Camels in the Arctic?

Though some Inuit do reside in two large towns, Iqaluit in Nunavut and Inuvik in the Inuvialuit region, the great majority are tenacious in their attachment to life in small communities. Of these, there are just over fifty, nearly all of them situated on saltwater shores. A remnant of the nomadic existence of hunters who relied on marine mammals at sea and caribou inland, many Inuit communities of today are the result of Canadian government and provincial interventions that brought people into settlements in a manner still regarded with sadness and anger. The same applies to the residential schools that followed. Settlement and schooling are prime examples of Inuit being required by southerners to accept transformative change. Not surprisingly, some of them view climate change in a similar light.

Since there are no roads between the various Inuit regions or among most of the individual communities in those regions, I had to fly to select sites. Flying in the Canadian Arctic is easier said than done. Quite apart from delays caused by weather, air links in this part of our country run north-south, not east-west. This means heading back south to go, for example, from Nain to Kuujjuaq or from Arctic Bay to Paulatuk. The venture was therefore done in three stages. And if these names and places seem strange and confusing, please do bear with me. All will become clear.

The Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami provided the initial contacts, and the rest was up to me, phoning ahead constantly to arrange the next meeting. I saw Inuit in their homes, in their offices, at the hotel, on the street, wherever I could, on weekends as well as weekdays. Setting aside economic development, energy security, youth perspectives, public health including the mental and spiritual, and any number of other possible themes, I determined to centre on climate change as it related to hunting, sea ice, and the maintenance of an Inuit way of life.

Despite local variation across the Canadian Arctic, Inuit speak of the earlier breakup of ice in spring and later freezing in the autumn (indeed, into the winter), diminished ice and snow, changes in the quality of both, unusual shifts in the location of marine mammals, less prolonged and less severe bouts of cold and blizzard, permafrost instability and loss, increasingly violent storms, more frequent freezing rain and an ensuing reduction in the availability of lichen as food for caribou, poorer water quality, increased UV radiation, and so on. Information about these phenomena and more is readily available down south. There is no need to travel in order to report it. My challenge was to see if a larger significance could be derived from local observations, and then to make it meaningful to non-Inuit.

So I went north with an idea. The idea is that Canada’s Inuit have come to constitute a new dew line.

Originally stretched across the North American Arctic from Alaska to Greenland and eastward beyond, the Distant Early Warning Line was built by the Americans in the early 1950s with the tagalong participation of the government of Canada. Consisting of a long string of manned radars, today known as the almost fully automated North Warning System, the dew Line sought to deprive the Soviet Union of any success in launching a surprise nuclear attack on the United States. Today, Canada’s Inuit serve, without necessarily knowing it, as a dew line that gives Canada and the world strategic warning of climate change. This is because they live in a chain of small communities strung across a part of the world that’s universally acknowledged not merely to be experiencing accelerated climate change, but to be driving it at a planetary level. It drives it, for example, in the capacity of snow-cover loss to accelerate ice-sheet reduction and thereby bring on sea level rise. And yet the new dew is different from the old in major ways.

For one thing, the original dew Line was designed to detect incoming objects from afar. Today it detects what has already arrived on the ground, on the ice, in the air, and in the water. Secondly, whereas the threat to be detected once resided elsewhere — in Moscow, to be exact — today it is we, all of us, who in our various ways are gassing the planet. Earlier on, if the threat was realized, we would jump immediately into responsive action. Today, it’s hard to see ourselves as the threat and to take responsibility. Instead, we may well prefer a congenial situation report and the inaction it justifies.

The climate change dew line reports facts and also meanings. It is self-referential. The line gives us access to our mind games. These games govern the interplay between the reception of facts of climate change, on the one hand, and our willingness, on the other, to accept the need for social change, including, possibly, change in our way of life. Ultimately ours are games of desire and aversion. But by understanding something of how they are played, we stand to improve our ability to handle strategic intelligence on climate change and to craft responses that are prudent and effective. Above all, we may reduce the potential for intelligence failure.

One further thing: last on the Inuit wish list is to be cast in the role of early warners, because their culture and identity are being undone by climate change, which is to say by others. Such a “role” may therefore be resisted. Among Inuit, some are indeed skeptical about climate change. Others are deeply troubled. Mary Simon, current president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, has captured the sense of apprehension by saying that Inuit are “the canary in the global coal mine,” a familiar reference to miners having caged canaries on hand to warn of the lethal presence of coal gas. What’s not so familiar is the comment, made to me in Iqaluit by a non-Inuk, that down south the miners moved only when they saw the canaries were dead.

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