Understanding the environment and reducing humans’ deleterious effects on the environment are needed areas of attention the world over.
However, as a relatively undeveloped land, Alaska is unique as a place where large predators have not been systematically eliminated and also where large tracts of land have not been systematically converted to agriculture or been unsystematically urbanized.
The land offers an opportunity to examine how development and nature might interact in ways that aren’t prohibitive and destructive to each, respectively.
Today, this must be done in a setting that is full of unknown, emergent pitfalls: unprecedented rates transition among plant communities, record setting insect outbreaks, rates of climate warming unseen at lower latitudes, and the possibility of unprecedented industrial and military activity in the Arctic as northern sea ice diminishes, to mention on a few.
More than ever, science in Alaska is of extreme importance in understanding change and the potential effects of that change.
Society can no longer see northern lands and waters as “frozen wastes” with little or no function. Northern lands have large impacts on global ecology through meteorological, oceanographic, and biologic phenomena that are unique to high latitudes. As climate change disproportionately affects Alaska and its northern neighbors, the pace of development, indeed already high paced, will quicken. Well educated, well trained, and professionally devoted environmental scientists will be needed to help govern that development, lest the important ecological functions of the North become irreparably altered.