Editor’s Desk: What happens when a species collapses

By Samuel Fromartz

In our latest story, Alaskan writer Julia O’Malley takes us to St. Paul Island, 600 miles west of Anchorage in the Bering Sea, to explore what happened when billions of crabs vanished. The crab industry had supported the island economy, but with climate change the crustacean suffered a historic collapse. “I was traveling there to find out what the villagers might do next,” O’Malley says in the story, produced in collaboration with Grist.

“In the last few years,” she writes, “I’ve seen disruptions to economies and food systems, as well as fires, floods, landslides, storms, coastal erosion, and changes to river ice — all escalating at a pace that’s hard to process. Increasingly, my stories veer from science and economics into the fundamental ability of Alaskans to keep living in rural places.

“You can’t separate how people understand themselves in Alaska from the landscape and animals. The idea of abandoning long-occupied places echoes deep into identity and history. I’m convinced the questions Alaskans are grappling with — whether to stay in a place and what to hold onto if they can’t — will eventually face everyone.”

Those questions echo loudly on St. Paul, a community that played a crucial role in the history of Indigenous people in the region. Now, with climate change and the collapse of a species, that history is changing again.

We hope you read this fascinating story, which includes beautiful photographs by Nathaniel Wilder. Needless to say, it cost thousands of dollars to send a writer and photographer to St. Paul to get a story many journalists had only covered from a distance. Now, in the midst of our mid-year fundraising campaign, we hope you will consider supporting this kind of work. Your support is crucial.