, organizers, and listeners for all of your support.
"I was always the kid getting outside and getting lost and grimy and playing with frogs and cutting trees."
"I think that the first thing that agencies have to acknowledge is there's an extreme power imbalance between what value we put on scientific knowledge and what value we put on local knowledge."
“I'm more and more impatient with the slow pace of science and feel like at the rate the world is changing these days, we really need to make progress.”
"As a leader you're not there to tell people what to do. You're there to support them succeeding at what they already can do best or helping them learn to do something better."
“I'm definitely interested in expanding access to nature because I do think it's really important for mental health and spirituality and physical health.”
“It's easy to be satisfied with incremental change when the incremental change is not affecting you.”
“As a mentor it's important for me to advocate for my students, especially as undergraduates you really feel like you're at the bottom and you have no power.”
“I think as humans, especially when it's in our backyard, we want to feel like we have a process, that we have ownership in that, and we have agency to make our voices heard.”
" I have to be able to be on my toes and defend all of the work that my team has done, and yet if I question any of the work any of the other teams have done, immediately I'm called in the office."
"I thought environmental science was a really good way to connect people's problems and Earth's problems and learn about the physical world yet the social science world, too."
“A lot of the male engineers were invited to go out golfing, and shooting, and I was never invited to do those things even though I was also an engineer and actually a pretty great shot.”
“The more positive side of people's brains would say oh, no, no, no, these are learning opportunities or whatever, but at some point it's actually just failure.”
"So once I found this role as a peacemaker, I was like, OK, this is my role on the team. It's not so much science, it's more communication."
"Being able to move on and feeling supported by your superiors, takes away so much of the trauma that women often experience when they try to report."
"I think the more that we talk about our differences and our full stories and how they've informed where we're at, that is how we make the community stronger for whatever we face."
"The person that owned that had no requirement to say hey there's a big ice lens under here, don't build your house there."
"Since our existence is glued together by stories and songs and language, all of our laws and everything, I have a certain way of looking at stories that the next generation won't be able to accommodate."
"It's sometimes hard to see a trend because we're living in the moment of all the ups and downs. But the sea ice is something that is really dramatic."
"When you get out to the real world the skills that you need are going to be really varied. I think that's helpful for a new generation of scientists, be aware that there's not one way to do it."
“Antarctica, it's fascinating from the scientific point of view, but you don't have a community that depends on the sea ice in Antarctica.”
"If I were in Ethiopia right now, I would be in jail already, or probably I would be killed."
"If the public who isn't a scientist knows what we do and why, then we've done good in education."
"When you lose half of your sea ice volume, in fact we've lost more than half of the volume in such a short period of time, that's something that I don't think people really anticipated."
"It's so overwhelming. The scope of problems we face in our communities, let alone climate change on an international or world level problems, sanitation issues, landfill issues"
"I told him we have a sand dune that's erupting in the middle of our airstrip and there was a tribal member who got stuck in a sinkhole."
"I feel that a lot of younger people really don't want to be faculty and don't want to be scientists because they feel very fed-up with the system. And I am really worried about that."
"There's a culture here of women, working moms, who are wanting to, outdoing each other, like, 'Well I put the baby down at 8 but I still had to stay up until 2 in the morning to finish this grant.'"
"We currently are the world leader in Arctic research. No other university, and really no other federal government around the world, does more research on the Arctic than University of Alaska Fairbanks."
"We were in Georgia, the Republic of Georgia, when they were being bombed. And all we had to eat for like six weeks straight was kasha, buckwheat."
"I started working with my high school teacher who was very, very dedicated to helping me reach this goal. She used to drive me to the university where I did the research after school everyday."
"I think what I've been focusing on is how can we take something that can spill out of people in such a negative way and make it neutral?"
"If you shoot a bear in self defense you have to take the hide and the paws and the head with you and we still had maybe two or so more weeks of floating this river."
"Their formal role in this is to make sure I don't die and my role is to make sure they experience a different part of the world that they wouldn't get to otherwise."
“My path now is to be a leader and to make conditions such that I'm encouraging other people such as yourself have those sorts of adventures”
“I want to be one of those ladies that's dirty every day and slugging through places without trails.”
"I'd say within the last 20 years maybe about 15 of those years we've seen a lot of changes in our climates with floods, erosions, fall storms."
"When we went back, again, we just listened. We didn't have any questions, we didn't have any ideas, and that space for communication grew back."
"I don't think climate change is something we should just wait off until disaster. I just think we need to be more prepped and figure out how far ahead can we get our stock up?"
"Done a little bit of everything you can imagine, from recycling pop cans to fuel spill response and contaminated site cleanups and brownfields, the whole gamut of things we can run in to in the villages."
"I feel that we all have a role at the smokehouse and that gives you some worth in your core. Like, you have a role in this family and you're important."
"First and foremost, we should be addressing our people And then addressing our scientific needs."
Alaska Voices project leads Jessie Robertson and Bob Bolton explain what led them to record dozens of conversations about Alaska and Arctic issues.
"When I went to work at the hospital, they were amazed what I can do. Elders always were glad for me to take care of them because I took care of an elder so I knew."
"Dad had been doing fieldwork for 17 years and never seen a wolverine. On my first trip out there, bam, not one but two wolverines in the wild."
"So it's been a challenge just trying to get out and teach students about what's going on with the snow pack when it doesn't really exist."
"Our children would always ask questions and say oh, why can't you say it this way? And so I realized that communication is very much a part of science."
"My mom always says this too, if you take a side profile of Randy, he looks just like a bison."