article at INDIAN COUNTRY Today

March 25, 2005
Tom Goldtooth
Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network

"We only have one Mother Earth"

Most everyone has heard about climate change, and most certainly about global warming. While some people still don't believe climate change exists, I am convinced it is real.

In January, climate experts from 30 countries met in England to discuss new evidence which proves we are fast approaching the point of no return. These experts report an ecological time bomb ticking away toward widespread drought, crop failures and rising sea levels. Scientists throughout the world continue to conclude with deep urgency that climate change is creating dangerous conditions that require immediate attention.

The November 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Report found that for indigenous people of the Arctic, climate change is very real. The report describes massive thinning and depletion of sea ice, which may result in species of seals, walrus and polar bear being pushed to extinction by 2070 - 2090.

Many Inuit, Inupiat, Yupik and Athabascan Natives of Alaska and Canada are experiencing increasing difficulty in predicting weather and environmental conditions. Hunters have even perished by falling through sea ice when traveling to hunting territories across historically safe paths. While climate change remains a complex issue and myth to some, it is already having devastating consequences for our brothers and sisters of the far North.

Human survival is increasingly threatened by the bio-degenerative consequences of an industrial and technological society: depletion of aquifers and water resources; expanding deserts; decreasing forests; declining fisheries; poisoned food, water, and air; and climatic extremes such as floods, hurricanes and droughts. Air pollution from burning fossil fuels causes health affects such as asthma, respiratory diseases and acute respiratory disorders. While environmental degradation in itself is by no means new, throw into this mixture the challenges indigenous communities face socially, culturally, economically and politically, and we're presented with a number of very difficult changes and challenges.

People often ask about the cause of climate change. A vast majority of scientists confirm that climate change is caused by human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels - coal, oil and gas, including coal bed methane - to produce energy. During this process carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted into the atmosphere where it builds up, blankets Mother Earth as a greenhouse gas and traps in heat, causing climate change. There are other greenhouse gases that add to this blanket effect, but climate change is caused mostly by the burning of fossil fuels in coal-fired power plants, automobiles and by other industrial processes.

The United States creates 25 percent of yearly global greenhouse gas emissions but has less than five percent of the world's population. To have a fighting chance to keep climate change within safe levels, the U.S. must reduce emissions of CO2 by 80 percent below year 2000 levels by 2050 - and we must begin to make these reductions right away. But this isn't happening.

As the rest of the developed world begins to implement the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally, U.S. corporate lobbyists have been very effective in derailing national and international action to address climate change. The U.S. has chosen not to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol. Although the U.S. accounts for a quarter of CO2 emissions and common sense says our country must be held accountable to forging genuine solutions, this isn't the plan of the U.S. energy policy.

Coal-fired power plants, making up one-third of total U.S. CO2 emissions, are the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. The proposed U.S. energy plan relies heavily on increasing coal-powered energy production to meet America's growing electricity demand.

Today, utilities burn a billion tons of coal annually to produce 54 percent of the nation's electricity. Coal mines on federal and American Indian lands in the Northern Plains and the Southwest contribute nearly 40 percent of the nation's total coal production.

If implemented, the U.S. energy plan will lead to more coal mines throughout the country, more leasing and mining of coal on public and tribal lands, more coal-fired power plants and power lines, more air pollution, more taking of private property and tribal land easements for power lines and less investment in the efficient use of energy. If left unchallenged, the coal industry will continue to dump millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, increasing and intensifying the impacts of climate change.

The 2005 U.S. energy bill promotes a fossil fuel industry. This soon-to-be-introduced energy legislation is predicted to be very similar to the 2003 energy bill which, fortunately, did not pass in the House. It was filled with language that would bolster the power of coal, oil and gas industries at the expense of emerging renewable technologies, energy efficiency and conservation. Under the terms of the bill, fossil fuel producers would enjoy more than twice the tax incentives than producers of renewable and alternative energy.

Also, the 2003 energy bill included an Indian Title VI section with numerous provisions that would make it easier and faster for the energy industry to build fossil fuel ventures in Indian country - at the expense of the livelihoods of our brothers and sisters of the Arctic.

Another legislative action coming out this year to address climate change is the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act (S. 342/H.R. 759). This act is a small step in the right direction. It came within seven votes of passage in the U.S. Senate in 2003 and has been reintroduced this year. The legislation would bring U.S. levels of global warming emissions to year 2000 levels by the year 2010 and would set the first binding limits on greenhouse gas emitters in the U.S.

