Cool Scientists
Dr. Henry P. Huntington
Name: Henry Huntington
Born: 1965
Organization: Independent Researcher and Consultant
Cool Science: Polar Scientist
Who Am I:
My polar interests started when I read about Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expeditions while I was in high school. I took a year off before going to college and worked as a janitor at McMurdo Station, the big U.S. base in Antarctica in 1982-83. I came home the long way, crossing the Arctic Circle while in Sweden.
I liked the polar regions, but my travels also made me fascinated with people and cultures. So I majored in English. After college, I came to Alaska in the spring of 1988, to count bowhead whales near Barrow on the north coast. I quickly became interested in Iñupiaq culture and the ways in which wildlife management efforts (such as our counting of whales) meshed or clashed with the Iñupiaq relationship with their environment.
After completing my Ph.D. in 1991, I moved back to Barrow. To my good fortune, Kathy Burek came up to help with the bowhead research, and we fell in love and got married. We moved to Eagle River in 1994, and have lived her ever since. Kathy and the boys enjoy the outdoors and traveling, too.
My Cool Research:
Most of my work now looks at various ways that people interact with their environment. This includes traditional knowledge, the impacts of climate change, conservation, and other topics, often done in collaboration with indigenous peoples of the Arctic. I've been fortunate to take part in other Arctic and Antarctic trips, including taking a small boat across 650 miles of the Arctic coast, traveling by dog team through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, climbing the highest peak in Antarctica, and following Shackleton's footsteps across the remote island of South Georgia.
Much of my research involves the residents and communities of the Arctic. I have worked with hunters and fishermen to examine sea ice, subsistence hunting, climate change, and traditional knowledge. This kind of research typically takes time. It is important to get to know something about the people and the community, and to let them learn something about you. First impressions, on both sides, may be misleading. It is unfair to a person or a community to try to say something based only on that first impression. With that in mind, I am not planning on any direct research during my upcoming Alaska-Canada Barrenlands Travers (SnowSTAR-2007) trip. Instead, I hope to see a variety of places and communities, look for general patterns that I've seen elsewhere in the Arctic, meet interesting people, and spend some time connecting in some intangible way with the notion of "the Arctic." If that sounds vague, it is. I'm not sure what we'll find, and I don't really have a fixed idea of what I should be looking for. Instead, I see the trip as a journey of discovery, which means in part that you don't know what you're going to find. If we did, what would be the reason to go?
