“‘What do we care if the ice is melting? We’re not eating seals. And it’s why “nothing happens at climate negotiations,” say Watt-Cloutier. It’s why people who hop in an SUV in Toronto fail to connect it to that Inuit hunter falling through the ice. This whole issue of climate change is very much about that.” “There is nothing more destructive than seeing ourselves as different and separate from one another. The core of the problem, she says, putting down a forkful of her gluten-free eggs Benny, is our “othering” of each other. Watt-Cloutier has spent the last decade petitioning world leaders to help them recognize climate change not as a threat to the politics of “business as usual” but as a menace to humanity and “cultural survival.”
Hunters must go further and further afield in search of dwindling food sources, and increasingly fall through ice that would once have been safe. Thawing permafrost and thinning ice have meant dangerously unpredictable conditions for an entire culture in northern Canada.
Watt-Cloutier asks, “If we cannot save the frozen Arctic, how can we save the rest of the world?”įor many of us snuggled up near Canada’s southern border, climate change is still mostly an abstract idea dominated by distant images of melting glaciers and hungry polar bears.īut Watt-Cloutier gives the effects of global warming a beating human heart and face. As the terrain the Inuit depended on for millennia vanishes, they’ve have become the world’s sentinels, the early warning signals of a planet losing its central AC – and moral compass. With her white RCMP father absent from her life, Watt-Cloutier was raised by her single mother and grandmother in the rich traditional Inuit hunting culture of her ancestors, where “ice is life.”īut in a single generation, she has witnessed massive societal shifts, most shocking of them the melting landscape. military base in Nunavik, northern Quebec. In her newly released memoir, The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and The Whole Planet, Watt-Cloutier takes us through the vibrant world she was born into near a former Hudson’s Bay outpost and abandoned U.S. The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize nominee, hailed as one of the world’s most influential environmental and human rights advocates, is known for being persistent, particularly when it comes to the right to be cold.
So she asks the waitress – again – warmly. It’s just after 10 am one Monday at a bright, chatter-filled breakfast joint in east-end Toronto, and Sheila Watt-Cloutier is waiting on a small request: marmalade for her toast.
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