Global Warming : Climate Change |
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A response to global warming CLYDE RIVER, Nunavut - When Inuit elder Zacharias Aqqiaruq tried to summarize local climate change for Harvard University researcher Shari Fox Gearheard, he used a word neither she nor her interpreter had heard before. ''The weather has been called uggianaqtuq,'' he said. Fox Gearheard asked around for a definition and finally learned that the word meant, in a human context, ''I was not myself; I was acting unexpectedly.'' For Arctic dwellers, the weather has definitely not been itself. A major study organized by the Arctic Council, a forum of northern nations and indigenous people, concluded in late 2004 that the top of the world is bearing the brunt of the phenomenon called ''global warming.'' But the rest of the world is only now beginning to listen to warnings from the indigenous people who live there. At a turn-of-the-millennium meeting of Native elders at Cornell University, western Greenland Inuit lecturer and drummer Angaangaq Lyberth told Indian Country Today that Inuit elders were debating whether it was worth trying to alert an unhearing world to the changes they saw coming. Modern science tended to discount tradition-based observations as ''anecdotal,'' and politically powerful interests were dismissing all talk of global warming as anti-corporate propaganda. The Native voice, however, is beginning to win through. It has had to break into an often crudely overstated debate of hypothetical computer models. As carried out in world forums, the debate has been an ideological struggle of generalities fueled by resentment against the industrialized West or, more specifically, against the United States. (In its turn, the U.S. government has complained that the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gases gives a free ride to the highly-polluting emerging economies of the Third World.) In all the shouting, indigenous people are quietly reminding the rest of the world that they are the ones living with the consequences, in the here and now. Indigenous people around the world, almost by definition, are the ones who live closest to nature and feel its impacts the most sharply. Daily survival depends on close observations of the climate and animal life. From this a sense of gratitude and responsibility to the natural world is derived. Native claims of a special relationship range from traditional Hopi prophesies to modern innovations that reduce pollution at tribal casino resorts. This relationship is a matter of life and death in the Arctic, where Inuit and Indian people have successfully adapted to the harshest and least-forgiving climate on earth. They are now the first to have to respond to global warming. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, released in November at a major conference in Iceland, concluded: ''The Arctic is now experiencing some of the most rapid and severe climate change on Earth.'' The average temperature north of 60 degrees latitude has risen ''at almost twice the rate as the rest of the world in the last few decades.'' The long-term impact, notably a rise in sea level, could dramatically affect the rest of the world. But, as the Arctic Council learned through paying attention to Native voices, immediate changes are already affecting daily life in the North. The changes were truly unpredictable. Fox Gearheard discovered in her travels through central Nunavut, the new Inuit-governed province in northern Canada, that some villages reported a definite cooling in the past decade. Cree around Hudson Bay, James Bay and the Hudson Strait reported rapid onset of cold weather and slower warming in the spring. But other regions reported the better-publicized warming. The overall pattern was climate instability and general failure of once reliable traditional means of predicting weather. Melting of coastal ice made travel hazardous. As once-solid surfaces thinned, hunters have fallen through to their deaths. Ice floes have drifted further from shore, taking away meat supplies such as seals. Elders in Baker Lake told Fox Gearheard that drier and hotter summers had reduced some berries and mosses, thinning the caribou herds. Thinning of the ozone layer exposed Natives to higher ultraviolet radiation. The elders Iqallijuq and Kappaniaq told her that the sun felt stronger. She reported that complaints of sunburn seemed a new phenomenon of the past seven years. On a broader scale, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) predicted dramatic changes in local ecologies, with good and bad sides. Some species, such as polar bears, would face ''devastating consequences,'' but the tree line would move north, providing more wood and employment opportunities. Human populations would increase, but would have to deal with greater plagues of flies and mosquitoes. The receding coastal ice would destroy traditional hunting, but could in the long run open maritime routes that would bring increased sea traffic and economic growth. (The northern Russia routes would probably benefit most, said the study, although the offshore oil industry might also boom.) Whether this growth would be good or bad for Native people remains highly debatable. The ACIA produced a 1,200-page scientific report with 300 contributors, the most massive of its kind. It is remarkable for drawing not only on scientists but on ''elders and other insightful indigenous residents of the Arctic region,'' as ACIA Chairman Robert Corell told the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Nov. 16, 2004. Perhaps it is a hopeful turn in the global warming debate that the rest of the world is starting to ''ask the experts'' and seek out the observations of the Natives who live in the most affected areas. |