With more than 15 years experience as a NPR reporter, Elizabeth Arnold has frequently covered environmental issues on such programs as Morning Edition and All Things Considered. (Photo Courtesy of Elizabeth Arnold)

Here in Alaska, I have a healthy mix of possibility and dread.

That may sound incongruous, but I live here because it’s still wild, I live here because there’s still time, and I live here because both are running out.

Whatever happens, I’ll be right in the middle of it. Living here, the health of the planet is not arms length, it’s in your face. There’s nothing abstract about climate change, nothing conceptual about oily waste. Whether it’s a Yupik village eroding into the Bering Sea or the vanishing habitat of a migratory duck, it’s happening in my backyard, and I’m to blame along with everyone else. We can either be models for change and resolution, or of ignorance and despair. It’s that stark.

The everyday truth here is that I can climb in a plane and see nothing but ice and tundra for hours on end. I can ski till I drop with no one but voles and moose for company. But I know all too well, that this same sense of limitlessness is also the rationale for its demise.

Whether it’s the annual congressional tug of war over ANWR, or a state game board dispute over salmon allocation, the argument is the same. “The pie’s so big, there’s plenty for all.”

But I see possibility in smaller slices or in some new geometry; in ecosystem-based management, in unexpected leadership from places as unlikely as Wall Street or China, and in non-traditional alliances between conservationists, sportsmen, birders and evangelicals.

And I see possibility in having a front row seat here in Alaska to a time lapse film of what’s been happening worldwide for centuries.

I look out my window and dread the pie is going fast, but I know I’m not alone in feeling that that I’m responsible for the outcome, and therein lies the hope.