American Indians, Alaska Natives and elected tribal leaders need to stand as one voice to demand U.S. policies that will increase the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles, deploy clean renewable energy solutions and implement energy efficiency and conservation programs.

One of many solutions is for this country to revamp, re-amp and rewire the colonial utility grid system to make room for tribal large-scale wind power generation. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that wind resources in the Great Plains alone could meet 75 percent of the electricity demand in the lower 48 states.

Groups like the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, working with the Rosebud Lakota Nation and 20 larger Indian reservations on the Northern Plains, estimate these tribes could exceed several hundred gigawatts of wind power potential. The Rosebud Lakota Nation recently constructed a 750 kW wind turbine. For tribal communities off the grid, the Sacred Power Corp., a Native-owned small business in Albuquerque, N.M., is putting up solar and wind hybrid power stations and energy-efficient upgrades for homes in remote Navajo Nation communities in northwest New Mexico.

The connection between the sustainable livelihood of indigenous people in the U.S. and worldwide and the negative affects of climate change is undeniable. The need to address climate change as a human rights issue is urgent. Here in the U.S., climate change must be looked at as a treaty and an Indian rights issue. Climate change is a genuine threat to our health, our physical and cultural survival and our future generations.

As Corbin Harney, spiritual leader of the Western Shoshone Nation, said: ''We, the people, are going to have to put our thoughts together, our power together, to save our planet here. We've only got one water, one air, one Mother Earth.''

* Tom B.K. Goldtooth, Diné, is the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, a nonprofit Native environmental justice organization providing advocacy, informational services and organizing support to tribal governments, tribal grassroots and indigenous people worldwide. Goldtooth is an active participant in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as North American climate change initiatives.

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March 25, 2005
by: Editors Report / Indian Country Today

"Health of Mother Earth is our responsibility"

The impact of human disregard for nature as a cohesive force that sustains the rest of all life is serious indeed. No one wants to play the fool sounding false alarms, but humankind must train itself to pay attention to these matters and to the most serious threat to life as we have known it on the Earth: global warming resulting from human civilization's colossal burning of fossil fuels.

From the rapid depletion of plant and animal species to the pollution of air and water with chemicals, there is much to worry about in humanity's careless use and neglect of the environment. But the issue of global warming and its impact on climate change is beyond serious. This is one that cannot wait for politicians in denial and requires substantial attention and response. Global warming and its effects represent a truly catastrophic threat to all human societies and to all animal and plant habitats.

The Earth is warming at an alarming rate. The average global temperature has risen by 0.6 degrees Celsius in one century. The hottest 15 years on record have all been since 1980. This intense change in temperature is affecting directly the intensity of climactic forces whose long-term patterns we now depend upon. Drought, hurricanes, flooding - all now become more intense or, to use the common term, ''super-sized.'' The rise in temperature is the Northern Hemisphere's most intense rise in 1,000 years. This problem is pointed out by Swiss Re, one of several major insurance companies internationally that estimate losses from environmental disasters have risen exponentially over the past 30 years, with more expected.

While some commentators have fun ridiculing scientists and their substantial studies, the vast consensus of the scientific community sounds a consistent alarm and a second, broad consensus of industrialized and non-industrialized countries worldwide is moving to address the problem.

Only the United States, which produces the largest amount of greenhouse gases, stands resolutely against taking any significant action. Instead, from the American government on down through the myriad talking heads who present a contrary view on radio and television, the dictum is to question and even manipulate the science so that the issue gets reduced from its truly overwhelming scale. Global warming is often pigeonholed as a theory being exaggerated that forever needs further study.

Except the ice caps are melting.

Subarctic Native communities are scandalized by the loss of habitat and the melting of permafrost. As the ice caps melt, the voluminous currents in the oceans (Gulf Stream, North Atlantic current, etc.), veritable river systems that regulate climactic patterns, noticeably change. As a few scientists paid through oil and coal industry think-tanks create a much-vaunted ''counter opinion,'' island countries in the Pacific are being lost to the rising ocean.

Persistent drought is squeezing the American Plains, drying out rivers and wells. The Missouri River basin, with six reservoirs, is at record lows. One reservation, Cheyenne River in South Dakota, reports it will be completely dry by August, leaving 14,000 residents scrambling for water. This is an area, along with a swath of the South, already pinpointed by scientific study as a persistent impact area for heat waves.

