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Ask the experts
03 November 2001
NewScientist.com news service
Sue Armstrong

Enlarge Map showing Nunavut, Canada

I'm in a cosy clapboard house on the frozen shore of Baffin Island in Canada's high Arctic, being introduced to Inuit "country food". It's a kindly, unchallenging introduction, with firm, pink slivers of raw fish rather than the chunks of seal fat and blubber-rich whale skin the Inuit call "muktuk" that are their real passion. Beyond the picture window, across the frozen bay bathed in ethereal light from the midnight sun, we see an antlike figure moving on the ice. "A hunter going out for seals," explains my hostess, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. These days, she comments, hunters are facing unexpected dangers. "The ice is thinning and people are falling through it." Only two months ago, she says, her neighbour - a hunter of long experience and great skill - did just that, and lost both legs to frostbite.

Unusual events are being reported across the Arctic. Inuit families going off on snowmobiles to prepare their summer hunting camps have found themselves cut off from home by a sea of mud, following early thaws. Some have discovered that the meat they cached in the ice as food for future trips has thawed and rotted.

There are reports of igloos losing their insulating properties as the snow drips and refreezes; of caribou clothing clogging with ice in unusually humid weather; of lakes draining into the sea as permafrost melts, just as if the plug had been pulled from a full basin; and sea ice breaking up earlier than usual, carrying seals beyond the reach of hunters and bears.

Climate change may still be rather an abstract idea to most of us, but in the Arctic it is already having dramatic effects. Subsea measurements suggest that summertime ice in Arctic waters has thinned by 40 per cent over the past 40 years. If it continues to shrink at this rate, say scientists, the Arctic Ocean could be virtually ice-free in summer by the middle of the century. The knock-on effects are likely to include more warming, cloudier skies, increased precipitation and higher sea levels. Scientists are increasingly keen to find out what's going on because they consider the Arctic the canary in the mine for global warming - a warning of what's in store for the rest of the world.

Equally importantly, what happens in this region could have a big influence on global weather patterns.

For the Inuit, the problem is urgent. They live in precarious balance with one of the toughest environments on Earth. Climate change, whatever its causes, is a direct threat to their way of life. Nobody knows the Arctic as well as the locals, which is why they are not content simply to stand back and let outside experts tell them what's happening. In Canada, where the Inuit are jealously guarding their hard-won autonomy in the country's newest territory, Nunavut, they believe their best hope of survival in this changing environment lies in combining their ancestral knowledge with the best of modern science. This is a challenge in itself.

The Canadian Arctic is a vast, treeless polar desert that's covered with snow for most of the year. Venture into this landscape and you get some idea of the difficulties facing anyone who calls this home. Farming is out of the question and nature offers meagre pickings. Humans first settled in the high Arctic a mere 4500 years ago, surviving by exploiting sea mammals and fish, caribou, musk ox and driftwood. The environment tested them to the limits: sometimes the colonists were successful, sometimes they failed and vanished. But around a thousand years ago one group emerged that was uniquely well adapted to cope with the Arctic environment. These Thule people moved in from Alaska, bringing kayaks, sleds, dogs, pottery and iron tools. They are the ancestors of today's Inuit peoples.

Life for their Canadian descendants is still harsh. Nunavut is 1.9 million square kilometres of rock and ice, and a scattering of islands around the North Pole. It's home to 25,000 people, all but a handful of them indigenous Inuit.

Over the past 40 years, most have abandoned their nomadic ways and settled in the territory's 28 isolated communities, but they still rely heavily on nature to provide food and clothing. Store-bought food has to be flown into Nunavut on one of the most costly air networks in the world, or brought by supply ship during the few ice-free weeks of summer. It would cost a family around £7000 a year to replace country food with imported meat. Economic opportunities are scarce, and for many people state benefits are their only income. "The environment remains our supermarket, there's no doubt about that," Watt-Cloutier says. "When you live in a harsh environment like we do, where it's extremely cold and you go out hunting, it's not a Lipton's cup-a-soup that keeps you warm. It's a nice piece of raw meat that gets your circulation going."

Identity crisis

While the Inuit may not actually starve if hunting and trapping are curtailed by climate change, they will struggle mightily to buy what they need. And there will be other costs. Store-bought food now comprises around 20 to 40 per cent of the average family diet, and this drift away from tradition has affected people's health. Obesity, heart disease and diabetes are beginning to appear in people for whom these have never before been problems. There has also been a crisis of identity as the traditional skills of hunting, trapping and preparing skins have begun to atrophy. In Nunavut's "igloo and e-mail" society, where adults who were born in igloos have children who may never have been out on the land, the suicide rate is six times Canada's national average. "A threat to our country food isn't just a threat to our health and well-being, it's a threat to our cultural survival," says Watt-Cloutier.

