Summer in the Canadian Arctic this year began with a heavy fog that lasted for days on end. It was unusual, though weather that departs from the familiar is becoming the norm in the North.
Those changes carry others.
Luxury cruise liner Crystal Serenity was due to leave this week to sail through Canada’s Northwest Passage, a voyage made possible by spiking temperatures and receding ice.
Indeed, Cambridge professor of ocean physics Peter Wadhams was reported in The Observer this week saying he expected summer ice cover at the North Pole would disappear by next summer or the one after that.
Ships would be able to sail across the globe’s most northern point.
And it is unlikely to be luxury liners alone that push up into the newly navigable waters.
Former Nunavut mayor Jerry Natanine has put his name to a Greenpeace campaign opposing plans by oil companies to begin seismic testing in the area.
Nunavut is Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s home territory too; she lives in Iqaluit on Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic, an Inuit stronghold.
She has become a powerful voice in their service, speaking out on education, human rights and climate change issues, the latter two in particular inextricably entwined.
Once the fog cleared this northern summer, there were some "wonderful long sunny days", she reports by email from the Arctic, as she packs to leave for writers and readers sessions in New Zealand, including Dunedin tomorrow, where she will talk about, among other things, her book The Right to Be Cold.
Watt-Cloutier has been in the vanguard of raising global warming as a human rights issue.
She led a legal challenge to the United States’ continued greenhouse gas emissions, highlighting their impact on the Inuit way of life.
While the legal challenge failed, it helped pave the way for the language of human rights to become a part of international climate change talks.
"Inuit culture as we know it would not survive without the ice, cold and snow, as our Inuit hunting culture is dependent on the cold for survival," she says.
"We are a hunting, fishing, gathering people to this day and we hunt for our food on that ice throughout many months of the year. In fact, the land, the ice and the water is our supermarket for our ‘country food’, which consists of seals, whales, walruses and caribou ... Everything living not only survives in the Arctic, it thrives on the cold."
Inuit hunters who once lived a life supported by the ice are now quite literally falling through it.
In summer, the locals are wearing shorts and swimming in the rivers, an almost unheard of pursuit.
Among other positions Watt-Cloutier has held, she was international chairwoman for the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents the 155,000 Inuit of Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Siberia, home to the culture for thousands of years.
In a 2007 interview, she described the Arctic as the world’s barometer and the Inuit as the mercury.
She has repeatedly argued for a connected view of the world in which people see the wildfires, storms and sea-level rise they are experiencing as linked.
That would include South Dunedin’s flooding, she says.
"Absolutely! As the Arctic melts it increases the sea level in many parts of the world. Not only that, the Arctic’s ice is the cooling system, the ‘air conditioner’, if you will, for the planet and as that breaks down it creates havoc in many other parts of the world, including sea-level rise, more wildfires, droughts, floods, more intense hurricanes/tornadoes, unpredictable weather patterns ... So the connection is definitely strong and protecting the Arctic’s ice is, in fact, saving the planet as a whole."
• It is not a new argument, but Watt-Cloutier shifts it away from images of polar bears on lonely icebergs.
"Indeed, the Arctic is better known for its wildlife and ice than its people. Attempting to put the human face to the issues of environmental challenges in the Arctic has been my life’s mission for the last two decades or so."
Climate change has often been seen as a scientific, economic, academic and political issue but not so much as a human issue or a human rights issue, she says.
"I think people of the ‘South’ are more able to relate to the protection of what they see as the cuddly furry animals and that has been more their focus."
While well intentioned, the species-specific approach to "saving" the Arctic has been misguided, she says.
"By putting the human face, human dimension and human rights at the forefront of this issue of climate change, I think we have been able to change the discourse globally in a world that tended to invisiblise the human beings who live there."
Watt-Cloutier says she tries not to be too alarmist, but what the Inuit have been experiencing in the Arctic for some years will be visited on the rest of the world soon enough.
"Time will not stand still for us to get our act together. If we don’t want our children and grandchildren to face such dire challenges in their lifetime due to the inaction of our generation, then we must act as urgently as possible to lower the greenhouse gases. We must not silo these issues of economy and environment as though they don’t connect. They are one and the same. Inuit know this, indigenous peoples of the world know this."
Watt-Cloutier says she was prompted to write her book many years ago by someone who had heard her speak.
"First, someone heard me speak many years ago and planted the seed in me by saying ‘I think you have a book in you, Sheila’.
"I thought about that and although it took another several years before I even started the process with an outline, I felt a book had potential to reach more people around the world with the message on how important the Arctic connects us all as a common humanity."
The memoir chronicles Watt-Cloutier’s life but is also a collective story, she says, that she hopes will resonate not only with other indigenous peoples around the world but all people.
"I wrote it in such a way that I wanted anyone reading it would see themselves in the book. In a sense, I wrote it to help sensitise and hopefully mobilise civil society to act on this issue of climate change with a sense of urgency. My hope is that it has potential to do that. Travelling beyond Canada to New Zealand and Australia to convey this message by sharing my story is a great start."
The talk
Sheila Watt-Cloutier is speaking at a Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival pop-up session at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery at 4pm tomorrow. The session also includes talks by Canadian novelist Elizabeth Hay, at 2.30pm, and Australian-based New Zealand novelist Stephen Daisley, at 6pm. For more information, go to www.dunedinwritersfestival.co.nz.
