Climate change hits where ice is a way of life and the residents literally live off the fat of the land.
By Cassandra Roos, Emerson College
Mar 21st, 2006
Although she had visited the Arctic before, journalist and founder of the Arctic Indigenous Climate Change Ethnography Project, Malin Jennings began to notice something unsettling when she returned to Greenland in 2003. Jennings told Campus Progress, “I hadn’t been to the Arctic in several years, but [in 2003] I was on a hillside in central Greenland …It felt lifeless compared to the way I experienced it before… I began to think, I wonder if it’s climate change.” The altered landscape pushed Malin to document the lives and traditions of the people of Greenland because she fears climate change will soon eradicate their lives completely.
Malin’s March 10th-March 24th trip to Siorapaluk, the most Northern community in the world, is intended to raise awareness about the effects of global warming. She will not be able to post any of her findings online, due to limited internet access. While Malin is doing this for personal fufillment, ABC showed interest after they heard her speak at the World Bank and a camera crew will join her. Hopefully ABC Nightly News or Nightline will broadcast a segment on her trip between April and June.
The indigenous Arctic residents Malin studies live in harmony with their local environment. Every member of the community usually owns a pair of polar bear pants, needed to keep warm during the cold winter months.
These subsistence hunting communities are extremely poor, and to make matters worse they have lost six total weeks of their hunting season to global warming. The three components needed for Inuit survival are diminishing rapidly: ice, the hunting season, and abundance of fat, healthy animals. As the environment heats up, the animals move north, and the hunters need to hunt longer and travel further from home in order to gather enough animal food and fur to sustain the community until the next hunting season begins.
Ironically, Greenland has released minimal greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, meaning it has had little part in its own destruction. Industrialized nations, and particularly the United States, release the most GHG emissions. WHILE representing less than 5% of the total world population, The United States’ total greenhouse gas emissions make up 25% of all global emissions.
Malin Jennings has shared her work with radio networks including Alaska Public Radio Network and the Independent News Network, the World Wildlife Fund, the World Bank, and is backed by the Conservation Science Institute, and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference.
When I asked Malin what the young people were like in Siorapaluk she replied, “You’ve never lived until you’ve seen Inuit teenagers with hair dyed red and everything pierced and they’re trying to carve up a musk ox wearing really baggy jeans and…you know, urban youth clothing.”
If you are interested in this topic you can also check out Gretel Erlich’s The Future of Ice, or Malin Jennings blog. Greenpeace also has photographic documentation of climate change.
Here is another picture of Malin Jennings at the same glacier. This was taken eight months after the one above, in April 2004. The tail of the glacier this time has moved closer to land and stands only 100 feet high.
The Inuit people are some of the most adaptive in the world. They have found ways to get over broken ice by following dogs through the ice who have a natural instinct for finding safe passage. Even for them, the impacts of global warming may be too harsh to guarantee prolonged survival.
Sled dogs are fierce work dogs, not pets. If one misbehaves and attacks a catch during hunting or a human it will be shot immediately.
Seal hunters wear all white in order to hide from the seals. Malin said they wait for over an hour perfectly still so they can catch a seal off guard to catch it at just the right moment.
Seal fat is used for eating and must be thick to provide enough protein to compensate for the fact that Inuit people have no carbohydrates in their diets.
A sign located in the village of Qaanaaq. The language is Dutch and reads “Copenhagen 5770 km” (approx. 3,585 miles) and “North Pole 1393 km” (approx. 865 miles).
A sleeping sled dog.
While the world average of personal greenhouse house gas emissions is 6 tons per year, each individual in the US produces about 22 tons of CO2 annually. You can use the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Greenhouse Gas Calculator to determine your “carbon footprint” here. And the EPA shows you how to reduce it here.