It was a bright winter morning when I looked out my apartment window here in Marshall and noticed a lot of pollution in the air. The main street was full of people as they drove in their cars and trucks to work. The pollution dimmed the bright sunlight as it stayed steadily in the air. Until now I hadn't realized how much Marshall had changed over the past few years.

The city we live in was once a clean little village but is now populated with over 30 thousand people. The streets are trashy and the tundra is crowded with houses making for little space to build things on. Houses stretch clear across the tundra from valley to valley. Pilcher Mountain now looks small because of all the hotels, stores, and other huge buildings there.

My sons and I were going to go moose hunting but the weather changed dramatically. From snow to slush, then it started raining hard outside. It was strange because it was in the month of December. The night before when we watched the weather forecast, they said that it was going to be that way a lot from here on in because of global warming.

For the past twenty years now there hasn't been any moose hunting because of the bad weather in December. And that affects the Native people because people who don t have jobs in this city can't get AFDC or foodstamps anymore because the Government cut off welfare checks and foodstamps back in the late 1900's.

We have seen great changes in the seasons that have affected many people all over the world. Our concerns about Global Warming, El Nino, and the Greenhouse Effect are more serious now. We are the cause of these problems, and they have caused us to have health problems.

The ozone hole is now open 3/4 of the earth's size. And more and more people are having skin cancer because of it. Average temperatures are now 10 degrees higher than normal worldwide. During our winters we get hardly any snow, and the summers are way hotter than before. It's also really dry in the spring.

Many years ago we started seeing different fish species from South America, Africa, and Mexico come up as far as the Bering Strait. All of our flora and fauna have moved farther north. And sadly, most of the salmon that used to come up the Yukon River have now disappeared. That has made it really difficult for us who have depended on fish for thousands of years.

Jack George