AT THE CONCLUSION OF OUR VIRTUAL journey, we feel compelled to reflect on these northern lands and the future of its peoples. The Maritime Far Northeast has not figured prominently in the calculus of nations since Martin Frobisher initiated the search for the Northwest Passage in the 1570s (see Chapter 7). Many of the people living in this huge pristine region continue lives and cultures that have existed for thousands of years. Our wanderings through this landscape—dipping into its history and cultures and its episodic interactions with the rest of the world—have revealed a place that largely for reasons of geography and climate has stood apart—grazed by whalers, occasionally exploited by miners and fishermen, and coerced into hosting Cold War Distant Early Warning and military installations—while the rest of the world has raced forward.
The Maritime Far Northeast is now experiencing an unprecedented political, cultural, and economic awakening that will involve the rest of the world, which will soon to be exploring for oil and minerals and sending ships through the Arctic Ocean and the ice-free Northwest Passage. Our purpose in writing this book has been to bring greater public awareness to a long-neglected region that is destined to play a larger world role in the future than it has in the past. Climate change, resource extraction, commercial ocean transit, environmental pollution, and the future of this northernmost region’s native populations, are key issues for the North as they are also for the wider world. A rational way forward is needed; in turn, the small-footprint societies of the Maritime Far Northeast may provide models of adaptation useful for sustainable development in the rest of the world.
The geographic chapters of this book have documented the many similarities, continuities, and connections that exist throughout the Maritime Far Northeast. Most are rooted in the region’s dominant physical characteristics: cold climate, cold waters, and an ocean-current system that exports nutrient-rich waters as far south as Nova Scotia and sea ice to northern Nova Scotia. The shores linked by the East Greenland, West Greenland, and Labrador currents share a common host of sea mammal, sea bird, and fish species. Land resources were more geographically diverse. The most important of these land and sea resources—caribou, moose, harp seals, bowhead whales, salmon, and codfish—provided food, hides for boat covers and clothing, and building materials. These species provided a common base for the region’s cultures, allowing for those with suitable adaptations to populate the region. Eskimo cultures could easily spread from Greenland far south along Subarctic coasts, while Indian tribes sharing closely related Algonquian languages were able to spread as far north as the range of the interior-dwelling woodland caribou and other forest animals, from Maine to Labrador and Quebec.
There are many lessons to be learned from the history and adaptations of northern cultures. One of the first is that change is inevitable and the ability to adapt or to mitigate the threat (for instance by reducing CO2 emissions) is key to survival. Humans cannot irrevocably force nature to their bidding, especially in the Arctic, and cannot always rely on technological innovations to prevail against adversity. Eastern Arctic prehistory is full of such lessons. The Pre-Dorset and Thule migrations into the eastern Arctic were opportunistic gambits that were facilitated by warming events. Pre-Dorset people carried an Arctic land-hunting economy developed in Siberia into what is now Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, but once there had to diversify and adopt toggling harpoons for sea-mammal hunting to secure survival when faced with caribou-population crashes. Dorset people who hunted seals and walrus at polynias (areas of open-water caused by wind or upwelling in the midst of dense pack ice) in the High Arctic were faced with local extinction or southward migration when these game “oases” froze over during the cold Sub-boreal Period (500 BC–AD 500). Later, during the Medieval Warm Period (ca. AD 800–1350), Thule culture peoples discovered a new niche for their whale-hunting economy in the ice-free passages of the Canadian Arctic. Concurrently, a less stormy, more ice-free North Atlantic encouraged Norse agriculturalists to settle in Iceland and Greenland. But once in Greenland, where their population quickly grew to about 5,000, the onset of the Little Ice Age (AD 1450–1850) forced retrenchment and eventual abandonment of this locale. Colder conditions encouraged Inuit sea-mammal hunters to reoccupy vacated Norse homelands.
