On a spring day last year, a group of Alaska Native activists gathered outside Sharon Heights Country Club in Menlo Park, California, unfurling a banner reading “Arctic Ice Project Lacks Free Prior & Informed Consent.” They’d come to protest a geoengineering initiative aimed at spreading tiny glass beads on sea ice to make it more reflective and, hopefully, prevent melting. 

Panganga Pungowiyi, a St. Lawrence Island Yupik and an organizer for the nonprofit Indigenous Environmental Network in Alaska, was among the protestors at the country club where the Arctic Ice Project (AIP) was holding a fundraising dinner. 

“The whole thing, it doesn’t align with our cultural values,” she said, “Our recognition is that Earth and Father Sky and the ice are very capable of healing themselves, if you just stop messing with them.” Free, prior, and informed consent is the UN-recognized right of Indigenous people worldwide to give or withhold permission for actions affecting their lands. By repeatedly testing the reflective beads on Indigenous land near Utqiagvik, Alaska, Pungowiyi said AIP violated that core principle.

Pungowiyi also sees the test as one example of a global trend, in which Silicon Valley–based geoengineering start-ups and elite research universities test climate-altering technology on Indigenous lands. Such efforts have sparked pushback. When a Harvard research team called SCoPEx attempted stratospheric aerosol injection tests in Sweden, Sami people successfully halted the project, objecting to it as a climate quick-fix counter to their worldview.

After protests, AIP’s Alaska project also stopped, an outcome that underscores the hazards of conducting science without sufficient community support. Now at the helm of a new geoengineering organization, AIP founder Leslie Field is seeking a way to work on Indigenous lands in a way that empowers, instead of overlooks, local people.

An engineer and inventor, Field founded the nonprofit AIP (originally named Ice911) in 2008, hoping to create a surface-based, localized solution to preserve ice. She landed on silica-based hollow glass microspheres, and after a few years of promising tests on ponds in California and Minnesota, set her sights on the Arctic. 

Field spent her first day in Utqiagvik, Alaska, at a local history museum, learning about Inupiat culture. She got permission to field test from the Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation, one of about 200 for-profit village corporations created on behalf of Native people under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. With the Native corporation’s help, she spread the microspheres over a nearby frozen pond.

“We tested tiny stuff, and then we tested a bit larger area, and in fact the largest one we ever did was on a pond with a lot of participation from [the Native corporation],” she said. “It was two football fields' worth of materials, so still tiny in the grand scheme of things.” That’s when the problems started. Inupiat activists accused Field of testing the microspheres without adequately consulting the community from the beginning. 

Native corporations aren’t in a position to give permission, said Pungowiyi, adding that Field should have consulted a broader set of Alaska Native stakeholders including Utqiagvik residents. “Prior to mass-ordering materials and purchasing plane tickets, before you’re knee-deep into a project, you should have the people’s permission.”

The community could have provided feedback on the geoengineers’ plans, she said. As an example, Pungowiyi explained that she thought focusing on one variable—increasing ice thickness to cool the global climate—had blinded researchers to other facets of the Arctic sea ice on which Indigenous communities depend.

“It’s not just disrespectful, it’s dangerous,” Pungowiyi said. “It’s not safe to come in and test single dimensional questions like, ‘Will this stick to the ice?’ or ‘Is this toxic to ingest?’ The ice is a living system. There are microorganisms who live inside the ice that need sunlight. That ice interacts with other living systems within the ocean. It’s the home of our marine mammals, our transportation, our grocery store, our hunting ground. Ice is our way of living, and it is a living structure, not something that’s dead.” 

Following the backlash, AIP stopped field testing the hollow glass microspheres. It’s still unknown if the microspheres would work on sea ice; prominent sea ice scientists such as Melinda Webster of the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center have published papers arguing that they could make melting worse.

Lab tests on the material’s environmental risks are currently underway at the SINTEF Ocean research institute in Trondheim, Norway. Annette Eros, the CEO of AIP, asserts that the organization is committed to community involvement going forward. “AIP will not conduct any field tests in the future without completing comprehensive environmental safety testing and sharing the data, securing any required permits, and informing and involving any local Indigenous peoples,” she wrote in an email, stressing that no current AIP staff or board members were involved in the Alaska field tests.

Last year Field resigned from AIP, partially because of the organization’s reluctance to do further field tests in the Alaskan Arctic. “The world is not in a position to be able to just wait,” she said. In 2022, Field founded the Bright Ice Initiative, dedicated to using microspheres on Himalayan glaciers. She thinks the microspheres could effectively brighten melting, soot-darkened glaciers. Rituraj Phukan, a member of the Tai-Ahom Indigenous group who lives in the Himalayas, was intrigued by Field’s work in Alaska and invited her to India. 

Phukan is the founder of the Indigenous People’s Climate Justice Forum, which represents India’s 700 Indigenous groups at global negotiations like the Conference of Parties. “If we continue at the current levels of warming, we are going to lose about 95 percent of the Eastern Himalayan glaciers,” he said. “I thought, if this needs to be field tested, why not in the Himalayas?”

Phukan doesn’t trust that the international community will cut emissions quickly enough to save Himalayan glaciers or fulfill promises to adequately fund communities impacted by climate change. Such communities should be able to decide for themselves if localized geoengineering is a solution they want, he said. 

“It is a matter of climate justice to allow communities who are on the front lines to be part of the decision-making process,” Phukan said. “Once we have all the scientific information, whether to deploy it or not should be the prerogative of the communities.” Melting glaciers pose catastrophic threats to Indian communities. Glacial lake outburst floods, which occur when meltwater from disappearing glaciers careens downhill, have become more common. Phukan remembers one glacial flood in 2013 that destroyed an entire village. Thousands of people have already died, and 15 million people are at risk. 

In coming years, Field hopes to test the microspheres on the Chhota Shigri Glacier, with permission from the Indian government. If the test goes well, the next step would be involving the region’s many Indigenous communities; Phukan said they plan to draw on traditional knowledge systems to guide field testing, monitoring, and feedback. 

“We have an enthusiastic collaboration from people in the country—they’re inviting us to come and work, and that’s different,” said Field. “I think the message going forward is you want to be sure you have not simply the logistics company who’s going to help you, but also broader support. And we have that with the Himalayas.”