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

Preface and Acknowledgements

i Preface and Acknowledgements The first decade of the twenty-first century has offered an abundance of scientific, political, economic, and intercultural debates on climate change that have highlighted for me the complex challenge we now face. From successive United Nations meetings in places like Kyoto, Montreal, and Copenhagen to ongoing public debates in the Canadian media and our living rooms, there has arisen a cacophony of hotly contested opinions about the nature of climate change, its relation to excessive fossil fuel use, and what an adequate response will entail. Early on I became disenchanted with the dominant concerns of defining the scientific physics of climate change, questioning the validity of the research and debating the political economic costs of mitigation and adaptation strategies. While these are all important issues that are discussed in this book, they seem to often marginalize a deeper inquiry into the climate-culture relations intimated in the opening quotes by climate physicist Spencer Weart, Inuit shaman Najagneq, eco-theologian Anne Primavesi, and Inuit philosopher Jaypeetee Arnakak. Their thoughts represent some of the many Western and Inuit voices that led me to ask some very different questions concerning the way we think about a responsive climatic reality, and, if we attempt such an inquiry, what the potential implications are for climate research and politics. These questions were not fully developed when I started writing Climate, Culture, Change but rather gradually evolved as I brought my Canadian culture and Western climate research into dialogue with various Inuit. With today’s northern warming being described by some climate researchers as a global “canary in the mine,” it seemed highly relevant to the Canadian context of my concerns to engage Inuit in a discussion about the cultural relevance of today’s changes. Beyond the climatic relevance of Inuit perspectives, this book also derived some of its original impulse from my short pre-academic life as a social worker in some of the in- Climate Culture Change ii digenous communities of northern Labrador. It was here I first realized the extent to which my education in a Canadian and Western system of thought is contrasted, and often in conflict, with indigenous ways of living and thinking. This experience left me with questions about intercultural relations, colonial injustices, and the environment that continued to reverberate as I engaged various Inuit and Western perspectives on climate change. The Western eco-theology of Anne Primavesi proved extremely helpful as I contemplated the relation of northern warming to a history of social injustices. An equally influential Inuit voice for this book and, more importantly, in the international climate change debate is Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference—now known as the Inuit Circumpolar Council— who was runner-up for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In concert with many other Inuit, as well as Primavesi, her climate critique challenged me to consider the politics of Western nations like Canada, the economics of never-ending growth, and the nature of science itself. It is just such Canadian and, more broadly, Western cultural assumptions that the dialogues represented in this book connect with the contemporary change of northern Sila, or weather, and the global climate system. Though the chapters that follow are very much grounded in the Canadian political and environmental realities of my experience, the global scale of climate change and the historic roots of Canadian-Inuit relations led me to consider the broader cultural influence of Western European, American, and international forces. The social context of Canadian environmental politics was highlighted for me by many Inuit who talked of the North’s present climate instability in relation to fairly recent colonial changes. Such perspectives surrounded my writing with questions about the historic influence of various Western traditions on climate change, including Christian, economic, and political missions to the North, which, over the past 150 years, were increasingly informed by the emerging Preface and Acknowledgements iii Canadian nation. These challenge the common political and public view of climate change as a contemporary issue related solely to unsustainable energy practices. I approached this challenge by thinking about climate change’s relation not only to a host of environmental issues but also to the social impacts of colonialism—all of which successively emerged in the North as Inuit-Canadian relations intensified over the twentieth century. Consequently, I have tried to contextualize my Canadian cultural , political economic, and academic position within both...