The lessons are clear: climate change provides opportunities, and new technologies may also be required, but societies must beware of depleted environmental capital; cycles exist and good times become bad times. When human population growth intersects declining resources, disaster forces extinction, migration, or new subsistence strategies. Arctic hunting cultures and marginal agriculturalists like the Greenland Norse are excellent examples of the propensity for human systems to collapse. In this sense humans operate like most other biological systems. Often when one culture declines, another, with different subsistence strategies, benefits. These processes are clearly evident throughout the 4,500-year history of the Maritime Far Northeast. Most northern societies in the prehistoric record appear to have lived well within the sustainable band of the resource oscillation curve.
10.01 Permafrost, Perception, and the Circumpolar World
The landmasses around the Arctic Ocean presents a strikingly different perspective of the world than the customary Mercator projection that has dominated geographic education. This map shows the distribution of permafrost, which–like sea ice–is shrinking and retreating to the north. Our new ability to virtually turn the world on its head reminds us that, as the physical and biological world responds to climate change, our perception of the world must also change. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Arctic.
Climate matters. But until recently its role has not been fully understood or appreciated. The changing aspect of climate that humans react to on a daily basis is weather. The more significant changes in climate have a longer periodicity and more lasting impacts. During the Late Archaic period (5,000–3,500 years ago) in Maine and the southern Canadian Maritime provinces, oak was a major forest component; today these forests are mixed pine, spruce and hardwoods with little oak, but oak and southern trees are beginning to move north again, and white pines are displaying record yearly growth spurts. Climate-sensitive animals, insects, and plants are moving north; and people—and modern cultures—are too. According to Serge Payette, the northern Quebec boreal forest landscape that he studies “is changing in front of [our] eyes. The annual mean temperature in the area east of Hudson Bay has increased by at least 2°C [3.6 °F]. The permafrost is thawing, and the tree line has begun a slow march north. Along the eastern coast of Hudson Bay and Labrador, new seedlings have begun to take root beyond their historical limits” (Canadian Geographic 2012). A comprehensive analysis of world climate, based on ice-core analysis, documents the past century as the warmest in the last 4,000 years and projects that if current trends continue, the era since the Industrial Revolution will be the warmest of the entire 10,000-year Holocene postglacial period (Marcott et al. 2013).
Remarkable changes are also taking place in the marine system. For the past several years sea ice has been diminishing in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and around Newfoundland; open water has been occurring regularly during midwinter in the Disko Bay region of West Greenland and other areas, including the Northwest Passage. The 2012 NOAA Arctic Report Card recorded a host of new developments across the Arctic: increased size and incidence of meltwater ponds on the pack ice that render the ice transparent to sunlight have stimulated massive under-ice blooms of algae and plankton; record-breaking melts on the Greenland Ice Cap; Arctic Ocean sea ice continuing to thin and reaching a summer minimum 18 percent below its 2007 record (see Chapter 2). From the Arctic to Antarctic, from the Himalayas to Andes, glaciers are disappearing today. Humans have ignored these signs in the past: Bolivia’s 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya Glacier, which began losing mass in 1940, was projected in 1998 to have disappeared completely by 2015. Without any fanfare, it disappeared sometime in 2009 because the rate of thaw had tripled since 2000 (Feldman 2009).
What requires more careful analysis is the long-term effect that these statistics portend for the environment and humans. The warming trends and northward movement of development and immigration we see today will be as clearly visible in the future’s archaeological record, but if we wait so long to understand them, our ability to adapt may be limited or lost. These changes have already impacted Inuit and northern economies as traditional, relatively inexpensive, subsistence methods of hunting and fishing are replaced by motorboats and snow machines. Seal hunting and fishing on the spring ice are declining. But there are compensations. Increased open water is facilitating commercial fisheries; Inuit farmers and sheepherders in southwest Greenland are emulating their Norse forerunners in these locations; new mines are emerging from receding glaciers, and glacial meltwater may soon produce a bonanza of cheap electric power for use in industrial development, powering furnaces to smelt shipped-in bauxite aluminum ore.
10.02 Sledging Near Uummannaq
Will Richard and master seal hunter Unartoq enjoy a break as they travel by dog sledge on the spring ice near Uummannaq.
