The cruise vessel with approximately 1,000 guests had anchored off Nome, too huge to squeeze into the tiny port of tundra city. Its tourists reportedly had to shimmy into significantly small boats for yet another ride to the shore.

It was 2016, and at the time, the cruise vessel Serenity was the greatest vessel to sail via the Northwest Passage.

However, as the ice of the Arctic Sea relents under the pressure of global warming and opens up the shipping lanes across the top of the world, many more tourists are venturing toward Nome — a northwest Alaska destination popular more for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and the 1898 gold rush compared to luxury travel.

The problem continues: There is no place to park the big boats. While smaller cruise vessels are capable of docking, officials mention that half of the dozen reaching this year will anchor offshore.

That is likely to transform into a $600 million+ expansion making Nome, with a population of 3,500, the nation’s first-ever deep-water Arctic port. The expansion, likely to be operational by the decade’s end, will be able to accommodate not larger cruise vessels of up to 4,000 guests but cargo vessels to deliver additional items for 60 Alaska Native villages in the region and military vessels to counter the presence of both Chinese and Russian vessels in the Arctic.

The prospect excites business owners and relevant officials in Nome. Still, it does concern others who are worried about the effect of additional tourists as well as vessel traffic on the environment and all the animals Alaska Natives are dependent on for subsistence.

The expansion aims to support the local economy and local and indigenous artists who have access to visitors and teach and share their culture and language and how they make beautiful art, stated Alice Bioff, an Inupiaq resident based in Nome.

Bioff, a tour guide, greeted the Serenity’s passengers as they returned in 2016. One of the guests admired her kuspuk, a traditional Alaska Native garment that she was wearing. A kuspuk is similar to a smock. The guest wanted to know if what she was wearing was water-resistant. It was not.

However, the interaction inspired Bioff to create her line of waterproof jackets similar to the kuspuks. She sells to locals and tourists alike from her Naataq Gear gift store, a retail spot in the post office building, where nearly 20 Alaska Native artists also offer beadwork, ivory carvings, or paintings via consignment.

Studies reflect that cruise ship passengers generally spend nearly $100 daily in Nome, Glenn Steckman, the city manager, said.

With the expansion, he has been hoping that guests on larger cruise vessels will extend their stay to experience more of the tundra and Nome, view its wild musk ox or sip a nice drink at its Board of Trade Saloon, which is 123 years old.

Climate change has made this possible.

Nome, discovered after gold had been found in 1898, has seen six of the ten warmest winters on record in this century alone. The Bering Strait shipping lanes have gotten busier since 2009.

On average, the Bering Sea ice typically reaches Nome around late November/December, two to three weeks later than it used to be 50 years ago, explained Rick Thoman, a climate expert associated with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Back in 2019, mushers in the Iditarod, who typically drive dog teams on the Bering Sea ice to the finish line in Nome, were compelled onto the beach due to open water. The ice season tends to get shorter, Thoman mentioned.

The existing port causeway was executed in the mid-1980s. The expansion will likely be done in three phases and double its size. The first part is funded by $250 million in federal infrastructure money, with an additional $175 million from the Alaska Legislature. The fieldwork is also likely to begin in 2023.

Currently, three vessels can dock simultaneously; the expanded dock can accommodate seven to 10 such ships.

Employees will dredge a new basin that is 40 feet deep, permitting large cruise vessels, cargo vessels, and all U.S. military ships except only the aircraft carriers to dock, Joy Baker, the Port Director, informed.

The expanded port is expected to become the centrepiece of the strategic infrastructure of the U.S. in the Arctic. The military has been building up its resources in Alaska, strategically placing its fighter jets at bases in Fairbanks and Anchorage, setting up a brand new Army airborne division based in Alaska, training its soldiers for cold-weather conflicts, and has missile defence abilities.

The northern seas near Alaska are starting to get more crowded. A U.S. Coast Guard patrol board has faced seven Russian and Chinese naval vessels cooperating in an exercise in 2022 approximately 86 miles north of Kiska Island, Alaska.
In 2021, coast guard vessels encountered Chinese vessels almost 50 miles off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

Last year, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s Secretary General, warned that China and Russia have pledged to extend their cooperation in the Arctic. This strategic collaboration challenges its values as well as interests.

However, the prospect of Nome wanting to welcome more tourists and increased military presence bothers some residents. An Inupiaq native, Austin Ahmasuk, said that the port’s first construction had displaced an area conventionally used for fishing or subsistence hunting, and the expansion would not help.

References: ABC News, Military Times, stltoday

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However, beyond the aesthetic appeal of the masks, which were traditionally created to represent various gods and deities during the historic annual festival, but now reflected ordinary humans, animals and common objects, Gauri was also interested in their potential for socio-political explorations of class and wealth disparity. Writing in the book, she says “When I first heard of the Bohada masks and festival, I began to wonder about the incongruity between these idealised mythic masks and the reality I saw around me. For instance, Jawhar, in Palghar district, is one of the most impoverished areas in Maharashtra… Surrounded by this precarity, I wondered why it was that the ritual masks were so extraordinary, and if the exaggerated tropes of representation were in fact inversely proportional to the routine landscape of everyday life.”

