Race, Gender & Class: Volume 19, Number 1-2, 2012 (177-179) Race, Gender & Class Website: www.rgc.uno.edu BOOK REVIEWS KIVALINA: A CLIMATE CHANGE STORY Christine Shearer (2011). Haymarket Books, 199 pages, $16, ISBN 9781608461288 Reviewed by Tracy Perkins* I n my experience Americans who worry about the effects of climate change tend to think about how it impacts plants and animals, how it could affect the lives of their children, or perhaps how it is already threatening distant peoples in other countries. Christine Shearer’s recent book, “Kivalina: A Climate Change Story” (2011) brings climate change dramatically into the here and now through the story of a native village in Alaska. The Inupiat residents of Kivalina live on a narrow barrier reef that is washing away from under them, threatening both their town buildings and cultural traditions. The connection to climate change? Kivalina’s shores have traditionally been protected from storm surges by the sea ice that surrounds the island for much of the year. Warming temperatures have caused the sea ice to form for shorter and shorter periods, leaving the island increasingly vulnerable to heavy waves and erosion during winter storms. Shearer writes that the town has lost 100 feet of coastline since 2004. Since the island is only one-quarter mile wide at its widest spot, every 100 feet counts. Sometimes the erosion happens quickly. In one case a single storm eroded away 70 feet of coastline, so the residents live in a state of “constant alert” (p. 14). The town has already been declared a disaster area after a 2005 storm and in 2007 its residents were temporarily evacuated from the island. Shearer’s short book is written largely for the general public, and is an important contribution to helping U.S. residents understand that people on our shores are already feeling the impacts of climate change. But, it is not a story with a happy ending. Kivalina residents voted to relocate their town in 1992, and close to 19 years later they still remain on their ever-thinner island. Shearer writes that several government agencies have reported on the impacts of climate change in Alaska and the necessity of relocating Kivalina to safer ground, but by the end of