Granted, weather is variable and floods and droughts are historically commonplace. However, signs are emerging everywhere that some very serious climate changes are taking place. Most world leaders, including America's staunchest ally, Great Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, are convinced by the vast majority of global scientists' consensus opinion: that the unchecked burning of fossil fuels is producing the global warming trend which is seriously affecting climate as we know it.

The evidence in Europe, as in all directly-affected regions, is hard to dismiss. Summer heat waves, once periodic and rare, are now nearly an annual event. Since 1977, ''an exceptionally strong, unprecedented warming'' is reported by the researchers. Temperatures have risen on average about 0.36 degrees per decade. The intense heat killed some 19,000 people last year, mostly the elderly.

A British study that analyzed the temperature history of Europe from 1500 to the present found last summer to be the hottest on the European continent in at least five centuries. The study's figures to 1750 are based on measures of tree rings and soil cores. Since 1750, instrumented readings have been available throughout Europe. This is partly why Blair told President George Bush in late January: ''If America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda, too.''

While the American government fiddles as the Earth heats up, adding to U.S. isolation in the world, more rational forces within the country have taken leadership of this issue. Many states, roughly 150 local governments and some corporations are increasingly convinced of the need for action. A couple of tribes are also leading in endorsing and adopting new wind and solar approaches that reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. And recently, The Pew Center on Global Climate Change helped to coalesce Shell, Alcoa, DuPont and American Electric Power, among others, to contribute ideas to new proposed legislation in the U.S. Senate. Promoting fuel efficiency to reduce U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil is also an argument gaining ground.

Many planners already assert that ''humanity actually has the hardware in hand to halt the rise in heat-trapping greenhouse gases it pumps into the atmosphere.'' (''Stabilizing the Global 'Greenhouse' May Not Be So Hard,'' Peter N. Spotts, Christian Science Monitor.) Harmful emissions can be halved within 50 years without harming the economy, as critics of the global warming argument contend would happen.

Among others, a Princeton University study published in the journal Science recommends a ''widespread use of a portfolio of at least 15 approaches - from energy efficiency, solar energy, and wind power to nuclear energy and the preservation or enhancement of ''natural'' sinks for carbon dioxide such as rain forests, or the conservation tillage techniques on farms worldwide.'' (Of these, nuclear power holds the quagmire of what to do with its own contamination.) As a result of these kinds of approaches, cutting CO2 emissions significantly over the next 50 years is now Britain's goal, while the European Union and Russia have also agreed to reduce emissions as well.

Some tribes are offering solutions by entering into what guest columnist Winona LaDuke calls ''the next energy economy.'' The Hopi and Navajo have greatly expanded into solar energy models in the past decade; the Rosebud Sioux are seriously moving along a major initiative in wind power, while the American Indian intelligentsia generally has put up serious voices within the environmental movement. Some of our commentators in this edition - John Mohawk, Tom Goldtooth, Dean Suagee and Winona LaDuke - address these issues in our Perspectives pages. Additionally, columnist Suzan Shown Harjo is a prominent researcher and advocate on sacred lands, which often are environmentally impacted by, and must confront, industrial society.

American Indian tribal leaders in government, business and education, and institutions such as the National Congress of American Indians and United South and Eastern Tribes, have a great opportunity to take up various aspects of this crucial issue. In the U.S. Senate, John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., are teamed up on a bill that begins to force action. The McCain-Lieberman bill would establish a domestic ''cap and trade'' system to control greenhouse gas emissions. These Indian political organizations and, indeed, all tribes should assist these senators with active support for their efforts. This is a wonderful opportunity to state and restate in the national discourse the American Indian tribal traditional values and contemporary sensibilities regarding the collective responsibilities humans share for the Earth.

Educationally, as NASA and the National Geographic Society pursue strong programs on climatic change of recent years, science and Native Studies programs should be encouraged to find ways and methodologies to exhibit, document, illustrate and teach the Native reflection of these concerns. Finally, the tribes, whenever possible, should project the principle of Earth systems enhancement in all their endeavors, from the formulation of tribal building codes that are sun-oriented to the building of support mechanisms in their internal and external structures for applying this fundamental philosophy. Again, this can make good economic sense, is good planning and is a great message with which to reach the American public.