New techniques that were not available just a few decades ago—computer modeling, satellite observations, ice cores, and many other sources of information and analytical data—are facilitating the new field of climate science. Each year brings new revelations, like the recent recognition that atmospheric soot (“black carbon”)—created from volcanic dust, clearing of agricultural land, domestic and industrial heating, and engine emissions—is a significant factor in the melting of alpine snowfields, glaciers, and sea ice. Although at present it is far from being a predictive science, nearly all the data emerging shows that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. Nowhere else is the environment changed as dramatically and quickly by a temperature change of only one degree, turning ice into water or vice versa. These changes are affecting life and land from one end of the Maritime Far Northeast to the other, from the logger in Maine to the seal-hunter in Greenland.
It has only been in the last few hundred years or so that a people could afford to ignore their local geographies as completely as we do and still survive … Something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year, the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles.
Barry Lopez, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
Today’s global culture has forgotten the social value of rootedness, place, and tradition that is so deeply ingrained in northern cultures and peoples. Without that connection to place, the importance of ecology, of understanding the natural systems that operate upon the land, also becomes abstract. Learning more about these northern places and their small-scale cultures may help the wider world learn how to live more lightly on planet Earth.
The relationship between land and place is fundamental to this understanding. Land is the physical and biotic environment. Place is the identity that a people form by their relationship to the land. This relationship is expressed through responsible utilization of the land and its creatures. Awareness of the interdependency of various elements within an ecosystem is crucial to maintaining balance. Those living in and with these environments are more likely to exercise their stewardship role than people living in environments that have been massively transformed by agriculture, industry, or urbanization. The peoples of this northeastern arc, be they Greenlanders, Labradorians, Newfoundlanders, Maritimers, or Mainers, all share a worldview expressed as sense and spirit of place. These are cultures still rooted in the land, still in touch with “wild nature” (as Europeans and Russians express it), who ideally experience contentment as an expression of that awareness. What we have observed in these peoples and their cultures is “groundedness,” a recognition of the responsibility for maintaining an ecology of balance between humans and the land. This is part of cultural identity.
People living in the Maritime Far Northeast have developed mental and behavioral adaptations that have helped them cope with prolonged cold, darkness, and long periods of winter confinement. Humans around the world respond in various ways to challenging environments, whether bitter cold or burning heat, by cultivating stamina, a sense of humor, and a sense of achievement in learning how to survive. Wasteful use of animals is rarely seen in the North, partly out of the hunter’s respect for the animal that has given its life, but also because waste is inefficient. This is another aspect of cultural identity.
Environmental wisdom comes from a sensual attunement of our minds and actions to the land. Poet Wesley McNair reminds us that “place is not only a noun but a verb; one cannot come to know it without locating oneself in it, a slow and interior process” (2003: 187). Such a mind-nature connection has been a basic principal of human survival for thousands, if not millions, of years of human evolution. Wisdom is nurtured by the human senses of sight, taste, smell, touch, and hearing: the people of a place share this sense-based knowledge within a particular land and time. The primary purpose of this sense of place is for survival. Today, this connection is fading as humans become increasingly migratory and as they turn from adaptation to nature to manipulation of nature through increasingly remote technology. To the Inuit, Innu, and Labrador settler, as to the Newfoundlander, awareness of this ecological web is the connection to nature. Cultures that are aware of dependence upon the land live consciously, in the moment, through traditional ways of knowing how to extract from the land life-giving heat, water, food, and shelter. Immersed within their environment, fishermen recognize how to find fish and what gear and/or bait to use.
10.03 Basque Hat Pin?
Bill Fitzhugh displays an oversized iron spike he excavated from a blacksmith shop at the Basque-Inuit archaeological site at Hare Harbor, Quebec Lower North Shore.
