“Arctic wildland fire has gone from being an effect of global climate change to a driver of it”, says Edward Alexander, co-chair of the Gwich’in Council International – a non-profit organization that represents 9,000 Gwich’in people in Alaska, United States and the Yukon and Northwest Territories in Canada. Alexander resides in Fairbanks just south of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, where wildfires is affecting both human and animal inhabitants. “I say I come from the future”, Alexander says. Meaning, a place where 65 percent of the land has burned. And it is heading south. Alexander highlighted the devastating consequences of Arctic wildfires during a panel discussion at the Arctic Encounter Symposium in Anchorage, Alaska this week.