Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin. If you don't already know,

we're working full-time on our new documentary, Earth's Greatest Enemy. All the interviews we've

shot for the film are very important, but they won't make the final cut of the movie.

So we're releasing many of them as bonus content for everyone who's donated to make this project possible.

A video version of this, and all the other interviews, are available at patreon.com slash empire files.

Donations are still needed to finish the project.

So visit earth's greatest enemy.com for more info. And be sure to check out the new trailer

we published on our YouTube channel. Thanks so much for listening.

My name is Rick Tolman and I work for the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy here at the International

Arctic Research Center on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

And I work as a climate specialist with ACAP and a lot of my work involved in doing climate outreach and providing climate type information.

And I especially focus on rural Alaska where things are changing the fastest and have historically

had the least access to information that

is relevant to their lives and to their concerns.

Why is it important to look at Alaska as a case study for this environmental disturbance

that we see worldwide?

Well, we're the canary in the coal mine, so to speak.

We're where this is happening first.

And that you can learn, you, lower latitude people, can learn from what's happening here in Alaska

and the Arctic.

I think over the last few years, we're starting to see some of those extreme changes

impacting wide areas in the mid-latitudes, whether it's the catastrophic flooding in New York

...