WATT-CLOUTIER: BOOK: The Right to Be Cold

[Oscar]

WATT-CLOUTIER: BOOK: The Right to Be Cold

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KLEIN: "The Right to Be Cold: Sounding the alarm on climate change in the North" by Sheila Watt-Cloutier

[ http://rabble.ca/columnists/2015/03/rig ... ange-north ]

Review By Naomi Klein | March 24, 2015

EXCERPT:

As the title of the book suggests, a major theme of The Right to Be Cold is how climate change poses an existential threat to cultures that are embedded in ice and snow. If the ice disappears, or if it behaves radically differently, then cultural knowledge that has been passed on from one generation to the next loses its meaning. Young people are deprived of the lived experience on the ice that they need to become knowledge carriers, while the animals around which so many cultural practices revolve disappear. As Watt-Cloutier has been arguing for well over a decade now, that means that the failure of the world to act to reduce its emissions to prevent that outcome constitutes a grave human-rights violation.

This argument shares much in common with legal cases lodged by several First Nations against highly polluting resource development: If the water is poisoned and the animals are sick, our courts have been told, then legally protected rights to hunt and fish are being violated. Watt-Cloutier's innovation was extending this argument, which had previously focused on site-specific mines and dams, to the planetary-scale crisis of climate change. With the help of a team of legal advisers and backed by a long list of Inuit elders, she submitted a landmark petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights arguing that, by failing to prevent climate change, the United States was violating Inuit human rights.

Part of what makes this book so illuminating is that it insists on being more than a manifesto. In weaving politics with her own life story, themes emerge that challenge the tendency to treat climate change as some new and singular threat. In Watt-Cloutier's narrative, just as dog sleds have been replaced by snow machines, so the emissions from the entire fossil-fuel-driven global economy are threatening the survival of her culture. And just as pollutants from industrial activities have ended up in the flesh and fat of the animals Inuit people rely on for food, so these same industrial activities are causing global temperatures to rise, threatening the continued existence of these same animals. Climate change, in other words, is nothing new -- it is the ultimate expression of the same threats that have been ravaging this part of the world for a very long time.

Inuit culture, however, is far from dead and in fact is thriving despite the odds. That, argues Watt-Cloutier, is very good news, because her people's hard-won knowledge about how to live sustainably on the land "could serve as a model for all nations, compelling the world to make the strong cuts in emissions needed to mitigate climate change."

Yet, this moral leadership is only possible if Arctic politicians resist the temptation to adopt an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude toward fossil-fuel extraction beneath their rapidly melting ice. On this point, Watt-Cloutier leaves no room for ambiguity. After summarizing the devastating impacts of oil and gas extraction on Indigenous lands around the world, she demands: "How is it that the extraction industry is going to work better for us? This is one heck of a risky business we're getting into as a means of pulling ourselves out of poverty."

Moreover, if governments in Nunavut and Greenland join the fossil-fuel gold rush, the ability to provide critical climate leadership will disappear. "Just a few years ago, we stood solidly together on high moral ground to defend a way of life," she writes. "Yet our pursuing resource-extraction industries now means that that high ground is fracturing as quickly as the ice is melting."

Months before a major United Nations summit on climate change in Paris, and with low oil prices calling many high-cost forms of extraction (including Arctic drilling) into question, these are fighting words. Clearly, the silenced, homesick girl is gone for good. In her place is a confident and forceful leader, sounding the alarm that unless we change course -- and fast -- our collective home will become incurably sick.

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Naomi Klein's latest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.