Bob Gough: Indigenous people most affected by climate change

With little responsibility for causing the problems, and with few of the benefits of modern industrialization, the planet's Indigenous Peoples, and especially those still critically dependent on subsistence harvests from intact habitats, are the first and worst hit by weather extremes and trending climate impacts. Native Peoples have become keenly aware of the need again to adapt to the changes now upon us. In the Pacific, Native nations are leaving their tropical island homes and migrating to purchased tracts of lands in foreign countries, as distinct nations.

From the Alaskan Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, indigenous American communities brace to relocate to higher ground as communities. In Louisiana, tribal bayous are subsiding from oil and gas extraction as salt water encroaches from rising seas. We loose land equal to three dozen football fields a day!

Native leaders have noted: "As talking heads waste time debating the existence of climate change, coastal and indigenous communities like Isle de Jean Charles are creating solutions to the very real problems that millions of coastal U.S. residents are beginning to face."

Indigenous peoples worldwide face these challenges less as climate refugees, and increasingly in a collective process of immigration with dignity, less as the 'canary in the mine' and more as the indigenous scouts and native navigators in a new era of an anxious global Anthropocene!