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.
first reports
Comments (10 comments)
Brad Arnold: It is very unlikely that mankind will cut their greenhouse gas emissions so fast and drastically that abrupt climate change and runaway global warming will be avoided.
Dr James Hansen of NASA says any feasible planetary rescue plan must include a method of removing the excess carbon dioxide from the air. I suggest the low cost method of biosequestration-removing vast amounts of carbon from the air and putting it back into the ground. I suggest seeding an extensively tested GMO into the ocean.
Author Franklyn Griffiths, in the article "Camels in the Arctic" writes "He does not speak of an overwhelming catastrophe that might come from the loss of a livable climate. Nor does he envisage a future in which smarter behaviour somehow allows us to remain basically as we are. Instead, he alludes to change that’s sufficiently severe to compel his people to surrender a treasured way of life in order to survive."
The only options are to either avoid abrupt climate change and runaway global warming, or lose a livable climate. It is too late to matter if we remain basically as we are, or surrender a treasured way of life:
"We now have evidence from the Earth's history that a similar event happened fifty-five million years ago when a geological accident released into the air more than a terraton of gaseous carbon compounds. As a consequence the temperature in the arctic and temperate regions rose eight degree Celsius and in tropical regions about five degrees, and it took over one hundred thousand years before normality was restored. We have already put more than half this quantity of carbon gas into the air and now the Earth is weakened by the loss of land we took to feed and house ourselves. In addition, the sun is now warmer, and as a consequence the Earth is now returning to the hot state it was in before, millions of years ago, and as it warms, most living things will die." (The Revenge of Gaia) October 16, 2007 04:07 EST
Danny Bloom: This is a very important and insightful article. One thing I wonder about is this, in terms of the far distant future: might humankind need polar cities to house potential survivors of catastrophic global warming events, say in the year 2500 or so? I have created a blog about "polar cities" to pose the question and get feedback pro and con from observers around the world. Google the term "polar cities" or Wikipedia it, and tell me your point of view. I would especially like to hear what Franklyn Griffiths thinks about polar cities, as a concept worth pursuing or just a silly idea. October 22, 2007 17:49 EST
N. Ramsingh: Asking the Inuit if they see evidence of global climate change is like asking people who live on a small island, who see the erosion of their beaches and coastline, the same question - their answer is relevant, but varied. Some will believe in global climate change, and others only see cyclical climate changes.
A microcosm can not define 'global' climate change, especially when that microcosm see themselves as bystanders to others' actions, i.e. do not see their actions reflected in any perceived local climate changes. It's a question that is not relevant to most of these people, and hence, can not be used to say whether the question of global climate change is relevant or not.
To use the varied perceptions of (not to be argued) most affected populations of 'global' climate change in support of or against climate change is not going to get us very far. All we really see is the playing out of the larger divide in perceptions worldwide.
October 24, 2007 08:26 EST
D Chen: Firstly, a quick thanks Brad Arnold: I appreciate your comments. In my way of thinking, just because James Lovelock's ideas are terrible and unappealing, does not necessarily make them physically implausible. His academic credentials should be noted. Case in point, IPCC predicted 4 to 6 degrees C average temperature rise is actuallly a death sentence for millions (or billions ?) of people and most ecosystems. Once you start counting in billions of deaths, it would surely be difficult to predict whether the number of surivors (by century's end) will be counted in the billions, millions, thousands, or less. Furthermore, if James Hansen is right, that 4 to 6 degrees C rise might only represent the first half of the long-term temperature rise for the planet due to slow feedback mechanisms. What then is the probable severity of future climate change? Can governments, societies and corporations cooperate, mitigate and adapt sufficently quickly ? CC is clearly not the only issue, the bigger picture has never changed in our political worldview - people kill people for geopolitical reasons. Usually for resources (and more so for water, oil, food, living space, culture, race, religion). Rapidly changing political agendas (and possibly involving nuclear weapons) presents a volatile mix especially if a quick fix for CC is not found. Ideally, the world should uncertake a rapid educational program to explain the full risks of CC. We still need nuclear disarmament and better political systems, population control, sustainable technologies, and fossil fuel substitution. Perhaps a rapid slowing of the global economoy has to be triggered. I would not discount the possibility that Washington is considering that very option. No doubt, some scientists somewhere are undertaking feasability studies for building 10 million CO2 scrubbers and sapce shields etc. October 28, 2007 08:19 EST
Leslie Barcza: Griffiths holds a mirror to the lack of imagination within our current culture tainted by the fetishization of technology and material wealth. (and how do i send this message without my PC, without electricity, heat, etc? )