Concern for Mother Earth and attention to how human beings are harming natural ecologies are responsibilities Native people hold dear. As always, though, we can also be part of the problem if we don't lead in providing and demanding solutions.

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March 25, 2005
by: Jim Adams / Indian Country Today

"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.

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March 25, 2005
by: John Mohawk / Indian Country Today

"Climate change in America"

Two categorical positions about climate change dominate conversations around the world. The first argues that the scientific community is in broad agreement that all the signs support the conclusion that the earth is growing warmer; that the reason it is growing warmer involves human activity, especially greenhouse gases caused by burning fossil fuels; and that the results could be catastrophic.

The second point of view, broadly speaking, holds that there is no global warming which is inconsistent with nature's own fluctuation in global temperatures, that if there is global warming it has not been adequately proven to be the result of human activity, and/or that the warnings about catastrophe are insufficiently supported by fact.

No serious group or individual can ignore the reality or inevitability of climate change. The history of planet Earth is one of recurring climate changes, including ice ages and, at one time, enough global cooling to engulf the whole planet in ice and snow. And no serious person can deny the role of greenhouse gases in changing Earth's temperatures. It was almost certainly such gases from volcanoes that freed the earth from the ice.

The reason for the debate's intensity is the expense of taking action against greenhouse gas production. The world community's most visible effort to address the problem is an agreement called the Kyoto Protocol, passed in December 1997. The Protocol, which has been rejected by the Bush administration, went into effect Feb. 16. Proponents of Kyoto cite the growing probability of devastating impacts.

The warnings are explicit in numerous publications, but two provide a good preview: ''Honesty About Dangerous Climate Change'' by Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou, found on the EcoEquity Web site; and ''On the Risk to Overshoot 2 Degrees C'' by Malte Meinshausen, listed at Scientific Symposium ''Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change,'' (Exeter, MetOffice, United Kingdom, Feb. 2). A Feb. 25 article at Asia Times Online lists these and other citations of studies which have energized the international community to action to urge governments to try to slow the release of greenhouse gases.

The most dire warnings are that a ''tipping'' point could be reached beyond which it will not be possible to reverse changes which will stimulate widespread changes in weather patterns, sea levels and who-knows-what.

Because of the current cultural dynamic in American journalism, news media seek second opinions on such issues without investigating the motives of the sources. When a report on global warming is released, a variety of ''think-tank'' representatives - advocates of an ideology which refuses to accept or is paid to reject such conclusions - expresses the view that the scientific conclusions are either ''bad science'' or based on insufficient studies.

The most convincing rebuttal of these ideologues is contained in an article by a University of California professor that appeared in the internationally-respected journal Science in December 2004. She found that all 928 peer-reviewed climate studies from 1993 - 2003 agreed with a generally-accepted scientific consensus. Not a single scientific study disagreed.

The so-called controversy about science and climate change has some of the elements of the current issues that surround evolution. The scientific community accepts that the overwhelming evidence in rock fossils and the study of species, while people with an ideological agenda continue to insist evolution is merely theory, mostly because it conflicts with their beliefs in Scripture.

Advancing science around this topic has been moving rapidly. As recently as March, the Clean Air: Cool Planet (CAAP) and the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire pinpointed changes to the region's climate in their report, ''Indicators of Climate Change in the Northeast.'' A broad range of indicators, including decreases in snowfall, a decrease of 16 days of snow cover over the past 30 years, ice-out dates on lakes earlier by 9 - 16 days in the Northeast and earlier spring bloom dates of 4 - 8 days add up to hard evidence of the increasing impacts of global warming. On the same day, Penn State glaciologist Richard B. Alley issued a statement that spring snows in the Arctic have decreased and that sea ice is smaller and thinner: all signs of continuing warming.

The Climate Change group released photographs March 15 showing that the ice atop Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa is melting and could disappear completely by 2020. The change could signal significant disruptions to ecosystems on the plains below. That same day, UK spokesman Gordon Brown stated at a G8 meeting: ''We have sufficient evidence that human-made climate change is the most far-reaching and almost certainly the most threatening of all the environmental challenges facing us.''

He urged that a list of problems ranging from soil erosion to the depletion of marine stocks will continue to threaten future economic activity. Wealthy nations have caused these problems, he said, and they should fix them.

