This summer, Alaska was once again under a heat advisory, following its first ever such notice, issued by the US National Weather Service, in June 2025. The Arctic region can often feel distant, disconnected, and isolated, but it accounts for about 20% of Earth’s land surface; Alaska itself is twice the size of Texas. Through what is known as arctic amplification, the climate crisis is causing Alaska to heat at twice the rate as the rest of the US.

Alaska is home to nearly 750,000 people, more than 15% of whom are Indigenous – the largest proportion of Indigenous People in the United States. Alaskans, especially Indigenous Alaskans, are disproportionately feeling climate impacts and being left out of important conversations as they pick up the pieces.

At the same time, since returning to office, the Trump administration has issued many executive orders removing safeguards and dismantling climate measures (pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, for example). They have simultaneously doubled down on their commitment to burning more fossil fuels, while intensifying extraction, including fossil fuel extraction within Alaska itself, further compounding climate impacts.

Despite Alaska’s reputation as an isolated place, accelerating feedback loops of extractive harm and climate crisis reveal this isolation to be an illusion. Alaska is deeply interconnected – every Alaskan person, animal, and ecosystem feels the impact of decisions made beyond, and what happens there is, in turn, already impacting us all.

Warmer Winters, Scorching Summers

Ayona-Reily Dixon, who is Inupiat, lives in Alaska’s Arctic desert – traditionally a dry area. She explains that the weather is changing year round: ‘I remember growing up it used to be weeks of -40, -50°F. I think last winter it didn't even get to -40° for long. The climate is changing very rapidly and with that we've also been getting these crazy rainstorms in the middle of the winter.’

Warmer winters then lay the groundwork for more dangerous summers. Sue Mauger, Science & Executive Director at Cook Inletkeeper, noted that ‘this year, we're having an incredibly low snow year, and they've actually started the fire season two weeks earlier because there's so little snow cover and we have a lot of dead grasses that spark super easily.’ 2.5 times more acres of land burned from 2000-2020 than from 1980-2000. Forest fires and permafrost melt then not only damage the wild landscapes and rich, diverse ecosystems that Alaska is famous for, but also release even more trapped carbon and methane into the atmosphere. Alaska holds more than half of the United States’ stored carbon. The release of this stored carbon creates a prominent feedback loop, continuing the vicious cycle of the global climate crisis, and further flying in the face of Alaska’s perceived isolation.

Alaskans Feel The Heat

All Alaskans are feeling the impacts of arctic amplification. Emma Charlton explains that winter oscillations from wet to freezing weather ‘impacts driving, safety for unhoused people, heating, and water’. Dixon agrees: ‘I live in a yurt. It's a lattice frame and it has beams on the front and on the top and a skylight. I'm worried every time we get heavy rainfall and freezing rain that the roof is going to collapse.’

In the past, federal funding has helped things like rebuilding and reinforcing homes and infrastructure. However, $350 million of that has been frozen by the Trump administration, putting these plans on hold. Money sent to Alaskan governments in 2022 made up less than 1% of all federal government transfers to states.

Come summer, wildfire smoke is putting people’s health at risk. Dixon explains that ‘there are so many who live in small villages, who live out there where nobody's there to protect them, and there's no town infrastructure to stop fires there. In 2025, wildfires got within 25 miles of town. The air quality index got to the 600 to 700 range, which is toxic, and will kill you eventually, and many of the people who are impacted by that are the homeless people who don't have anywhere to go. There were many people who died just down the streets and it was really awful. That's not going to get any better unless we take action.” 

People and Nature: Alaska’s Deep Interrelations

Human and non-human lives are always intertwined. Yet in Alaska – especially with a large Indigenous population who have a long history of deep connection with the abundant ecosystem – these interconnections are especially visible, and vulnerable.

Moose, for example, are a huge part of Alaskan diets. Here too, Dixon is feeling climate impacts: ‘The moose come into town more in the winter because it's easier to move around, but what happens when we get these rainstorms is there's a big crust of ice, and they end up breaking their legs and dying.’ As plants die out, moose are moving farther north to access food and safer conditions. One big change to the food chain can stress a whole ecosystem and throw everything out of whack.

Salmon populations have been declining as well – 81% below the recent 30-year mean in the Yukon River back in 2022. Those that are left tend to be smaller in size. Mauger, who has studied Alaskan Salmon for decades, explains that salmon are relatively happy swimming in streams up to about 55 degrees, but recently she’s been measuring stream temperatures above 80 degrees and populations have been dropping as a result.

‘In western Alaska, in places like the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, there are huge systems of native villages, and managing the subsistence resource, the fish that are headed upstream has to be done in a very equitable way. If the first village takes all the fish, it impacts everybody else. If all the people on the Yukon in the US take all the fish, then the upper stretches of the Yukon in British Columbia really suffer… we're looking at the end of culture in these places. I don't think that people who don't live in Alaska can really understand the depth and the connection to salmon in these communities. The loss of those fish is a loss of culture, a loss of connection, a loss of hope.’

Rising Resource Extraction

In the midst of this deepening climate crisis, Alaska continues to be treated as a resource. The Trump Administration has greenlit accelerated large-scale development of natural resources in Alaska via another executive order. Unfortunately this extraction continues an existing trend. For decades, Indigenous People have been displaced and disregarded as projects like Ambler Road, the Willow Project, and the Pebble Mine are stuck in limbo.

This activity puts more stress on the environment, further exacerbating climate impacts. Jennifer Watts, Arctic Program Director at Woodwell Climate Research Center, uses remote sensing to look at the stress put on plants due to climate change. Watts emphasizes that ‘in these very sensitive permafrost regions any disturbance will kind of set off a local chain reaction. You have a lot of ground heating, you have melt of ice, you have land collapse. All of this of course exacerbates climate feedback loops concerning permafrost melt. Once it happens, they probably won't reestablish; there's too many stressors and they're changing too quickly. They're already facing climate change, so anything in addition to that is kind of like making it reach a tipping point.’

Right-Relationship In An Era of Extraction

Indigenous Alaskans are taught to be highly aware of the way that they relate to the land. Dixon explains: ‘Mom taught me that you have to respect the land, and it respects you. You support it and it supports you. It's like a reciprocal relationship. Gathering was and is a super important part of my life and gardening and just being outdoors is very prevalent and important, and that's reflected through pretty much all the Indigenous people I know. It's kind of a stereotype at this point, but it's true.

Today, with Alaska so often framed as distant and isolated, a focus on interrelation and maintaining healthier, balanced, reciprocal relationships could not be more important. It is not just that Alaska’s land, its people, and its more-than-human life are interconnected, but that they are intimately connected to the rest of the world too, not least through the carbon cycle. As Watt explains: ‘I think that a lot of times we're short sighted in how we operate. It's complicated. Anything that you do that impacts how Earth functions. It leads to a lot of complex reactions, and a lot of those are long term. So I think, as humans, we would benefit to try to live more closely with our environment and to live together with nature instead of working against nature, because ultimately it only comes and works against us in the end.’

The Trump administration’s executive orders make it clear that they do not value the land – and in turn, the people – but view them as resources for the taking. Rather than focus on Alaska’s deep interconnections, they treat it as a convenient ‘sacrifice zone’ – out of sight and out of mind. In Sue Mauger's words: ‘if your worldview is one of transactional relationships then your ability to be compassionate about impacts on a generational scale just doesn’t exist. We’re in a world of hurt and the Trump administration is going to exacerbate that and put Alaska on a trajectory that is going to harm people, stall out small businesses, and irrevocably change our landscape. Four years doesn't sound like a long time but this four year period is happening at just the wrong time for our climate story.’