Sealing in the Arctic is a case study of such ecological dependency. Perhaps the biggest difference between sealing in the Subarctic and Arctic is that Inuit view seals as a primary food source—and they utilize the entire animal, not just the hide. The Western world has been unable to recognize that “Inuit subsistence was a matter of cultural right, as well as need” and that “food was only available through hunting” (Wenzel 1991: 55, 113). Greenlanders like to say, “We eat nothing that is kept behind bars or in a cage. What we eat lives free until we kill it for food.” Even with rifles, Inuit sealing constitutes a traditional practice. The hunt is embedded in Inuit kinship structure as the means of sharing what is harvested from the land. The subsistence hunters of Greenland and Nunavut have very little choice of resources that they can process for trade, and seals are not in danger of extinction, so utilizing this local resource is essential to enter the market economy. The ban on importation of seal products by the United States and the European Union reflects an ignorance of local resources and traditions; it is an unnecessary intrusion of foreign values that has no beneficial effect on northern ecology.
In many northern societies, teaching survival continues through oral tradition. For example, a story told by Inuit elders about a hunt fraught with danger to young boys contains many references to natural features of the land that helps the hunter-to-be construct a mental map of the hunting route. Oral history remains a viable technique for understanding the world through narrative. The peoples of the Maritime Far Northeast still engage these age-old traditions that emulate the wisdom of elders and pass on key information about values, hunting and survival skills, and belief systems that resonate with the land and their history in it. Although most of these peoples are staunch Christians, elements of shamanism, the former religion of northern peoples, find expression in their daily lives. The Maritime Far Northeast offers at least a conceptual nucleus of living in balance with ecology and the land where both individuals and society can learn ways of living that have been tested over the ages and are relevant across cultures and across national borders.
From … the wisdom of centuries, we know at last that the universe does not revolve around us, that we are citizens in a living community where our membership implies stewardship.
Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
Much of this vast northern region has yet to be developed under the rubric of progress. Unlike many of the lands to its south, the Maritime Far Northeast has seen little industrial development; it has not been urbanized or suburbanized. But even this remote land is inexorably being sucked into the vortex as economies begin to draw on its resources with rising market demand and new technological solutions to Arctic exploitation. The region is slowly becoming aware of the outcomes of thoughtless economic growth and careless environmental and social degradation that has come with outside intervention in its fisheries, forestry, and mineral developments.
In the Maritime Far Northeast, history is coming full circle. Through the early twentieth century, whales were sought for their oil, until technology replaced the diminishing number of whales in the earth’s oceans with abundant supplies of crude oil extracted from the earth’s crust. Now, as land sources are proving inadequate to meet petroleum needs, commercial interest has returned to the waters of the Far Northeast to procure oil from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and to tap natural gas from the waters of Nova Scotia. Over the last few years, the seafloor lying beneath the icy waters of Nunavut, the Maritimes, and Greenland continues to be explored for oil, and discoveries are being made.
10.04 Dorset Figurine
This soapstone figure from Shuldham Island, Saglek, Labrador, probably of a woman, displays the high-collared parka hood that is a distinctive, although seemingly impractical, feature of Dorset-culture clothing.
Energy is “the lifeblood of modern Arctic settlements,” according to Julian Dowdeswell and Michael Hambrey (2002: 189), who go on to note that, “every mammal needs to generate its own heat, and this is ‘expensive,’ so it [a mammal] must be well-insulated to prevent heat loss” (2002: 195). From insects to humans, the importance of energy to maintain body warmth becomes a more critical condition of life as one proceeds toward the north. Current demand demonstrates that humans living in Arctic settlements are increasing their need for energy. Over the last century, per capita energy consumption increased four-fold while human population increased six-fold, and fossil-fuel consumption increased sixteen-fold (Flannery 2005: 77). These energy needs are real, but in both the Arctic and in our temperate world, there are sufficient alternate resources. People who utilize local resources and resource sharing to meet their needs are more economical. In northern forest regions many people are again heating mostly with wood. Iceland’s 250,000 people are heating their homes and powering their industries with volcanic energy tapped from the locally thin crust of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Greenland has tied its future to electricity generated from glacial meltwater.
