Apparently Al Gore isn’t the only person attempting to make the world aware of the threats of global warming. A man named Simon Nattaq, an Inuit, had his life changed when he lost his feet to frostbite after falling through ice that had become thin from higher Arctic temperatures. Today he has prosthetic feet and still hunts to this day. He and other Inuit from the United States, Canada, Russia, and Greenland have been spending more than a decade making the world aware of thinning ice and wind shifts and how well-established hunting patterns are being threatened due to the deaths of much of their hunting game.
Ice surfing, as shown in this picture, in addition to other “ice” activities, cannot happen in the Arctic because the ice is becoming too thin.
Picture Credit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/42/Ice_surfing.jpg/800px-Ice_surfing.jpg
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, recently nominated with Al Gore for a Nobel Peace Prize, was scheduled to argue yesterday before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the United States is violating the Inuit people’s rights because it is the country that emits the largest quantity of greenhouse gases into the atmoshpere.
The Arctic region suffers the most from this current problem of global warming, and unless action is taken now to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Arctic region’s late-summer sea ice will be almost entirely gone by the second half of the twenty-first century. This means that our children will be dealing with the severe consequences of global warming unless action is taken now to reduce its impacts. Polar bears, seals, and walruses are already moving north because of the lack of solid ice in their current locations. There have been reports of walruse and seal pups stranded on pieces of ice. They die because their mothers are too big to float with them on these shrinking “rafts” of ice.
According to the weather service in Canada, last winter was their warmest since 1948.
Watt-Cloutier says, “The wisdom and answers from our hunting culture may leave us, because the ice is melting so fast.”
If the polar ice keeps melting, the Inuit culture faces extinction. There will be no more Arctic animals for them to hunt or from which to get their furs that keep them warm. Their climate is certainly part of what make the Inuit who they are. It would be a pity if something so preventable, like global warming, put an end to their lives as they now know them.
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