Wilderness Lecture at UM Features Inuit Leader, Global Warming Expert
By Brooke Hewes, 3-07-06
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The story of the Inuit is old, and one rooted firmly to place and people and tradition. It is also one that Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and guest speaker at today's Wilderness Institute Lecture "Arctic Environment, Climate Change and Inuit Human Rights," hopes will inspire action against global warming.
Watt-Cloutier is one of 155,000 Inuit people living in mostly coastal areas of Greenland, Siberia, northern Canada and Alaska who has watched frozen ground thaw and sea ice melt over the last 15 years. And what is occurring in her homelands, she warns, is permeating the globe.
"The Arctic is a barometer for climate change," she says. "We are all connected through melting ice."
Indeed, as Greenland ice sheets melt, she says, sea levels as far away as the South Pacific surge and threaten to submerge low-lying islands. Still, for most countries who live thousands of miles away from the Arctic or sinking land masses, climate change is considerably less tangible (evidence, however, continues to mount for those of us in the Rocky Mountain West.)
To challenge what Watt-Cloutier describes as place-based or technology-inspired apathy, she brings real stories of real struggles in the Arctic abroad.
She tells of hunters in Northwest Hudson Bay who are accustomed to thicker and longer seasons of sea ice, who must now contend with leaner and more aggressive polar bears; She talks of her people in Nunavik, Northern Quebec, who cooled themselves with wetted sheets last year when temperatures rose to a record 37 degrees; She speaks of those Alaskan Inuit left coastal communities more vulnerable to storm and erosion because of diminishing sea ice; She shares pieces of a culture and tradition trying to balance the pressures of modernity with its more primal, critical connection to what she calls "the rhythms of nature."
"In the Inuit language," says Watt-Cloutier, "there is no word for wilderness. There is no division between here and out there. Home is everywhere out there."
Of turning global warming's swelling tide, Watt-Cloutier says we are beyond the luxury of early warnings. The window of opportunity for the world to act, she says, is rapidly closing. What we can do, however, is limitless.
"Everyone -- students, families, communities, alike -- can do things in their homes," she says. "People can also lobby elected officials because as we all know, public opinion eventually becomes public policy."
Specifically, we can purchase less disposable products, choose a vehicle with low emissions, and keep tabs on our elected officials. We can also, she says, think in terms of the global commons -- in terms of connectivity -- and broaden the way we think and talk about conservation.
Watt-Cloutier's unique, non-dualistic perception of wilderness, says Nicky Phear, director of UM's Wilderness and Civilization Program, is one of the reasons her words are so relevant to this spring's lecture series "Native Peoples & Conservations." While most people in the United States think of wilderness as the pristine untouched-by-the-hand-of-man, federally designated kind, wilderness, says Phear, can be much more.
"The reality is that most federal wilderness areas have been inhabited or used by people long before being designated," she says, adding while it is important to still set aside areas with serious restrictions, it is also important to allow for natural processes like fire and grazing, as well as more traditional, cultural uses in some wild lands. "Land is not always best kept pristine or untouched."
In addition to the mounting newsworthiness of global climate change and the compelling substance of her talk, Phear says, Watt-Cloutier's talk is worth hearing because she is a woman worth seeing.
"Sheila talks in a way that moves the heart and mind and that helps us all connect to the global community," Phear says. "She's phenomenal."
To this end, Watt-Cloutier has been honored by the United Nations with The Champion of the Earth award, by Norway with the Sophie Prize, and by the outgoing Governor General of Canada Adrienne Clarkson with the 2005 Northern Medal.
This is Watt-Cloutier's fourth and final year as chair of the ICC, a non-governmental organization formed in 1977 to raise global awareness of, among other things, toxic accumulation in "the Arctic sink". Contaminants such as PCBs, DDT, and other persistent organic pollutants from industrialized and developing nations not only ended up in the air and water around the North Pole, but accumulated in the fat cells of polar bears, seals, walruses and other sea animals upon which the Inuit depend. And not only does toxic food threaten the physical well being of her people, but their culture identify as well.
"We got the point where Inuit woman had to think twice about breast feeding," she says.
Eventually, though, the world paid attention and supported the ICC-endorsed Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which banned 12 such toxins called the "dirty dozen." She trusts that burgeoning awareness will inspire the same international momentum to stop climate change, which like POPs, is much more than an environmental problem -- for the Inuit, whose hunting and food-sharing culture depends on Arctic weather, it is a human rights issue.