Environmental and social destruction does not need to be a subtext for progress, which can coexist with environmental and social conservation, if certain parameters are understood and respected. The Maritime Far Northeast can support only small populations: that is the key to their sustainable lifeways and approach to husbanding the land and its resources. A new phase of geographic expansion into the Arctic that coincides with increasing climatic and environmental stress threatens that balance.
Recently climate change has become an even more powerful force of change than the pressures of economic development, modernization, westernization and their attendant social ills. Rising sea levels are flooding out Arctic villages on Alaska’s coast; melting sea ice is depriving people of their livelihood; and the world’s demands for petrochemical energy threatens to endanger subsistence food supplies and the ecological web on which life depends. The international economist Jeffrey Sachs warns that while “science and technology can be harnessed…[T]he harder question is whether we will be well enough organized, and cooperative enough on a global scale, to seize the chance to save the planet from climate disaster” (2008: 74).
Robert Reich reminds us that humans must be more than just consumers and investors; we must be citizens of the global polity (2007). Being a citizen of anything requires a duality of rights and responsibilities. In the throes of rapid development, much of the Western and Eastern worlds have shrugged off their responsibilities as citizens and have chosen, rather, to be characterized as “consumers,” a passive identity solely bestowed by the market. Such a categorization erases our sense of place, increasing the distance between people and land. A consumer is simply an economic category that excludes most of the other social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of human beings. As consumers, we are modern-day nomads ranging across the land seeking work and access to goods and services, wherever they can be found—in box stores, fast-food franchises, or the Internet. In Greenland, subsistence hunting-and-gathering cultures have persevered for at least 4,500 years. Yet, when these roving hunters are relocated to permanent settlements, either voluntarily or involuntarily, microcosms of suburban consumption patterns develop. Northern peoples in these growing towns and cities soon emulate the values of their southern relatives: more consumer goods and less connection with the land.
Two decades ago Native American writer William Least Heat-Moon expressed the rising consciousness of conflict between humanity and environment. Conceding that white men have become stewards of the land, he cautioned that these white men have “the big machine but not the operating instructions … the white man’s … way of life is the land’s death” (1991: 239). For two centuries, aboriginal peoples have been forced to emulate and assimilate the Euro-American model of progress through technological development and the expansion of the global economy. Today there are signs that the world is beginning to reverse direction and heed the advice and sustainable ways of indigenous peoples and individualists who live at the tail ends of the bell curve. While the historical and modern societies of the North should not be idealized, they do provide some alternatives that could be adapted as models for sustainable living elsewhere. But, instead, over the last few decades, traditional aboriginal technology has been replaced by systems that dramatically increase the dependence on imported goods and petroleum products. As the North adopts the Western model it sacrifices its self-sufficiency and independence, the qualities that helped its peoples to adapt to changing conditions over thousands of years. Sharing the natural wonders of the Maritime Far Northeast from Maine to Greenland is one way to raise consciousness of what we are in danger of losing, and to suggest what we must do to save it.
10.05 Migration: Umiak with Spirit Figures
Abraham Anghik Ruben’s sculpture was exhibited at the National Museum of the American Indian in conjunction with the Arctic Studies Conference hosted by the Smithsonian in 2012. This work evokes the ancient traditions of his Inuvialuit ancestry of the western Canadian Arctic, where seasonal migrations marked the passage of time and relationships between animals and humans were mediated by hunting ritual and shamanic ceremony.
In a cairn on an island northwest of Upernavik the small, palm-sized Kingittorsuak Runestone, chiseled by Norse hunters in the late thirteenth century, was found by a Greenland Inuit in 1824. Among today’s “runes” are scientific reports about shifting climate; in a changed world that is much larger than it was in Norse times, these are the messages that must be decoded.
When Will’s great-great-great-grandfather Moyse Richard was born in Lower Canada in 1800, the world’s human population had just reached one billion for the first time. The US Census and the United Nations project that by 2015 our population will number eight billion; just during the lifespan of one generation, Earth’s population will have quadrupled. Not only are there are more of us, we also live longer and have dramatically intensified our demands on the environment. The majority now resides in metropolitan spaces, and many of us live in a megacity—one with a population of at least 10 million—because the number of these urban areas has expanded from three in 1975 to twenty or more in 2009. Humans have been exponentially degrading the Earth’s carrying capacity, for example, through the fastest rate of species extinction in the last 65 million years. The cause of this observed extinction is displacement of species habitat for the purpose of human food production, transportation infrastructure, and urban sprawl.