The VERY inconvenient truth is our need to change our ways to avoid killing human life on the planet. Real sustainability? Maybe we should ask the Inuit. The comment from N. Ramsingh ("To use the varied perceptions of...most affected populations of 'global' climate change in support of or against climate change is not going to get us very far") misses the point. Civilization and the objectives of our culture need to be reinvented/rethought to avoid the danger. The Inuit aren't just canaries in the mine, but possible role-models as well. November 25, 2007 09:00 EST
Maureen Flynn-Burhoe: How can a Canadian social scientist in 2007 set aside economic development, energy security, youth perspectives, mental and spiritual health issues to focus on climate change as it related to hunting, sea ice, and the maintenance of an Inuit [pre-contact?] way of life? Readers would have benefited from a more accurate thumbnail sketch of the complexity of Inuit everyday life today: linguistic disparities, Inuit governing bodies, local initiatives, the long history of meddling in Inuit affairs by successive waves of interlopers. How much trust and intimacy can you develop in each community as you seek Inuit to gather impressions when the six-week enquiry is divided between tiny, remote towns, communities and hamlets like Nain in northern Labrador; Kuujjuaq in Nunavik; Iqaluit, Igloolik, Arctic Bay in Nunavut; Yellowknife, NWT and the Inuvialuit in western Arctic Ocean communities like Paulatuk and Tuktoyaktuk reached in twenty-five zigzag flights covering 24,000 kilometres? How does that improve the way social scientists put people in the picture in studies of the Arctic? Where is the background context based on Inuit-initiated research? Where are the sources so a public policy researcher can follow through with questions arising from this article? Has this article and lecture by the same name helped in anyway to revisit the distorted history of the Inuit as called for in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996)? It is misleading to suggest that increased suicide will be a future unintended consequence of the destruction of the Inuit lifestyle without acknowledging the heart-rending on-going tragedy of youth suicide epidemic, with rates that are among the highest in the planet, that directly or indirectly touches every northern Inuit community as well as thousands of urban Inuit in the south. How can any social scientist claim a people-centred ethnography while skimming over key social issues and structional changes affecting Inuit lives such as land claims implementation and human rights concerns regarding access to housing, employment, health and education services (the early exit from schooling). Two or three well-edited and well-researched paragraphs could have briefly traced a critical Inuit social history to dismantle some of the commonly held myths about the north. At the end of the lecture did the assistant from PEI understand that Inuit do not live in igloos anymore and that there are Inuit hunters who are politically-saavy individuals with cellphones and computers who travel frequently to regional, national and international conferences. Did no Inuit in his travels mention the northerly creep of flora and fauna? Would Griffiths not have found those who are deeply troubled, skeptical or even optimistic about climate change among Newfoundland fishers, PEI farmers, Alberta ranchers or First Nations hunters? Would isolationist southern fishers, farmers and ranchers not also be found to be conservative, pragmatic and immediate in their responses to climate change? " November 30, 2007 13:05 EST
Geza C. Teleki: In my view, as a practicing environmental and social sector professional for over 30 years, Prof. Griffiths goal was to present a snapshot—a different viewpoint on the basis of an insightful, albiet short, visit to selected areas of arctic. I found the article clear, all underlying assumptions defined, and done with great sensitivity. I loved Leslie Barcza's comments and appreciated the depth of Maureen Flynn-Burhoe's commentary we need to take on board. I found Prof Griffith's article a breath of fresh air and something all of us southern do-gooders (me included) should read very carefully. History is replete with examples of where the "educated macro-scale thinkers" have lost sight of the the intuitive, observational and anicdotal accounts of local people on the ground. I think of Griffiths acccount of the polar bear issue! We must seek out and include such data in our "southern thinking and decision-making". No doubt the views expressed by the Inuit are views from 'within'—but my question is why is the south continuing to ignore them. Just think of the Goverment's plan to keep the NW passage Canadian—but with little or no involvement (at least as far as I have heard) of the Inuit? We would do well to listen to their message about adaptation, while at the same time cleaning up our own local CO2 footprints by turning off lights,wearing sweaters, refusing packaging and using a bike instead of a car. I for one am sending the article's web-link to all my colleagues around the world December 18, 2007 07:05 EST
Danny Bloom: I got some images on my website now, of polar cities. And Nina Munteanu linked to this site here today.
http://sfgirl-thealiennextdoor.blogspot.com/2008/02/polar-citiesfriday-feature.html February 23, 2008 02:05 EST
Danny Bloom: Quick link to SF GIRL blog here above. February 23, 2008 02:05 EST
Anonymous: your page is too long and didnt have the info i needed March 25, 2008 15:50 EST