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“The Animals Are Going Crazy!”
Years before An Inconvenient Truth, the Internet sounded the alarm for those of us who talk to Inuit or Athabascan Indians.
Animals, they said, were turning up in the wrong places or at the wrong times or failing to turn up at all. For people who still practice subsistence hunting, such things are hard not to notice. Later, buildings situated on the permafrost began to lose their perma — everything from cracking walls to entire buildings sliding downhill.
I took the remarks about the animals seriously. My grandmother used to say that the chickens were better fixed to warn us of an approaching tornado than the weathermen on the Tulsa TV stations. While I no longer keep chickens, I think she had a point. Animals seem to know a lot more about the weather than most modern human beings are equipped to learn from them.
It was based on alarms from other species in the frozen north I applied to learn enough to speak in terms the settlers would take to be more credible. I got picked for one of Al Gore’s early classes in Nashville to go out and show the slides that were continuously updated since An Inconvenient Truth.
I threw in with the scientific method as a youth and I’ve never backed off it as a method of policy analysis. My academic…