U.S. delegate James Connaughton told the BBC that the science was still contested. The populated areas of Europe, which lie further north than the populated areas of North America and could experience dramatic climate changes, have led the efforts to reverse course. Almost all observers agree that the Kyoto Protocol is flawed and that as currently constituted, is not an answer to greenhouse gas emissions; but the U.S. refusal to play a role in planning for reductions has helped alienate and isolate America from the rest of the world.

Traditional indigenous people, most notably the Hopi and the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois), have long warned about a possible backlash at the hands of nature that could include dramatic climate events. And indigenous people, especially in the Arctic, have been among the first to demand that industrialized nations do something to meet the threat. They have even launched lawsuits claiming that inaction amounts to genocide of a sort. If polar bears could sue, they'd undoubtedly make the same claim. Some scientists, and indigenous people, think warming could place the polar bear in danger of extinction.

The debate over global warming highlights an unexpected phenomenon in U.S. culture. The U.S., an enthusiastic participant in the 18th century intellectual movement known as the enlightenment, seems poised to turn its back on the method of skeptical inquiry into patterns of fact and revert to old ways which sought answers to all questions in Scripture.

Some Indian prophecies predict very difficult times, but not an end to all life. Contemporary American culture, especially its political culture, is influenced by expectations of a biblical end-time, a ''second coming'' and the end of nature. Who would have thought a time would come when the Indian prophets and the scientists would be on one side, and the end-of-nature crowd would direct environmental policy from Washington?

John C. Mohawk Ph.D., columnist for Indian Country Today, is an author and professor in the Center for the Americas at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

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March 25, 2005
by: Stephanie Woodard / Indian Country Today

Blending science and tradition in the Arctic.

The existence of climate change is not debatable here. ''The North is a very different world now,'' said Pita Aatami, president of Makivik Corp., which administers the benefits of a 1975 Inuit land claim.

''We have no winter until December, whereas we used to begin driving our Ski-Doos in October; and the sea ice melts earlier in the spring, so polar bears are coming inland in May instead of late June or July.''

Other new challenges include airborne pollutants riding the winds from industrial parts of the world, mining activities that may cause local contamination and a growing population. In the face of these transformations, the Inuit of Nunavik are using all means available - traditional and modern - to make informed choices and protect their 14 villages, which range in size from 280 to 2,000 residents and are located mostly along the Ungava Bay and Hudson Bay coasts.

One important tool is the Nunavik Research Centre, established in 1978 to monitor wildlife populations and ensure optimal harvesting levels for the traditional subsistence hunts. ''The most healthy population has individuals distributed among all age classes,'' explained wildlife technician Peter May, Inuk, a lab employee since 1983.

''It's important that the Inuit have that data,'' added toxicologist Michael Kwan, one of the center's four scientists. ''They need it for the sake of their own health and that of the region, and for negotiating with the government in regard to hunting and fishing quotas. If we have our own studies, we know the actual situation instead of having to accept the word of other scientists.''

Having scientists on the Inuit payroll was vital to Nunavik's elders, who had noted that researchers would arrive in the region, collect data and disappear without telling local inhabitants what they'd found. Aware that in a rapidly changing environment the information gathered would likely be significant, the elders advised Makivik Corp. to put cutting-edge science and traditional knowledge to work for the people.

Nowadays, the communities convey all sorts of questions to the Nunavik Research Centre. The concerns are expressed first to the Nunavik Regional Board of Health and Social Services, which is responsible for public health; it then turns them over to the research center. Under the supervision of director Bill Doidge, a marine mammalogist, the lab's staff devises studies, often in collaboration with Health Canada, Environment Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The results go back to the health board, which in turn - as the elders directed - makes recommendations to the communities.

''Recently, we got a call from people who had found dozens of dead eider ducks,'' said May, one of the lab's four technicians. ''It turned out that the birds had contracted avian cholera. We paid for people to return to the site in canoes, burn any carcasses and clean up the area.''

In another case, a village asked that water, snow and soil from around a nearby mining site be analyzed for pollutants. ''We found that the mining company had, in fact, done a good job with its environmental monitoring,'' said Kwan.

Safety of the local food supply is a new issue. Surprisingly high pollution levels have been discovered in the seemingly pristine circumpolar region because volatile materials such as mercury, PCBs, brominated flame retardants and aerosol pesticides are carried on the wind from other areas and plummet to earth when they condense in the Arctic cold. As a result, the Inuit worried that ''country food'' - the traditional fare they have eaten for thousands of years - had become contaminated.

