by David G Matyas
“I think it might be illegal to have a climate change presentation without a drowning polar bear.” It was day two of the Development and Climate Change side event and behind the young academic from the University of Hawaii, a giant image of a polar bear floating on a tiny chunk of ice materialized on the screen. A “charismatic megafauna,” she called it with irony in her voice. Beside her on the panel, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, former president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, calmly made a note.
It was August of 2007 when I first had the privilege of hearing Sheila Watt-Cloutier speak. I was on Baffin Island in the Eastern Canadian Arctic working with youth concerned about climate change and she gave us a keynote address. Set to the backdrop of the Sylvia Grinnell River, where a fisherman pulled Arctic char from the water, the beauty of the landscape was only surpassed by the grandeur of Watt-Cloutier’s words. Though the basement studio at the Copenhagen Koncerthuse was somewhat less majestic than the park in Iqaluit, the words were no less inspiring.
“In the Arctic,” she said, “we don’t talk about the polar bears.” It was a phrase I’d heard her say before and one that moved me then as it does now. “In the Arctic, we talk about the people.”
It’s a message that haunts those who hear it. You see it resounding in each video clip of melting glaciers and each powerpoint presentation with a polar bear image. You hear it in radio programs and podcast and read it in books on climate change and headlines about endangered species. It is the message that the Arctic is not a wild, uninhabited place, with threatened animals, but a lived environment with threatened communities and people. In Kimmirut and Pangnirtung, hunters are facing unpredictable weather and dangerous conditions on the water. Across the Northwest Territories, ice roads, the arteries of Arctic transportation are melting, further isolating remote settlements. In Tuktoyaktuk, the community is being washed away by rising sea levels and an eroding coastline.
This is the face of climate change. This is the species that is affected by a warming planet. We are the charismatic megafauna.
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