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

Making Carbon Confessions to Sedna

179 Making Carbon Confessions to Sedna After coming in as the runner-up for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc) and former Vice President Al Gore, the once Inuit Circumpolar Council Chair Sheila Watt-Cloutier stated “the issue has won and, in fact, our own planet Earth was a winner in all this.”1 The Nobel committee explained their choice of the ipcc and Gore as being due to their tireless work “to disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.”2 While the ipcc was documenting climate research, Gore had, in the last years of the George W. Bush presidency, offered a liberal reading of an unfolding climate apocalypse in the popular documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. With the changes occurring much quicker than had been projected in the 1980s and 90s, he argues that America’s, and, more broadly, humanity’s fossil fuel dependence will need to undergo a swift and radical change. By making homes more energy-efficient, increasing transportation efficiency, employing more renewables, and promoting carbon dioxide sequestration technology, Gore proposes that America could quickly reduce its emissions to below 1970 levels without significantly affecting affluence.3 Though Gore’s proposals could bring significant change, the lack of analysis on how culture and religion are part of the problem or solution reflects a liberal resistance to recognizing the limits of rationality. As I argued in the previous chapter’s critique of Diamond and climate research in general, this inability to appreciate the potential adaptive role of culture and religion in assessing Gaia’s indeterminate dimensions will continue to narrow our interdisciplinary and intercultural research . What we need is something more in line with the spirit of Gore’s Nobel Prize acceptance: “We have to quickly find a Climate Culture Change 180 way to change the world’s consciousness about what exactly we’re facing, and why we have to work to solve it.”4 To conceive how we are to enact such an apocalyptic change in consciousness , this final chapter returns once more to an Inuit view on relating with Gaia’s animated northern ecology. When the elder Naalungiaq told Knud Rasmussen of the darkness before the Dorset-Thule world, he also talked of a being known as Sedna that he said is “the most feared of all spirits, the most powerful, and the one who more than any other controls the destinies of men.”5 Stories of Sedna describe a watery being that can change the Sila, increase winds, bring forth a blizzard, and, most importantly, “make the animals disappear so that people go hungry” when offended by improper human actions.6 Around today’s Chesterfield Inlet, Her potentiality seems to be evoked in the declining arctic char population, northward migrating birds, and mammals from the southern treeline, and the recession of an ice ecology that has been home for polar bears and seal species. Though the climate research that informed Gore’s analysis may not be inclined to a Sedna or Gaia view, it should by now not be surprising that the West’s scientific knowledge of animal changes is consistent with Inuit Qaujimatuqangit’s (iq’s) ecological knowledge. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment states northern wildlife is being impacted by habitat loss, increased risk to migrating diseases, rising pollution levels, difficult competitions with what were once more southerly species, and expanding human industrial developments.7 Putting this northern research in a global context is another study of 1,700 species that found animals have, on average, shifted their range pole-ward by six kilometres every ten years and, more broadly, spring is moving forward 2.3 days per decade.8 As the ipcc suggests, climate-forced migrations will further threaten Gaia’s already receding biodiversity.9 Inuit are expressing concern about the irksina changes to polar bear behaviour and the animals they hunt. Such regional changes would in pre-colonial times call forth stories of Sedna and Making Carbon Confessions to Sedna 181 the kind of consciousness needed for a response—stories that are still of importance to many Inuit despite the conversionary impacts of colonialism. While Sila’s northern warming and Sedna’s shifting animals are calling forth many Inuit responses, the global scale of today ’s sorcerous changes highlight the point that Canadians and Westerners need to consider their own conscionable approach to this northern situation. Inspired by Gore’s call for a...