To see whether the concern was warranted, the research center hired Kwan in 1996 to run a toxicology lab - the eastern Arctic's first - and expand the organization's portfolio to include food-safety studies. Kwan looks for the presence of heavy metals. Wildlife parasitologist Manon Simard was hired in 2003 to take over ongoing research into diseases such as trichinellosis and toxoplasmosis, which may pass from animals to humans.

''We found that levels of contaminants here are very low, though we did recommend continued monitoring, as levels of mercury and other pollutants are definitely rising in the Arctic,'' said Kwan. ''We also confirmed that country food is good for you - with high-quality protein and plenty of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients, including omega-three fatty acids in the marine mammals and fish. In contrast, store-bought foods may have fewer nutritional benefits and their own contaminants, such as hormones and pesticides. We then worked with the health board to produce educational materials that explain this in non-technical terms.''

Lining the lab's walls are examples of informational posters - on mercury- and botulism-free ways to ferment walrus meat and more - that take the scientists' work back to the people in English and Inuttitut.

Community members take part in the research center's projects. Kwan explained: ''If we want beluga samples, for instance, we contact local hunting and fishing associations and send kits with labeled bags, measuring tape, writing instruments and instructions: everything the hunters need to collect the samples. Depending on the project, they'll be paid about $60 for measurements of an animal and a set of tissues, such as meat, blubber and liver.''

Simard has accompanied hunters to Sleeper's Island in Hudson Bay, where a higher proportion of walruses appear to be infected with trichinellosis than is the norm in Nunavik. Trichinellosis is caused by a worm that's related to the one found in pork. It can be killed by cooking meat well; however, the Inuit consider raw or fermented walrus a delicacy, and communities that habitually hunt in this area may find that half of the walruses they harvest are infected and can only be eaten cooked.

During the trip, Simard assessed an existing field test for trichinellosis that the hunters hoped could be used to check the walruses themselves. If the test proved effective, they wouldn't have to send a sample of the animal - ordinarily the tongue - to the Nunavik Research Centre to be analyzed.

Unfortunately, the test proved unreliable, so Simard will evaluate the accuracy of traditional means of determining if walruses are sick (including the presence of yellowed skin and extra-long tusks) and look at the life cycle of the disease and the management of the hunt to see what can be done to control the disease.

''In projects like these, the whole community is involved: the hunters, their associations, the health board, the research center,'' said Simard. ''There's a lot of collaboration and talking to each other. It works, and that's important.''

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March 25, 2005
by: Dean Suagee / Hobbs, Straus, Dean & Walker, LLP / Indian Country Today

Suagee: Pulling our heads out of the sands of global warming.

Do ostriches really stick their heads in the sand to avoid danger? Having never personally witnessed an ostrich doing such a thing, I suspect they only do it in cartoons. I mention this because the approach of the Bush administration and its congressional allies to energy policy makes me think of those cartoon ostriches.

An energy policy bill that ignores global warming? A bill that ignores the connection between the burning of fossil fuels and the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Even if it seems it's only in cartoons that ostriches stick their heads in the sand, apparently in real life, so do some policymakers.

Perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions, having not yet seen an administration-backed energy bill in the current Congress. Given the administration's record over the past four years, its rhetoric about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, emphasis on drilling on public lands and its silence on conservation-oriented measures such as increasing the corporate fleet average fuel economy standards, I am willing to risk the embarrassment of being wrong in print and predict that when we do see such an energy bill in this Congress, it will ignore the obvious fact that the wasteful ways in which we consume fossil fuels are contributing to long-term changes in Earth's climate.

As the climate changes, ecosystems around the world, with their interwoven communities of plants and animals and other living things, are becoming unraveled. As ecosystems unravel, ancient human cultures are also at risk: cultures that are interwoven into the ecosystems where they have developed, ecosystems from which they derive material existence and spiritual well-being.

Indigenous cultures around the world have been under assault, of course, for centuries, and many of the kinds of assaults that present-day indigenous cultures face are more abrupt in the ways they inflict disruption than global warming. For example, these include massive hydroelectric projects, deforestation, oil spills in tropical rainforests or off the coast of Alaska and laws enacted by national governments that permit multinational corporations to exploit the resources of indigenous territories.