With so much at stake, the Inuit are determined to play a key role in teasing out the mysteries of climate change in the Arctic. Having survived there for centuries, they believe their wealth of traditional knowledge is vital to the task. And Western scientists are starting to draw on this wisdom, increasingly referred to as Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, or IQ. "In the early days scientists ignored us when they came up here to study anything. They just figured these people don't know very much so we won't ask them," says John Amagoalik, an Inuit leader and politician. "But in recent years IQ has had much more credibility and weight. Scientists and Inuit are learning to work together."

Bruce Rigby, a geologist and director of the Iqaluit Research Centre in the Nunavut capital, tells the same story. "It's a fundamental shift in designing research," he says. In fact, it is now a requirement for anyone hoping to get permission to do research anywhere in the territory. Communities today are helping to set the research agenda to reflect their most important concerns.

They can turn down applications from scientists they believe will work against their interests, or research projects that will impinge too much on their daily lives and traditional activities.

The rules have polarised scientists, says Wayne Pollard, a permafrost expert from McGill University in Montreal with long experience in the Arctic. At one end of the scale are those with a "rather colonial mentality" who resent having to seek permission from the locals to work in the Arctic. At the other are those who have an uncritical reverence for IQ because it's the politically correct position to take. Between the extremes are scientists like Pollard. He wholeheartedly supports the idea of working with northern communities and listening to the wisdom of experience, but also believes there is a need to develop formal ways of collecting and evaluating IQ. "Some of it is good, some of it is bad, and some of it is totally within the realm of mythology," he says.

As far as climate change is concerned, Pollard thinks the scientific value of traditional knowledge is limited simply because human occupation of the Arctic doesn't go back far enough. Others, however, point out that the first weather stations in the far north date back just 50 years. There are still huge gaps in our knowledge, and despite the scientific onslaught, many predictions are no more than best guesses. IQ could help bridge some gaps and resolve the tremendous uncertainty about how much of what we're seeing is natural capriciousness and how much is a consequence of human activity.

But there are constraints to using IQ in formal scientific research. Besides closed minds and resistance to change, there are conceptual and language difficulties too: terms and concepts are often not directly translatable between the two paradigms of knowledge. Significant insights - and therefore credibility - may be lost in trying to squeeze what is essentially an oral tradition into the straitjacket of written language. What's more, IQ is rarely quantitative, and timing events accurately is often impossible, which many people feel limits its usefulness.

However, not everyone is concerned about integrating IQ and Western science.

Putting their trust in the wisdom that has kept them alive in an environment that has killed many an educated outsider, the Inuit are taking their own initiative. In March this year, for example, the indigenous organisation Nunavut Tunngavik held a conference on climate change that brought together 18 elders from across the territory to explore their personal observations, discuss the implications, and come up with policy suggestions for the Nunavut government.

Ready for anything

The elders' recommendations included a call for houses to be redesigned to withstand avalanches, subsidence, freak storms and similar hazards. They suggested building robust shelters - perhaps dug into rock - to which people could go in emergencies. "We also have to ensure that all communities have a safe harbour," said elder Ashevak, "as without protection lots of boats have been lost." Snowmobiles should be redesigned to become all-terrain vehicles, commented one elder. And another, Qarpik, said: "We should prepare for a time when communities in Nunavut no longer have the sea ice to hunt from. Things like community trade in country foods should be considered." That would allow people from the worst-hit areas to buy meat from those less affected by warming.

The elders also called for much more committed sharing of information between everyone involved in climate research - both elders and Western scientists - and the communities, so that people know what they are facing.

And they wanted locals to have greater involvement in monitoring change.

Nunavut's children are already poised to play their part. This term, several schools start work on an Internet-based science programme called GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment), set up in 1995 by the US and now involving 96 countries. Using materials developed by GLOBE for classroom and field activities, pupils and teachers will collect data for international research projects identified by scientists, who will act as mentors.

In the Arctic, schools will monitor the weather and the state of the snow and ice, as well as timing the seasons by events such as bud burst or the first hatching of insects, says Peter Hardy, an Australian science teacher responsible for getting GLOBE off the ground in Canada. "Kids have to take what they find out back to their communities and share it," says Hardy. "And they'll be encouraged to talk to hunters' and trappers' associations and other groups to understand how it relates to traditional knowledge."

Whether or not this effort will yield worthwhile information on climate change remains to be seen. But its real value could be in building the capacity of northern communities to do scientific research for themselves - and research that more readily reflects the wisdom of experience, comments Rigby.

The hope is that the old mould will be broken by youngsters in Nunavut who are now getting involved in science, but who also have respect for their own culture and world view. "I believe we're on the cusp of some major shifts right now in Arctic science," says Rigby.

From issue 2315 of New Scientist magazine, 03 November 2001, page 36

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