Alaska's Indigenous Episcopalians Revisited

One of my summer projects will be to finish the essay I started on Alaska's Gwich'in people, the caribous and ecosystems they struggle to continue to subsist on, the Episcopal Church in Alaska and our greed for oil. As I scour the internet to get up to date on developments in Alaska oil and gas industries, the role of the unapologetically colonialist Alaska government, and the compromised role of the Alaska Native Corporations who were tied into the capitalist for-profit model in the the early seventies, and the rising and falling of the legal fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, my mood darkens. The complexity of the issues, the ambiguity of so many groups and people involved in these issues seems impossible to cut through to come to some clarity. Here is a summary of the Status of Alaska Natives from the University of Alaska, Anchorage (2004. 20pp PRF exec. summary).
So it comes in handy that my current gym reading (while treading away on the elliptical trainer) is Jon Kabat-Zinn's Coming to Our Senses, a helpful reframing of mediation and mindfulness (i.e. finally getting it our power to affect change is primarily located in changing ourselves and not other people, organizations, churches, religions, governments, God, etcetc...). A reminder of the limits of our own agency. I suppose remembering this might help us not to go crazy as we watch and experience that we have the tools and technologies to stop global warming, the political will is missing, partly also because we ourselves are way too invested in keeping things the way they are... The latter being basically my summary version of the gist of Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Oh, and yes, in case you were wondering, Kabat-Zinn seems to be related, somehow, to Howard Zinn, he lists him in his acknowledgements.
Anyways, thanks to a grant from the Wabash Center, I will be able to visit Episcopalians and Gwich'in this summer for ca. a week to help me finish the essay I am writing. The picture above shows me and Alaska EpiscopalBishop Mark MacDonald during a trip to Arctic Village in Summer 2004. We joined villagers on the lookout for the migrating caribou. They were late that summer, and as the climate change most immediately affects the arctic, their lives may be changed drastically. Just last sunday, the LA Times reported how dramatically the Greenland Ice Sheet is melting, a fact that could change Atlantic currents and seasons for the adjacent countries dramatically. Stories and evidence from the Arctic in Alaska only adds to the evidence. A few months after I visited Bishop Mark and his family in their home the house was so irreparably warped due to melting of the permafrost that they had to abandon their house and move into the diocesan headquarters.
As a theologian it seems a huge task to consider such an enormous drastic change in history as we fear will occur. The apocalyptic scenarios just keep piling up, not divinely ordained, but human-made... What does this mean for how we understand divine agency and our own? Stay tuned...