In Alaska, climate change isn’t abstract. It’s personal. As a woman and a mother, I wanted to know how other women were thinking about the dramatic changes we’re seeing around us. For women in Alaska, warming temperatures shape how we think about our lives, families, work, identities, and futures. Over the course of a year, I spoke with mothers, grandmothers, Native elders, commercial fishermen, scientists, firefighters and other women whose lives are altered by climate change.

These aren’t stories of disappearing glaciers or houses toppling into the sea. These are the quieter narratives—the ones that don’t often grab the headlines—about the ways in which climate change is eroding how people live in the largest state.

This essay appears in the Spring 2018 issue of The American Scholar alongside beautiful photographs by Anchorage-based photographer Ash Adams.

Read it here.