By Kiera Butler
Unlike much of the rest of the world, the people of the Canadian Arctic don’t need to be convinced that global warming is real: they’ve observed it firsthand for years. The lean transitional period between summer and winter — when the ice is too thick for seal-hunting boats to cut through but too thin for the hunters to risk driving on — is much longer than it used to be. Elders remember a time when dog teams would leave long streams of frozen breath behind them as they ran. No more.
While world governments argue over the urgency of global warming, Nunatsiaq News, the English-Inuktitut bilingual weekly that serves the province of Nunavut and northern Quebec, has moved beyond the debate, searching out stories that give readers a sense of why their homeland is changing and what the future might bring.
With an editorial staff of five and a weekly circulation of just over 6,000, Nunatsiaq might seem like the small time, but in the vast tundra of the Canadian Arctic, everything is relative. The paper’s offices are in Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital city (population 6,000), which was built on a former U.S. Air Force base in the shadows of the low hills on the southern tip of Baffin Island, about 1,300 miles north of Ottawa. In winter, Iqaluit’s white landscape is broken only by a few boulders that receding glaciers left behind; during the short summer, the tundra comes alive with sedge, heather, mosses, and a few dwarf willows, grown sideways from wind.
Nunatsiaq serves not only Iqaluit, but also forty-two other communities with a total population of about 40,000. In this region, most outposts are geographically isolated: no roads connect one community to the next, and nearly everything, including the Nunatsiaq News, must be brought in by plane. “In some communities, we are the only source of printed news,” says a Nunatsiaq reporter, Jane George. “People read every word.” Despite the number of communities that Nunatsiaq must report on, the paper nonetheless gives prominent space to coverage of climate change. For people in the Arctic, the science and politics behind the gradual heating of the far north is major news. “We don’t have to tell the story of the hunter who has trouble hunting because of the thin ice,” says Jim Bell, editor in chief of Nunatsiaq. “Our readers already know that. But what our readers do want to know is the scientific projections of where the Arctic is going to be fifty years from now.”
Some news comes from the Arctic’s own backyard. This past November, Nunatsiaq dredged up a story from the bottom of local lakes, where a team of researchers had found heightened levels of chlorophyll, an indicator that the northern waters are getting warmer. But to report news of international research and politics, Nunatsiaq also looks beyond the edges of the tundra. George covers several international conferences every year, cutting through political rhetoric and scientific jargon to deliver lucid stories that matter to Nunatsiaq’s readers. “First of all I have to make it interesting,” says George. “Second of all, I have to make it understandable. I have to understand the science backward and forward so I can explain it to someone who might only have a grade seven education.” George tries to weave political nuance into her stories, as well. From the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal in December, for example, she reported on a lobbying alliance between Nunavut and some Pacific island nations, areas of the world with next to nothing in common except that both have already been hard hit by the effects of climate change.
Part of Jim Bell’s mission is to make readers aware of how their own habits — not just those of the rest of the world — contribute to global warming. Because of its harsh climate, Nunavut consumes almost five times the national Canadian average of fuel per capita, thus pouring more carbon into the atmosphere. In a 2003 article, the reporter Dwane Wilkin wrote about one piece of the problem: the far north receives government subsidies for fuel, and those subsidies create the illusion that fuel is less expensive than it really is. “If generous government subsidies didn’t exist, it would probably be cheaper — and a whole lot more efficient — to stoke home furnaces with wads of $20 bills,” Wilkin wrote.
The next few months, Bell says, will be an interesting time for climate-change stories in the Arctic. The newly elected Canadian Conservative party, whose power base is in the oil-rich province of Alberta, has not said much about the Kyoto Accord on Global Warming. The Nunavut government has just raised quotas on polar bear hunting, despite warnings from scientists, who say global warming has caused the polar bear population to dwindle. Then there’s the ongoing story of changes in behavior. Seal hunters, for example, have begun to check satellite images of ice to determine where it is thick enough to hunt. “The effects have been so gradual and so subtle that people are in some ways already adapting to it,” says Bell. And that news — that global warming is quietly becoming part of Arctic culture — might be the most interesting story of all.
Kiera Butler is an assistant editor at CJR.
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