Environment

More than 90 percent of households in Bethel use heating oil to keep warm, according to census data. But a lot of people supplement with wood, even though there are no trees on the tundra. And then there's Jeff Sanders, who exclusively heats his 3,000 square foot home in Bethel with wood he scavenges around town. Sanders says that he hasn't used heating fuel since 1974.

Once again, Bethel hosted a meeting on how climate change is affecting the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Bethel hosts a lot of these meetings. Many say the same things: temperatures are warming and the weather, land, and life is changing. The latest group on the scene hopes to advance this conversation by developing a plan to work with those who live in the region to find and implement ways to adapt and protect its resources.

The Kuskokwim River now has its longest ice road ever in a year when people thought there might not be any ice road at all. As of this weekend, the graded, marked road stretches 200 miles from Bethel upstream to Crooked Creek. The project has involved almost a dozen tribes, working together across months.

It’s clickbait, for sure. A recent Facebook video shows two men helping a baby moose cross a frozen river; it was filmed last weekend on the Middle Kuskokwim. The sight is touching, but the incident presents another example of how the warm winter is changing the river.