As usual, we didn't get to all of the material I had hoped to discuss this past week. I hope you'll all look again at the readings and think about them in the context of our focus on responsibilities and stories in the past couple of classes. I also wanted to provide a quotation from Watt-Cloutier's Introduction to the Right to be Cold since it's not included in your readings package. Here it is:
The Arctic ice and snow, the frozen terrain that Inuit life has depended on for millennia, is now diminishing in front of our eyes.
We are all accustomed to dire metaphors used to evoke the havoc of climate change, but in many parts of the Arctic the metaphors have become a very literal reality. For a number of reasons, the planet warms faster at the poles. While climate experts warn that an increase of two degrees in the global average temperature is the threshold of disaster, in the Arctic we have already seen nearly double that. As the permafrost melts, roads and airport runways buckle. Homes and buildings along the coast sink into the ground and fall into the sea. The natural ice cellars that are used for food storage are no longer cold. Glaciers are melting so fast that they now create dangerous torrents. The world becomes focused and horrified only by haunting images of polar bears struggling to find ice [like the image I showed at the end of class], but hunters too are finding that the once reliable ice can be deadly. The land that is such an important part of our spirit, our culture, and our physical and economic well-being is becoming an often unpredictable and precarious place for us. (xiv-xv)
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