Climate, Culture, Change: Inuit and Western Dialogues with a Warming North

Conclusion: Our Climatic Challenge

213 Conclusion: Our Climatic Challenge On my first evening in Chesterfield Inlet, Simionie Sammurtok referred to some advice his grandmother offered before dying a number of years earlier: My grandson, I am going to tell you something that you should remember all the time. When animals come from the tree-line, going north, when this happens, you have to leave it in your heart and in your mind. In the months that followed, I found myself circling back to these words that were so important to Sammurtok. Unsure of what “leaving it in your heart and mind” could mean, I asked Jaypeetee Arnakak his thoughts. He responded: In iq, it is believed that the physical body is aware of the environment way more than the conscious ego—which one must regard with a scepticism and forbearance. Inuit believe that the body will crave and visualize what it physiologically and spiritually requires to heal the body. I would suspect that what Simionie is saying is that … the human heart has the capacity to perceive messages that the ego has up to now ignored.1 There is, in his view, a kind of intuitive Silatuniq that the heart can offer our limited knowledge. Such a complementarity of rational and emotive understanding was evident at an Inuit elder conference when participants defined iq as “using heart and head together.”2 According to Sammurtok’s grandmother, this integrating practice becomes even more vital in times like today when Sedna’s animals are moving northward, Sila Climate Culture Change 214 is warming, and Gaia’s climate is changing. Considering these trends in a Canadian and global context, I have similarly concluded that it is time for climate research and politics to marry its abundant interdisciplinary knowledge and policy options with the intercultural inspiration of a heartfelt global conscience. With the northern ice receding and such a global conscience nowhere to be found in Canadian politics, the Conservative government followed its January 2009 Polar Bear Roundtable with a summer northern sovereignty campaign that displaced concern about Sila’s warming with frontier optimism about a melting Northwest Passage. As Prime Minister Harper promised to defend the romantic and economic right of Canadians to the North with armed icebreakers, northern paratroopers, and a Baffin Island deep-water port, the new post-Dion approach of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff began with a double movement that shifted much closer to this conservativism. Though he described the North as “the world’s refrigeration system” and called for Canada and other arctic nations to stabilize the climate,3 Ignatieff’s initial concern was with conserving Canada ’s frontier economy in a progressive way. This is not only reflected in his thoughts on the power Canada can derive from an open Northwest Passage but also in his proposed restructuring of how the land’s extensive energy resources are used. His vision includes processing more tar sands oil in Canada, maintaining energy reserves for difficult times, and creating east-west energy corridors to counteract its current southward flow to the United States. In other words, the nation should continue extracting frontier resources and services from the tar sands and Northwest Passage, but the pace must be slowed in order to sustain Canadian energy security and international sovereignty. As with Prime Minister Martin’s failed call for a global conscience, Ignatieff deemed his approach consistent with a sustainable climate response that recognizes Canada can no longer “wait for our environmental policy to be determined Conclusion: Our Climatic Challenge 215 outside our borders.”4 Instead of being concerned about the influence of President Bush’s denial, Liberals would now critique Prime Minister Harper for following the lead of American politics—even President Barack Obama’s newly elected Democratic government. Until the November 2008 election of President Obama and his campaign promise to deal with the impacts of “dirty oil,” Dion’s Liberal defeat and Prime Minister Harper’s economizing faith in the tar sands suggested even a mediocre Canadian climate response would fade into oblivion. The day after the American election this seemed to change as Prime Minister Harper sent a proposal to strike a joint climate change pact that would protect the tar sands from “new U.S. climate-change rules by offering a secure North American energy supply.”5 Talking to cnn in February 2009, the prime minister suggested Canada has always wanted a “regulatory regime” that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions...