ANCHORAGE, Alaska — It's a good bet that President Barack Obama will never use a honey bucket. The five-gallon drums serve as makeshift toilets in large swaths of rural Alaska, where residents empty the waste-filled buckets into nearby sewage lagoons. Obama's historic visit to the Alaska Arctic on Wednesday will shed a rare spotlight on the plight of Alaska Natives and others who live in more than 200 far-flung Alaskan villages under conditions unimaginable in most of the United States. Obama's goal on this trip, the first by a sitting president to the Arctic, is to showcase the havoc he says human-influenced climate change is wreaking on Alaska's delicate landscape: entire rural villages sinking into the ground as permafrost thaws, protective sea ice melts and temperatures climb. Alaska Natives have joined the president in sounding the alarm on climate change. Yet the obstacles they confront daily in rural Alaska extend far deeper, raising questions about whether the federal government has done enough to help some of the country's most destitute citizens. Even as Obama has sought to improve conditions for Native Americans in recent years, Alaska Natives have received less attention. “The vast majority of Americans have no idea there are dozens of communities in Alaska that live like this,” Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska said in an interview. “It's unacceptable, and we need to do more to fix it.” Outside of Kotzebue, something of a regional hub where Obama will close his three-day tour of Alaska with a speech Wednesday, more than 32 percent of people in the Alaska Arctic lack complete plumbing, according to the US Census Bureau. One in five doesn't have a proper kitchen. This is a life of subsistence hunting for bowhead whales, walruses and seals, a proud tradition of dependence on the land that poses immense logistical challenges. With no roads to their villages, residents depend on boats, snowmobiles and bush planes — weather permitting — to ferry them to rare doctor visits or other business. Among Alaska Natives, cancer is the leading killer, with incidence rates about 16 percent higher than for white men and women in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as anywhere else on earth, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said. Permafrost, the layer of frozen ice under the surface, is thawing and causing homes, pipes and roads to sink as the soil quickly erodes. Some 100,000 Alaskans live in areas vulnerable to melting permafrost, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates. And in coastal Alaska, sea ice that once offered critical protection is melting, exposing coastlines, causing more extreme ocean storm surges and risking mass emergency evacuations. — AP
