"Six hundred people in the Inuit village of Shishmaref, on a barrier island just north of the Bering Strait about 60 miles north of Nome, have been watching their village slide into the sea. Increasing storm surges have been eroding more than 23 feet from the island's shoreline each year. With a warming climate, ice no longer holds back the increasingly turbulent sea that threatens the village with destruction. Several other Native Alaskan coastal villages face the same fate. . . . This is a story worth telling and reading. Recommended."
-- "Choice"
"What can we learn from the case of a tiny Inupiaq village in remote Alaska? Anthropologist Elizabeth Marino examines this question and many others in her insightful and timely Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground. Marino adeptly explores the technical, environmental, and cultural aspects of environmental change in Shishmaref. . . . Her succinct summary of the current scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change is one of the most accessible I have read, and her policy recommendations regarding how state and federal government agencies should work with communities like Shishmaref are well grounded in both fieldwork and literature."-- "Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences"
"While journalists have publicized a great deal about Alaska Native communities, describing them with the now routine phrase, as 'miners' canaries' of climate change, there have been few ethnographic accounts that capture the on-the-ground complexity of how communities in the north are responding to climate change. Elizabeth Marino's pithy ethnography is a welcome addition to this body of literature."-- "Anthropos"