I am afraid, though, that the kinds of changes wrought by global warming will prove even more challenging for the survival of indigenous cultures than the various faces of industrialization and imperialism - and just as unrelenting.

The connection between our wasteful consumption of fossil fuels and the environmental and cultural disruption caused by global warming is particularly frustrating because so much of the solution has been fairly obvious, and well documented, for more than a quarter century.

What we need, what the world needs, is a national commitment by the United States to achieve a transition to an energy economy based on efficiency and the use of appropriately-scaled solar and other renewable energy technologies.

Global warming is just the most recent reason why, as a nation, we should make this commitment. Some of the other reasons include saving money, building local self-reliance, recycling energy expenditures in the national economy rather than shipping money overseas, creating employment and business opportunities, enhancing national security, avoiding the environmental impacts associated with conventional energy and, in the case of solar design techniques for buildings, creating wonderful spaces within which to live and work.

Twenty-four years ago, the federal research laboratory known as the Solar Energy Research Institute (predecessor of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory) completed a comprehensive study of the potential energy savings through promoting efficiency in buildings, transportation and industry, and potential contributions of renewable energy sources. That report, published with the title ''A New Prosperity: Building a Sustainable Energy Future'' (often referred to as the SERI Solar/Conservation Study) concluded that ''through efficiency, the U.S. can achieve a full-employment economy and increase worker productivity while reducing national energy consumption by nearly 25 percent'' and that ''20 to 30 percent of this reduced demand could be supplied by renewable sources.''

In March 1981, when the SERI Solar/Conservation Study was finished, the incoming Reagan administration attempted to keep it from seeing the light of day. (At the time, I worked in the central office of the BIA and, having been involved in the Carter administration's Domestic Policy Review of Solar Energy, obtained a copy from a friend at SERI the day before it was embargoed.) The study was subsequently published by a private company featuring an introduction by then-Congressman Richard Ottinger who, as chair of the relevant subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had requested the study in the first place.

Years before the scientific community reached its current degree of consensus on the reality of global warming, Ottinger drew attention to what he called ''our greatest economic conflict: our economy is hemorrhaging as we devote a larger and larger percentage of our gross national product to the purchase of imported oil, competing for scarce capital needed to rebuild our industrial and economic base.'' Among other things, this shows that the current administration has no claim to originality in its imitation of cartoon ostriches.

Achieving a transition to widespread reliance on solar and renewable energy resources would require a comprehensive set of incentive programs. There are many reasons for this, but a big part of it is that the transition will involve millions of purchasing decisions by consumers of energy services and buyers of buildings and products that consume energy.

Most people do not have the time to become informed about the environmental implications of their choices, and even if they do, they typically do not have extra money to pay for up-front extra costs of solar and renewable energy technologies - even if they could realize substantial savings on a life-cycle basis. Moreover, energy consumption purchases are not made on a level playing field. Rather, the marketplace has been distorted by decades of subsidies to conventional energy technologies and regulatory regimes designed to promote conventional technologies.

To some extent, a transition toward efficiency and renewable energy has been occurring, driven largely by market forces. Market forces are not enough, though, and the enormous ''external'' costs of global warming are not taken into account in the marketplace. This strikes me as a classic case in which government policies should be fashioned to compensate for the marketplace's shortcomings.

With a national commitment to energy efficiency and the widespread adoption of appropriately-scaled solar and renewable energy technologies nowhere on the horizon, what can American Indians and their tribal leaders do? While the energy market is largely driven by federal and state laws and policies, tribal governments can use their sovereign powers to deal with parts of the problem that occur close to home. In fact, many tribes have been using federal grant programs to promote solar and other renewable energy technologies, although there has not been much effort to draw lessons from tribal demonstration projects and publicize the results. We could do more talking about these local experiences and drawing attention to the global implications.

One idea for starting at home, literally, is to write tribal building codes so that they include solar design performance standards, drawing on energy design software that has been developed with support from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This way, a tribe could make solar design the standard in new construction. This is but one way tribal governments could help lead the way to the widespread use of appropriately-scaled renewable energy technologies.

The possibilities are all around us, but we have to look for them for ourselves. We cannot afford to wait for national politicians to get their heads out of the sand.

* Dean B. Suagee is counsel to the firm Hobbs, Straus, Dean & Walker, LLP in Washington, D.C. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation.

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