the fast runner

I've always felt this connection to inuit people. I really don't know what that's about but i thought I'd share a little bit of their struggle because They are so often overlooked. In the oppression olympics, they are gold medalists.

"The impacts of climate change have very real, negative, harmful impacts on the Inuit's ability to sustain themselves as they have traditionally done, their ability to be healthy, which they have a right to in the Inter-American human-rights system," explains Wagner, of Earthjustice. "Their ability to maintain their unique culture, which is absolutely dependent on ice and snow; their ability to hunt and fish and harvest plant foods; their ability to have shelter and build their homes -- all of those rights are impacted by climate change in the Arctic."


The Inuit had been noticing alterations in ice, land, water, and wildlife for years -- phenomena that fell outside their extensive traditional knowledge. Ice formed later in the year and broke up sooner. Changes in the ice pack altered travel routes over land and sea. Experienced hunters were falling through thinning ice into seawater cold enough to kill in minutes. Once-frozen coastlines were eroding, destroying Inuit homes.

Also potentially devastating, residents were observing changes in the creatures around them, including caribou, polar bears, ringed seals, walrus, beluga whales, and seabirds. The culture has relied on these animals for food, clothing, and other materials for thousands of years. Now, increasingly, they were noticing that polar bears couldn't find seals along the receding ice edge and were forced to scavenge elsewhere for food. A mosquito invasion drove caribou into the hills during the summer, forcing them to forsake rich lowland grazing for scrappier fare. And robins and barn owls -- birds for which the Inuit had no name -- appeared for the first time.

Global warming is not the first industrial threat to reach this land. In the late 1980s, medical research revealed that chemicals and pollutants including chlordane, DDT, and PCBs had been accumulating in the globe's farthest north for decades, carried from thousands of miles away by atmospheric and oceanic currents -- or, as scientists have more recently supposed, by bird droppings. These persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, become more concentrated higher in the food chain, reaching unprecedented levels in predator mammals at the top like polar bears, ringed seals, beluga whales, walrus -- and Inuit, who carry more than 200 toxic pollutants in their bodies.

This poisoning from afar means "we have to think twice about how we deal with going out into the environment," says Watt-Cloutier, "because the environment's our supermarket, it's our way of getting food back to our families and to our communities." Canadian Inuit mothers, for example, who have seven times more PCBs in their breast milk than women in the country's largest cities, are advised either not to nurse their babies, or not to eat meat from the hunt.

The Inuit have also struggled to survive a cultural dissolution common to many indigenous peoples who have experienced rapid modernization. Canadian Inuit struggle with some of the highest rates of alcoholism and drug abuse in the nation. Inuit infant mortality rates are two to three times higher than the Canadian national average, life expectancy is about five to seven years shorter, and the suicide rate is six times higher.

"Everything is connected," she continues. "Connectivity is going to be the key to addressing these issues, like contaminants and climate change. They're not just about contaminants on your plate. They're not just about the ice depleting. They're about the issue of humanity. What we do every day -- whether you live in Mexico, the United States, Russia, China ... can have a very negative impact on an entire way of life for an entire people far away from that source."

This summer, Wagner, Goldberg, and the ICC will continue gathering facts to support their case, including videotaped testimony by Inuit elders. In the meantime, Watt-Cloutier's stature as a global activist is growing: in April, she accepted a U.N. Champions of the Earth award and helped stage a massive, Hollywood-infused "Global Warning" photo shoot on the ice in Nunavut, Canada's Inuit territory; in June, she generated headlines from Norway when she accepted the international Sophie Prize, given annually to a recipient "working toward a sustainable future."