The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [105]
“She says, ‘We’re always changing.’”
“Hm? Oh, yes. Ask her to elaborate.”
In my defense, I might have been distracted from the interview no matter who was translating. What I was hearing from my subject, a fiftyish Sámi reindeer herder in Lapland, was quickly turning into what I’d already heard in many other interviews around the Northern Rim. It was fast becoming clear to me that the perspective I’d carried into this project would need to be broadened considerably.
I had come up here—I thought—to write a book about climate change. My plan was to document not only the physical realities of thawing ice and soil, but their corresponding impacts upon traditional aboriginal societies. I’d wanted to find the faces and tragedies hiding inside the pixels of my satellite images and climate models. I’d envisioned being welcomed with gratitude, after traveling thousands of miles to record personal accounts of meatless hunts, starving wildlife, and perilously thinning ice. In my year-plus vacation from number crunching, I would become the Anna Politkovskaya of Arctic climate change.
In retrospect it’s a bit embarrassing. Instead of gratitude I got a resigned look and the tired recitation of stories told once too often. Often I was the third, fourth, or tenth outsider interrupting someone’s busy summer, demanding to know how climate change was destroying their life. In airplanes and hotels I bumped into camera crews and book authors, all asking for leads to a stricken hunter to interview, a melting lump of ice to film.
I got all of those stories of woe. My notebooks are overflowing with them. Our Sámi reindeer herder is now spending a bundle on hay, because bizarre winter rains have made her animals unable to scrape through the ice-crusted snow to eat.444 There is no question that climate change is wreaking havoc upon northern peoples, as described in earlier chapters. These problems will only get worse in the future. But to isolate climate change, and portray it as the sole concern facing northern societies is disingenuous. It is but one part of a much bigger story.
Across a vast chunk of Canada’s bitterly frozen extreme north, a place with no permanent roads and too cold even to grow wood, a remarkable political experiment is unfolding.
The new Nunavut Territory—the first redrawing of Canada’s map since 1949—has just celebrated its first decade. With 1.9 million square kilometers, approximately the size of Mexico, Nunavut is geographically large enough to be a good-sized country. But if it were, with barely thirty thousand people it would have the lowest population density on Earth.
Its residents are hard at work changing that. Nunavut has the fastest population growth rate of anywhere in Canada, and it isn’t relying on foreign immigrants to do it. It is birthing twenty-five babies per thousand people versus the national average of eleven. With a median age of just twenty-three years (Canada’s average is forty), Nunavut is extraordinarily youthful. More than a third of its population is under the age of fifteen.445
As of Canada’s last census in 2006, Nunavut’s population had leapt more than 10% in just five years. Iqaluit—its new capital sprouting from the site of an old Cold War U.S. Air Force base—jumped nearly 20%. With vacancy rates near zero, new housing can’t be built fast enough in Iqaluit to keep up with demand. Apartments go for two to three thousand dollars per month, and the city vies with Fort McMurray for the dubious distinction of being the most expensive rental market in Canada.
I first met Elisapee Sheutiapik, Iqaluit’s mayor, in 2007. She bubbles with enthusiasm about Nunavut’s potential. It is a very exciting time for northern aboriginal people, she explains. We are regaining control of our homeland. There are more jobs and new opportunities. The whole world