Four decades ago, in the oft-cited Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth, its authors (Meadows et al. 1972) gave new life to the eighteenth-century Malthusian doctrine that population growth outdistances the ability of technology and the planet to support the rising numbers of human beings. Now, in the second decade of the twentieth century the demands of seven billion people may be causing the earth to approach a tipping point beyond which there is no return for this tiny planet floating in the void of space. As economist Jeffrey Sachs writes in The Price of Civilization: “[The] human impacts on nature are for the first time in human history so great that they threaten the planet’s core biophysical functioning.… Our peril is unprecedented, and human knowledge, values and social institutions are far behind the curve” (2011: 175). The paradigms of economics and ecology must coalesce into one, and reconcile the true costs and benefits to humanity and to the land that sustains us.
Since the Renaissance naturalists and academics have explored the world, discovering and dissecting its constituent parts and building systems of thought that described and explained them, creating scholarly disciplines such as medicine, physics, biology, electronics, anthropology, and many others. Today we are discovering that what once seemed like rigid boundaries between fields are porous and are interconnected in complex ways. Disciplines are now merging into sets of systems linked by interdisciplines: ecosystems, bioregions, molecular biology, and biochemistry, string theory, political economy—perhaps all eventually to be incorporated into some grand theory or set of linked systems. Increasingly, economics is integrating costs of production (air and water pollution) into the cost of doing business—perhaps along lines that E.O. Wilson would approve. Decades in the making, economics and ecology are becoming increasingly connected and, in fact, are cooperating in ways that are encouraged or demanded by governments.
From the activities of individuals to heads of state, new ideas are taking root as the world awakens to the effects of climate change and the concerns of northern peoples. Among the important new connections between these lands in recent decades is the political integration resulting from pan-Inuit political organizations. The new governments of Greenland and neighboring Nunavut have given their Inuit populations a greater role in establishing policies that in many respects lead the world in areas of cultural and environmental awareness and sustainability. Informed by a northern indigenous perspective, the Inuit Circumpolar Council has brought Inuit cultural values to the floor of the United Nations, influencing the policies of nations and sensitizing world leaders to the need for meaningful consultation with northern people. The newly created Arctic Council, with representation from Arctic nations, has quickly established its legitimacy as a pan-Arctic political organization and has contributed to the formulation and coordination of international policies such as trans-Arctic shipping, search and rescue, pollution, and industrial development. These political developments are being spurred by the crisis of climate change currently being experienced in the North.
The attention of an international group of scientists, researchers and museums has produced some of the most useful and well-grounded information. Climate studies—which have included four decades of collaboration between the National Science Foundation and Danish scientists on the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP-1, GISP-2); glaciology studies on Baffin and Ellesmere Islands by the universities of Colorado and Massachusetts; and multinational studies of sea-sediment cores in Baffin Bay, the Labrador Sea, and East Greenland Sea by the Canadian Bedford Institute of Oceanography—have produced many pioneering discoveries. Early on the GISP collaborators learned that air bubbles trapped in ancient glacial ice constitute an archive of the earth’s atmospheric “pulse”that could be tracked back hundreds of thousands of years (Oeschger et al. 1985). The ice sheet data has yielded information on changing CO2 levels, documented the history of volcanism, and established a record of storminess—which coincides with more sea salt being transferred into the atmosphere (Mayewski and White 2002). Perhaps the most striking revelation from Greenland’s ice cores was that global climates have shifted from cold (glacial-dominated) to warm in a few decades or less—which is almost instantaneous on the geologic time-scale (Alley 2002). These and other projects have produced hundreds of scientists who have worked across the borders of the MFNE, and this pattern is now expanding to include Canadian, American, Greenlandic, and Scandinavian students who frequently seek higher education in each other’s countries.