As such, Gauri became interested in the idea of using these newly created masks as a tool by which to empower this mundanity. She asked the Adivasi artists to create masks that, rather than symbolising deities, actually captured the people, animals and objects that surrounded them, as well as the emotions they experience on a day-to-day basis. And rather than performing such acts as the epic slaying of a demon — as would be the custom during the Bohada festival — asked them to reenact quotidian rituals familiar to them such as sweeping the floor, washing dishes or reading a book. Gauri guided this process of creation as a kind of catalyst but, importantly, the artists were given agency over their final interpretations, crafting life as they see it, and offering suggestions while staging the improvisatory mise en scenes.

While ripping out yellow blooms blanketing hillsides in Los Angeles, Max Kingery has been questioned about his fervor for killing flowers.

But the clothing designer who used the plants to dye his spring and summer lines said he takes no offense at being accused of pillaging this part of California’s “superbloom.” Instead, he sees it as an opportunity to raise awareness about a destructive flower that proliferated in the state following an unusually wet winter: wild black mustard.

Mustard was among the most prominent of wild flowering plants that seemingly popped up everywhere in California this spring. As temperatures warm it is starting to die, making it tinder for wildfires in a state that has been ravaged by blazes. Its stalks can act as fire ladders, causing flames to climb.

Mustard also smothers native plants, transforming the landscape. Its leaves and roots inhibit the growth of other species, creating a mono-thicket that spreads rapidly. There are numerous kinds of wild mustards in California, but black mustard or Brassica nigra is considered among the most pervasive.

Kingery is part of a growing group of artists, designers and chefs who are tackling the invasion by harvesting the plant to use in everything from dyes to pesto.

Foragers have led edible hikes to pick its peppery flower and munch on its leaves. There have been workshops and instruction guides on how to turn it into paper, fertilizer and a spicy version of the well-known condiment by the same name.

Kingery’s line, aptly named “Pervasive Bloom,” features sweatshirts, pants, tank tops and other items dyed naturally using mustard. On the website for his company, Olderbrother, a model embraces the uprooted weed while donning a mustard-dyed jacket. Other photos show the clearing of the land.

The Olderbrother store in Los Angeles is decorated with a huge panel of the plant’s stalks, leaves and flowers that were woven on a loom by designer Cecilia Bordarampe. The material came from the first harvest when Kingery said his team initially harvested about 450 pounds to make the dye. They have continued, removing more than a 100 pounds a week ever since, mostly from public land in Los Angeles.

Even that amount is only nipping at the problem, Kingery said.

The plant from Eurasia was first brought to California in the 1700s — it has been found in the adobe bricks of missions. But its presence exploded this year after a record amount of rainfall from December to April. Years of wildfires also created more spaces for the plant that thrives in disturbed lands.

State and local agencies remove mustard from managed lands, but it’s spread to places beyond.

At its peak bloom this spring, undulating swaths of yellow lined freeways. Hillsides jutting up from urban landscapes glowed. Sidewalk cracks were abloom.

“Physically, it’s been demanding,” Kingery said. “And yes, there seems in sheer volume, if you zoom out a bit, that there could be enough wild mustard here to make salads and dyed sweatshirts for everyone in the United States.”

But when Kingery sees native plants sprouting in plots that have been cleared, it makes it all worth it, he said. And, he added, to get the hues that he wants requires a lot of mustard, which in this context is a good thing.

“We don’t want to rip a bunch of plants out of the ground for no reason,” Kingery said. “The idea of something being utilized that is growing out of the sidewalk is a pretty cool concept.”

Artist Erin Berkowitz of Berbo Studio makes dyes from invasive species, including the dye for Kingery’s clothing line. She has offered classes along with a chef who crafts pesto from the mustard greens and mashes the flowers into dressing.

“This is an abundant art supply that is all around us,” Berkowitz said.

She said her work with Kingery showed the possibilities of what can happen if more people become aware of its uses.

“Visually we watched a whole hill of a park be denuded of mustard, which was a very hopeful thing,” she said.

Underneath the towering stalks of mustard, which can grow more more than 8 feet tall, blue lupine, poppies and other native plants were fighting to reach sunlight. “One public space, one whole neighborhood, returned to having healthy, functional native ecology,” Berkowitz said after the harvest in the working-class neighborhood of El Sereno in east L.A.

Jen Toy of Test Plot, an organization that partnered with Kingery and Berkowitz and helps people restore biodiversity to their neighborhoods, said “it’s really about broadening what we mean by land care, and getting other folks who might not see themselves as like environmentalists interested.”

To that end, ecological horticulturist Alyssa Kahn and artist Nadine Allan made a zine, a digital magazine, about the uses of black mustard, including to make paper, a face mask and even a kind of natural pesticide to till into garden soil.

Kahn said she was motivated to act in part because she has friends who lost nearly everything to wildfires.

“We wanted to incentivize people to do something about it,” she said, and educate them.

“They just look so pretty,” Kahn added. “They have those yellow flowers, and if you don’t really know kind of what’s happening on a larger scale, you might say, oh they’re just a sea of yellow flowers.”

Jutta Burger of the California Invasive Plant Council applauds the ingenuity and suggests people contact land management agencies to gather left-behind seeds when areas are cleared.

“You’ll never completely get rid of it, at least where it’s been established for a long time,” she said.

Still, Burger said similar efforts to creatively use something have made an impact. For example, she said, when chefs started crafting recipes involving the predatory lionfish and serving it in restaurants, its population decreased in areas, and it became widely known that the species was a threat to native marine life.

“One thing we would like to make sure people know is those yellow fields out there, they were once fields of not just yellow — they were fields of yellow, purple, pink, and blue,” Burger said.