A Climate for Wisdom?

Print this article A Climate for Wisdom? by Timothy B. Leduc June 28, 2011 “Why don’t researchers ever ask us about wisdom?” Almost a year after I began talking with Jaypeetee Arnakak about Inuit ways of thinking about northern warming, he asked me this question. From his position as an Inuit policy worker and philosopher, Arnakak stressed to me that wisdom, or silatuniq in Inuktitut, should be of central importance to anyone concerned with climate change. We have lost our way. The climate is in crisis. Might a more spiritual view of the climate help us change course? Here, an Inuit cairn (inuksuk) guides travelers on Whistler Mountain in Canada. Credit: Creative Commons/Evan Leeson. Considering the significant changes that are occurring globally and in the north — a region that some describe as climate change’s canary in the coal mine — it may seem highly impractical to shift our attention from questions of how to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to that of wisdom. What may seem even more impractical is the argument I am going to make in this article: that a sustainable and just response to northern warming and global climate change may depend on our capacity to inspire climate research and politics with something akin to silatuniq. For many who study northern warming and global climate change, there is an increasing sense of urgency that a comprehensive response needs to be initiated now; the time for delays is over. In Fall 2010, Lester Brown wrote in Tikkun that “we’re beginning to move in the right direction but we’ve got to move faster.” A year earlier, Paul Wapner expressed a similar sentiment in this magazine by quoting a 2007 statement from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chair Rajendra Pachauri that declared: “The next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Whether we choose to heed such urgent calls for change or continue with our current political and economic inertia, significant change on climatic and cultural scales is on the way. In that context, do we have time for wisdom? To explain why I think an Inuit view of silatuniq is important beyond the north, it is helpful to start by going back to the events that led to the discussion in which Arnakak introduced this concept. As with many researchers who have headed north over the past decade to document Inuit observations of changing weather, land, ice, and animals, I was originally focused on Inuit ecological knowledge. For weeks we had been discussing the relevance of sila to northern warming. Trying to give me a broad sense of this term, he described sila as an ever-moving and imminent force that surrounds and permeates Inuit life, and that is most often experienced in the weather. I came to our dialogues with knowledge from two largely divided academic disciplines: climatology and ethnography. Contemporary climate research often assumes that sila is a direct translation for “weather,” with it most often coming up in relation to unexpected weather phenomena. Meanwhile, Inuit ethnographies from the first half of the twentieth century described sila as the spirit of the air, upholder of the weather, and the breath source of all life on earth. It was while discussing this divide in Western thought between the physical weather properties of sila and a more spirited sensibility that Arnakak brought up silatuniq. As he explained, the sila and climate surround our lives, and silatuniq is an inquiry into “the context and consequence of applying knowledge and/or how our interacting with the surround affects that surround.” This understanding seemed relevant to northern warming and climate change, for at their root, are these changes not the planetary response to industrial society’s exhalation of greenhouse gases? A sustainable response to climate change "may depend on our capacity to inspire climate research and politics with something akin to silatuniq," the author writes. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/jezzer-hozzer. Various world religions have struggled to define a wisdom that is inspired by an ineffable spiritual surround. Navajo tradition describes our internal winds as continuous with the external winds, and as such recognizes an immanent reality that influences human thought. In the...