Alaska News Brief January 2026—time to talk to the critters
As I check off my to-do list before heading to Ecuador for few weeks, I feel overwhelmed, unsettled, and impatient. I’m ready to be done with the chaos for a spell and eager to plunge into a vast marine dreamscape.
Vicki swims with sharks on a previous diving trip. Photo courtesy of a fellow diver.
I’m occupying a liminal space right now—a transition between the grind and a coming dreamtime, the past and what’s next. These transitional spaces don’t feel great. There can be exhilaration, for sure, but also anxiety about practical matters, what’s left behind and undone, and what’s unknown and to come.
We’re all living in liminal space right now. We’re on the threshold of one year rolling into the next, the notion of the United States as a striving democracy now leaning into autocracy and empire-building and a transactional worldview heralding money and power as the sole factors in decision-making while shunning any notion of collective care. In the chosen game of winners and losers, what of yourself do you lose to win?
We’re all scooped up in the voracious political and industrial appetite for oil, oil, and more oil, which is code for money, money, and more money. There’s the drive to fuel data centers and Pollyanna technology titan promises about a utopic future that seems more about those bloated with power and wealth gorging on more power and wealth. The utopia they use to prop up the degrading or destroying of communities and Earth looks dystopic to most of us, who are treated only as resources or obstacles.
We’re told to hang on, it will be great, because the market and economy depend on it. But collateral damage has always been human. It has always been animal. It has always been Earth.
Every time I hear these visionary (money-making, power-hording) schemes, I am in awe at the human ego. What a wide-eyed and conniving storyteller! What a master of the sleight-of-hand! What a greedy thief of what truly holds and nourishes us!
When pulled down into this dark and old tale, I know it’s time to talk to the critters. To listen to them.
Right now, me on the cusp of leaving, I move through a mundane and stressful period of getting ready and going, of fretting about this and that, getting on a plane, and then dropping into what the journey brings.
Iguana in the Galapagos. Photo by Dawnell Smith.
For a few weeks, I will ground myself in the waters of the Galapagos. It’s not just that I will get to float in another magical environment that I can’t breathe in without a tank, but that I find my calmer mind, I find me less reactive and boxed in self. I will encounter beings I’ve never encountered before—prehistoric-like marine iguanas, the long-lived elder tortoises, lizards of all kinds, penguins and boobies and sea horses. I hope to see a—or many! —hammerhead shark.
It is a blessing to do a trip like this, and I am grateful I can do it. This kind of journey and break equips me for continuing the work I do. I will be with friends and meet new people. I will submerge into a place of calm, curiosity, and care. I will reflect, marvel, and re-center myself.
When I return, I will be more helpful and less cynical. I will have reclaimed what brought me to this work in the first place and what gives me the energy to keep doing it.
Sally Lightfoot crab in the Galapagos. Photo by Dawnell Smith.
No, I can’t speak all the languages of the Galapagos, but the critters will speak to me. They will show and remind me that I’m part of it, too—that we belong here, companions on Earth, and that with that belonging comes responsibility to it.
By the time you read this, I’ll be in that big water relearning, remembering, reclaiming, and awed again at what joy this great belonging can bring.
PS. Thanks to supporters like you, we can continue fighting to protect Alaska’s land, water, air, wildlife and people.
Caribou at Hulahula. Photo by Danielle Brigida.
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Aerial view of Fort Knox gold mine. Photo by Brian Wotherspoon.
Between a rock and a hard place—hard rock mining’s toxic stew
A vole pokes its head out of a tunnel in the snowpack. Photo courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.