The world has a fever
Morning. I’m horrified by my carbon footprint as I jet around the far north talking to Arctic people, well aware that my well-intentioned trips are only adding to the problem of climate change. Theirs is a “green” existence. Mine is not.
Arctic travel is never direct. For example: to get to this biggest inland in the world in the winter I have to fly from Massachusetts to Copenhagen, then halfway back across the Atlantic to Greenland’s west coast.
Dinner with Rune Fjellheim, from the Arctic Council’s Indigenous Peoples Secretariat, and Evelyn Hurwich, director of the Circumpolar Conservation Union in Washington D.C.
Every conversation is about the climate change crisis. Our lives on this planet are at stake. But too few seem to be noticing. A world lost in a global market economy pivots on reaction and crisis management, but this crisis is about the loss of our lives. Serious corrective action should have been taken seven years ago; a major offensive launched. Still, emissions have not been cut. The consequences of inaction are dire: huge methane emissions form melting permafrost; ecosystem collapse; massive extinctions of mega-fauna and birds; rising diseases; water shortages; violent storms; crop failures; climate refugees seeking new homes.
Rune admonishes finger-pointing countries such as the
My friend Sheila Watt-Clouthier, an Inuk from northern
“The world has a fever,” James Lovelock says. Global warming is not a natural fluctuation. The Arctic ecosystem is in collapse because of the arrogance, greed, and carelessness of those who rule the tailpipe-smokestack world in the lower latitudes. As a consequence, the “green,” subsistence lives of Arctic hunters is no longer possible. “If this was before the time of stores and food that comes from other places, we would already be starving to death,” an elder tells me.
The warming of the earth is a death sentence for ice-adapted boreal peoples and for the fabled polar bear, the walrus, the ringed seal, Arctic hare, Arctic fox, and millions of birds that nest and fledge on
Greenland - 17 February
Greenland - 17 February
This is a story about genocide
This is a story about genocide. Joe turns toward me. His eyebrows are raised, his mouth down-turned, his salt-and-pepper hair sticking straight up.
I mean the dire harm we are doing to this planet and in so doing, the harm we are doing to you. I point at him with my thought.
He smiles and points to his T-shirt: a row of “lower-forty-eight” Indians and the words: Terrorism: We’ve been fighting it since 1492….” Oh yea, and happy birthday,” he says, grinning.
Joe keeps saying we’re losing daylight but I can’t see that there’s any to lose. The night sky is wiped clean by a white-out with short glimpses of the revolving airport light, or a snowmobile dashing by.
Joe says,
My mentor, Paul Tiulana, took me aside one day when I was young and said, ‘The society that rules us thinks we’re problematic. But we’ve lived here successfully for 15,000 years. Those who say we’re trouble have only been here for 200 years.’
“Pre-contact, we were one of the great civilizations alongside the Aztecs and Mayas and the Sioux. We were warned that going to school would teach us only one thing – to be a recipient of welfare. In the old days in Wales, our parents taught by example: ‘This is the way to live in order to be.’”
Wales
Ten a.m., minus 2 degrees, wind: 50 mph. Joe keeps saying we’re losing daylight but there’s hardly any to lose. Mid-morning darkness is pixilated by horizontal grains of white. We haven’t really “seen” the village yet. We’d get lost if we went out there. But from this new part of town – built since Joe was last here - there appears to be no houses, no people, no animals, no village all.
The florescent lights in the hall are bright but I’m groggy. These days, explorers, climatologists, and journalists have lousy carbon footprints: too much flying around. Joe is making kupiaq with his Italian stovetop espresso machine and nuking instant oatmeal. He has lived in San Francisco, had shows in Chicago and New York, but doesn’t go far these days.
Ray Seetonik stops by to visit. He’s one of the village’s four whaling captains and a venerable “elder” at age 67.
Last month we saw small birds around. Maybe 10 or 20 of them. They were dark, grayish, smaller than snowbirds (snow buntings). They were by the pond. Then we saw a couple of hawks. Never saw birds here in winter time.
In spring the seagulls come just when the bowhead whales arrive. Last year we were the only whaling boat out there. I harpooned one but it went under the ice. My sons were able to find it because the ice was so thin. One used an auger and the other son had a tuuk and we finally got it out. Oh, we were happy. It’d been lost for 3 days. Before that was the time I got the big whale. It was 47 feet long. I dedicated that one to Mom. It was so big, it almost tipped us over….
I can feel it when a whale or a polar bear is out there. I’ll be working somewhere, doing something, and suddenly I’ll just feel it and I tell my crew, “Hurry up, we have to go out now.” We’ve always had plenty of food. But so many young people these days, all they do is (makes gesture of sitting at a computer keyboard)……what’s that word? Type.
I always had sealskin pants and mukluks, harpoons with handles made of driftwood, and seal nets. No one has these things anymore. But I teach my sons everything I know. One day I shot a bear but it didn’t die. It didn’t even get wounded. Then it turned around and looked at me and I saw a black mark on its rump. My Dad told me never to shoot a bear with such a mark. I was careless. I felt so bad. That was another kind of bear, you know, the kind that can’t be killed at all.”
