Giving Compass' Take:

• Zoya Teirstein, writing for Grist, reveals the devastating impact of climate change on toxic shellfish and Native Alaskans' traditional way of life.

• How do stories like these create a more intimate concern around climate change? How much of climate change's effect is still unknown? 

• Discover how you can follow in the footsteps of indigenous efforts to curb climate change.

Phyllis Clough was driving to the post office in the tiny Alaskan village of Old Harbor one summer afternoon when her lips went numb. Within minutes, her mouth was swollen and the numbness had spread to the rest of her face.

She learned how close she had come to catastrophe at the local clinic the next day. She had eaten a single clam containing a naturally occurring poison a thousand times more toxic than sarin gas. The clam had been harvested by her parents, both subsistence fishers, from a beach in Old Harbor, home to 300 people on the southwestern Alaskan island called Kodiak. “You could die from one clam,” Clough recalls her doctor telling her.

Clough’s family is Alaskan Alutiiq, a tribe that has long depended on the state’s wealth of cockles, clams, limpets, urchins, mussels, geoducks, and periwinkles. “When the tide is out, the dinner table is set,” Alutiiq elders say. But increasingly, those shellfish harbor the toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning, the illness that made Clough sick. Her reaction subsided within a couple of days, but the traditional foods from the ocean that have fed her tribe for thousands of years no longer pass her lips. “I’ll never eat a clam again because I’m scared of what it did to me that time,” she said. “I just never want to go through that again.”

Her mother, an 80-year-old Alutiiq elder named Mary Haakanson, has no such qualms. She still regularly eats food harvested from the sea. Clough doesn’t understand it. “We’ve actually had people die of this here,” she said. “I feel very strongly against it, but people grew up here so they want to continue eating it. It’s a traditional food, so they don’t care.”

Read the full article about climate change's effects on toxic shellfish by Zoya Teirstein at Grist.