"Making a Difference in the World"

I saw Sheila Watt-Cloutier being interviewed on UCTV. She was very impressive in her vision and her demeanor. She talked of educating and influencing and treaties that she has worked on getting countries to ratify.

"Sheila Watt-Cloutier is an Inuk, the first female President of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and an international activist on climate change."

Ms. Watt-Cloutier has also been involved with the issue of toxins (persistent organic pollutants, or POPs) in the arctic environment. There has been an increasing problem with seal meat - and other meats that are hunted in the arctic.

From an article from the CBC:

Research done by the federal department of Indian and Northern Affairs shows that Inuit women throughout the territory of Nunavut have DDT levels in their breast milk that is nine times higher than what it is in southern Canadian women.

The UN's Craig Boljkovac says Meeka and other women have every reason to be worried about the food they eat. Over the past few years, he's read and reread the studies on persistent organic pollutants, many of which were done by Canada's federal government. The most recent one was done by the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States.

The studies all conclude that the vast majority of POPs are coming from places much further south. In the case of DDT, most of it originates in tropical areas of Africa, Asia and Central America.

There, DDT is still used in large quantities to control malaria, which kills more than a million people a year. DDT was banned in Canada, the United States and most developed countries in 1972. But poorer countries still rely on it. They see it and other chemicals, such as PCBs, as a way to develop their societies and improve their economies...

In the capital of Nunavut, Iqaluit, the problem of DDT poses a painful dilemma for Sheila Watt-Cloutier. She's the president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in Canada....

Although DDT was never used in large quantities in Canada's Arctic, there are other persistent organic pollutants that are to this day being released into the environment here. They're called dioxins and furans. At the Iqaluit garbage dump, ravens and seagulls pick at the bits of food and anything else that's remotely edible. The smoke never seems to drive them away...

Garbage is being intentionally burned, space is at a premium in the Iqaluit dump, but you can repeat that scene in every community in the North and very many in the south as well. The problem with that is every time you burn plastic in an open fire, if it contains chlorine, and most plastics do, you create POPs...
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Articles about Ms. Watt-Cloutier winning the Sophie Prize in relation to her activism are here and here.

This is her answer to a question at the COMMONWEALTH NORTH FORUM
ALASKA WORLD AFFAIRS COUNCIL about the Inuits changing their lifestyle:

Well, the thing with climate change, when people say well, you'll have to adapt to the situation, the problem with that is that we are adapting. We already are adapting to situations, many of our hunters are and so on. But changes are going to happen so fast that there won't be that adaption period. We can't go from meat eaters to weed eaters overnight or growing from hunting, subsistence to becoming farmers. That's just not a reality that anybody can deal with.

And already us Inuit of the arctic, what has taken many people about 350 years to adjust to this new way of life, some like in our region, as I say I grew up on a dog team the first 10 years of my life, many of my people were still living in snow houses and iglooiuks (ph) when I was born. And to think that in the 52 years since I was born we felt as though we've lived three lifetimes in that. It's happened so quickly. And we're reeling from that change. And my worry is that this next wave of tumultuous change to our climate could have potential to wipe us out very quickly, not just in terms of us the people, but our wildlife.

We don't know the body burdens of toxins in the polar bear. We don't know the body burdens of toxins in our marine mammals. And with global warming coming and adding to that do we know a tipping point? How much of our animal and wildlife and our flora and fauna can take such rapid change?

And so we the people, too, I mean we might be able and we already are adjusting to many changes, but you know, even our systems and the way our body is we have enzymes that are meant to be eating meat. You know, not certain other foods that we don't ingest well. That's the way that we're all made under this universe. And that's why we live in certain areas of the world. Certain things we can adjust to, other things we can't, not that rapidly.

And so it's the rapidity of the fast way in which things are happening that worries me more than anything because are, in essence, a very adaptable people. We're a hunting people who have adjusted and adapted to seasons and to different settings for a long, long time. And that's our strength, but in situations like this there's going to be tipping points, I believe, that will start to happen very quickly that we should be aware of. And that window in which to make drastic cuts is about 10 to 15 years. Let's do it now because international communities take that much time to do something effectively, to make changes to their policies.