Watt-Cloutier's talk begins at 7 p.m. at the Gallagher Business Center. Her lecture is free to the public and will be followed by a question-and-answer session.
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Comments
Why is Canada is spending almost as much on new icebreaking ships for it’s "melting" arctic as it is on Kyoto?
Why did 7 of the thousands of global warming protestors in Montreal Canada last December require treatment for frostbite injuries?
Why does Toronto Canada annually have twice as many cold weather alert days as smog advisory alert days?
Why do we selectively forget that Canada’s Polar Bears were indigenous to as far south as Minnesota USA 300 years ago? (called Yellow Bears due to the summer coats they retained longer, for obvious reasons but still the same bear)
Why do we conveniently ignore the fact that our American neighbors to the south saw snowmobile sales increase by 13% in 2003.
Are all glaciers really melting? All 167 thousand of them on this planet?
It can’t be too late to stop global warming because we should be able to stop something we started, correct?
Global warming is 20 years old. Introduced to the UN in 1988, it declared to the world that the earth had been warming for several years. Twenty years later we are still watching the Winter Olympics, paying the kid next door to shovel the snow, enjoying a crisp sunny winter day, flying south to get warm, driving in snow storms, enjoying the changing seasons and paying heating bills. Twenty years worth of global warming would have us all by now sitting around reminiscing about the old days when we used to have some cool weather. Our lives have not changed. The effects of twenty years of global warming should look far more dramatic than the normal unpredictable weather patterns that we see now. Perpetuating this mass insanity, is the media. The politicians (Kyoto), scientists, and religious-like environmentalists feed off this mutually beneficial source of empowerment while bewildered citizens are numbed with a now growing cynical fear. Only when our frustratingly misunderstood climate is perfect, like the inside of a shopping mall, will this cultural anomaly fade away and when Santa Clause does not drown after all. Hey, we eventually stopped burning witches and sacrificing virgins didn’t we?
1)Consensus is not conclusiveness.
2)Independent opinions are from those without a direct financial connection to the science and or media industries.
3)The Internet is not a laboratory.
4)Political boardrooms are commodity floors where votes are bought and sold.
5)Anyone can make credible data for public consumption and dogma fuel simply by pushing the enter key enough times.
CO2 and Methane are two natural chemicals that exit our bodies from one of two orifices.
Global warming may or not be caused by transfatty acids, weed killer, gingivitis, red wine, oatmeal and or vitamin E.
Global warming started with the first cave man passing wind.
Polar bears that are stressed and depressed from global warming are now called bi-polar bears.
Maybe America’s Al Gore and Canada’s Doctor David Suzuki should start a chain of tropical resorts in Canada’s melting arctic regions?
If global warming increases storms and therefore wind, couldn’t we tap that energy for wind power generation and live like perfect little green elves for ever and ever?
"And Here Is The Hourly News; “Global Warming is a growing concern say the majority of scientists poled in a special survey that was thoughtfully given to us at no charge but first, here is Suzy Cleavage with your local ski report.....”
Seven year old Kimberly-Catlind Ashleyford of Mother Of Sacred Heart Public School in Misterandmissessauga Ontario Canada pontificates: “I think we still have winters because, like, ah, the arctic is like melting eh and ah, like cold air like sinks eh so the cold air sinks, ya that’s it, it sinks down from the melting north, it falls south like in down south or down to the south eh and makes us cold down here while the rest of the planet is like, melting?”
I Received A Response From The EPA:
Thank you for visiting EPA's Global Warming Site.
We appreciate your feedback and are committed to keeping an open-mind as
we can continue studying this issue.
There have never been predictions (from scientists) for the end of
winter. Predictions have called for a gradual
warming -- ranging from ~2 to 10 degrees F over the next 100 years. The
observed warming rate of the last 20 years has been about .3
degrees/decade or 3 degrees per century -- a bit above the low end of
that forecasted range (but well within it). The warming rate could
increase or decrease in the future, depending on a number of complex
factors (e.g. rate of future emissions growth, environmental policies,
etc).
The bottom line is that the effects of warming may not be that apparent
over the period of a decade or two, but should become increasingly
obvious over longer periods. The noticeable changes will likely be
observations that the REALLY cold winters don't occur as frequently not
that there won't, on occasion, be cold winters.
Sincerely,
Jason Samenow
Jason Samenow
Climate Analyst
U.S. EPA Office of Atmospheric
Programs
Climate Change Division
So much for Marshal Macluen’s predictions