Bellingham is barely out of view when I realize Global Warming has arrived in Alaska. “Our first winter was cold, but I knew it was not that cold,” the young man in a frayed baseball cap says. He, his wife and six-year-old son had been living in a remote village on the Bering Sea, just south of the...

It is a strange, white world. There are only the most basic of elements: ice, rock, sky, weather, man, dog, food and shit. It is a completely artificial place set in geologic time where the pulse rarely quickens, and cruise ship tourists believe to know what it is like to ride a dog sled in the great...