Scholarly and educational exchange programs have also blossomed. The Smithsonian built upon its long history of archaeological research ranging from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Labrador and Baffin Island to explore one of the more importat Nordic–North American immigrant legacies, Leif Eriksson’s Vinland voyages, in a major exhibition and book, Vikings: the North Atlantic Saga (Fitzhugh and Ward 2000). The Nordic countries, Greenland, and Canada cooperated with the Smithsonian in producing this exhibition that also explored the growing archaeological evidence of Norse contacts with Canada’s Dorset, Thule, and prehistoric Indian populations.
In May 2005 the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center mounted a Festival of Greenland, cosponsored with the Home Rule Government of Greenland and the Embassy of Denmark. A large contingent of Greenlandic crafts people, musicians, and government representatives were present, including Robert Peary IV, the great-grandson of Robert E. Peary and the Inughuit (Polar Inuit) woman, Aleqasina. Other connections between Maine, Labrador, and Greenland have continued through the legacies of Peary and MacMillan and the modern research programs of Bowdoin College’s Peary–MacMillan Arctic Museum.
In October 2012 the Smithsonian Institution’s Arctic Studies Center hosted the 18th biennial Inuit Studies Conference, which attracted 600 participants, including scholars and Inuit from Canada and Greenland. Its theme, “Learning from the Top of the World,” was enunciated in films, seminars, scholarly sessions, and exhibitions that brought indigenous representatives, Inuit youths and elders together with political leaders, policy experts, and government officials to discuss the impacts of climate change and ways that its deleterious effects might be minimized. Inuit youth expressed concern about rising sea levels, more powerful storms, mineral development and industrialization, pollution, and the social consequences of the immigration and globalization on Inuit language and culture. A highlight of the conference was a youth group from Uummannaq, northern Greenland, who performed classical and traditional Inuit music and presided over the North American premier of Inuk, a film about loss and affirmation of cultural identity among Greenland’s young people.
10.06 Gannet Aloft
Gannets, one of the most majestic large birds of the northwest Atlantic coast, have been constant companions as we cruise the Maritime Far Northeast. Unfortunately we have lost to human predation its former avian partner, the great auk.
The challenge we face is therefore to find some means of enjoying the same degree of harmony and tranquility as those of more traditional communities while benefiting fully from the material developments of the world as we find it at the dawn of a new millennium.
The return of the eagle and the puffin in New England and the Maritimes, restoration of whale species indigenous to the waters of the Maritime Far Northeast, the imposition of quotas on narwhal and polar bears in Canada and Greenland, and an increase in number of parklands throughout the region are all examples of successful stewardship policies. It is important that we preserve these living archives of nature, not only for humans but for the sake of this total ecosphere. Nature remains a repository of the sacred, and flourishing small-scale cultures communicate the sanctity of nature that sustains us in our built-up world.
As geographers, photographers, and scientists, and as concerned citizens, we and others are sounding the alarm of climate change and offer proactive small-scale solutions, many drawn from life in the Maritime Far Northeast. With climate change now convincingly documented and recognized as a worldwide phenomenon, we need to think beyond geopolitical borders. With a global market, international corporations, mass culture, satellite-based communications, English as a dominant language, and global warming, borders are passé except as pertains to issues of security. The environmental and social problems that we face are not contained within national borders.
Much like the genetic information contained within species of wild wheat or wild maize as a repository of benefits and costs, the knowledge of small indigenous cultures, such as those of the Maritime Far Northeast, can assist the global culture to find ways of living responsibly within that nature of which we are all very much a part. Like the transformation of a wooden or stone shelter into a home, it is only through intimacy with the land that we develop a sense of place. All too often, peripatetic ways and omnipresent technology act as firewalls to bar us from the world of nature and from ourselves. In these journeys the authors have never really left home: we have simply enlarged the circumference of home to include the wider reaches of the Maritime Far Northeast. We hope that these journeys will encourage you the reader to make the Maritime Far Northeast part of your world, too.