We're Doomed. Now What?

by Roy Scranton

  The next day we anchored at Ilulissat, 171 miles farther north, another town of bright square houses and home to a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Ilulissat Icefjord: a thirty-mile-long channel choked with giant icebergs calved from one of the world’s most swiftly collapsing glaciers. The Jakobshavn Glacier has been melting back at a consistent rate of more than a hundred feet a day, dumping more than 38 billion tons of frozen water into the sea each year. In the days before we arrived, a nearly five-mile-square chunk fell off the face—what some observers think might have been the largest single calving ever seen from that glacier. The iceberg-choked fjord that the glacier emptied into seemed unreal, like a breathtaking modernist abstraction in white and blue and silver, 3-D, vivid, luminous, massive, and grave.

  Jakobshavn is responsible for about 10 percent of all of the icebergs that Greenland produces. From Ilulissat, they follow the current north along the coast to Kap York, where they turn and wheel back south along Baffin Island, Labrador, and Newfoundland, slowly melting their way into the North Atlantic. Leaving Ilulissat, we sailed with them, stopping along the way for picturesque hikes at Karrat Fjord and Kullorsuaq Island. From Kap York we diverged from the current and sailed north out of Baffin Bay, to the most northerly point we would reach, just a smidge beyond seventy-eight degrees. A thin, shining line of pack ice, cutting across the gray water of Smith Sound and cloaked in a low fog, blocked us from going any farther. We didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the only significant sea ice that we would see.

  That day, August 26, we Zodiacked in down a long, spectacular fjord to land at Etah, a lush glacial valley rich with tundra, mosses, grass, and wildlife. We saw birds, musk oxen, and Arctic hares, but the most striking sign of life was in the innumerable bones littering the valley floor. A great cairn of them had been heaped up on the beach near a couple of Inuit hunting shacks, testifying to Etah’s plenty: caribou antlers and musk-ox hooves, walrus skulls and seal spines.

  A mile or so back from the cairn was the glacier face. Gently sloping to the moraine at its base, the glacier poured a stream of water out into a large pond. Its north edge had melted back in a curious way, creating a passage and, within, a small cave leading back under the ice. Standing inside the glacier, you could watch the vast Greenland ice sheet melting right before your eyes. You could feel it, slick, cold, and glistening under your hand. You could hear it drip, drop by drop, into pools among the rocks. Greenland is losing about three hundred billion tons of ice every year. Over time, that ice is going to raise sea levels by more than twenty feet. Drip by drip, drop by drop.

  Bernadette Dean, Inuk hunter, seamstress, advocate of Inuit culture and language, member of the Nunavut Water Board, Adventure Canada resource staff : “I’ve lived in the North all my life. It’s my home. The last few years we’ve had cold winters, but ten or twelve years ago we started noticing the freeze-up was later and later, and in lots of cases it was dangerous for hunters traveling on the sea ice. Another thing I’ve noticed is the change in the wind patterns. Easterly wind is more common now than it used to be. And the molting season of the seal seems to be a lot longer.”

  Dr. Mark Mallory, seabird biologist, Canada Research Chair in Coastal Wetland Ecosystems, Acadia University, Adventure Canada resource staff: “Moving north, climate change hits you like a tidal wave: all the scientists, that was their focus, all the talk amongst Inuit communities and community members was about how things had changed. In 1999, we were told that the typical temperatures we could expect in the summer might be 10 to 12 degrees Celsius. By the time we left Nunavut in 2012, it was very common to have at least one week in Iqaluit over 20 degrees, 24 or 25 degrees on some days.”

  Chris Dolder, Adventure Canada assistant expedition leader: “We were going out into Smith Sound and we’re trying to traverse eastward to get to Etah, and we found ourselves going alongside a tabular berg. We steamed over two hours down one face of this berg, well over twenty-two nautical miles. One face. This is the first time that we’d encountered something that large. Why is that? Because the ice shelves at the top of Ellesmere Island are breaking apart.”

  Ecotourism, adventure tourism, expedition tourism—call it what you will, wilderness-oriented group tours remain an ethically dubious proposition. Built on and often glorifying a tradition of brutal, racialized colonial domination, adventure tourism restages the white-supremacist conquest of “nature” and “natives” as a carefully controlled consumer encounter with “pristine wilderness” and “indigenous cultures.” And while it’s nowhere near as violent as the heritage it celebrates, it cannot help but change the places and people it objectifies as “experiences,” in ways both obvious and subtle.

  Adventure Canada CEO Swan, along with nearly every staff member I spoke with and several of my fellow passengers, expressed an alert and sometimes pained awareness of the problem—in this case, a history of environmental and cultural exploitation stretching from the fur trade and whaling days to more recent Canadian efforts to forcibly assimilate Inuit. Lecture programming on the Endeavour focused heavily not only on environmental issues and climate change, but also on Inuit culture and history. Two esteemed Inuit leaders, Bernadette Dean and Tagak Curley, were on the cruise as resource staff, in addition to a biologist, a zoologist, a botanist, an archaeologist, a geologist, and a historian. Generally speaking, the hope was that the experience would make passengers more conscious of the very history of despoliation it reprised, and that the positive increase in social awareness thus achieved would outweigh any negative impacts, not the least of which came from the Ocean Endeavour burning ten to twenty tons of fuel every day.

  “For us, as a company,” Swan told me, “I feel that there’s value in bringing people to a place that brings them so far out of their regular life that it gives them a little jolt. To say, ‘Hey, it’s not all pavement and Walmarts and provincial parks.’ To have that wake-up call to remind us that we’re a very small part of a much larger picture.”

  Swan introduced me to her resource staff, with whom I had many long conversations. I talked with biologist James Halfpenny about polar bears and sea ice, I talked with zoologist Ree Brennin Houston about environmental education, and I talked with Tagak Curley, one of the founders of Nunavut, about Inuit perspectives on climate change. Their voices resonated through our journey like a chorus. One of the most interesting people I spoke with was Ian Tamblyn, a sandpaper-voiced folk singer who’d been coming to the Arctic for decades. When I asked him about climate change, his merry eyes grew somber and their charming twinkle dimmed. “I’m not a scientist,” he said. “I’m a musician. But I’ve seen these things. I’ve seen the Northwest Passage change in my lifetime. What it is, if it’s not scientific evidence, is bearing witness. I’ve seen it happen.”

  James Halfpenny: “Once we lose the multiyear ice, that’s a major tipping point. And I think we’re probably going to see an ice-free North Pole in five, maybe fifteen years.”

  Ree Brennin Houston: “We need to look at what’s coming at us with our eyes open. The Arctic will be ice-free. The Arctic ecosystem will change.”

  Ian Tamblyn: “I think about it all the time. To me, it’s the slow disaster. It’s so beautiful . . . so beautiful. And it’s a disaster. It will eclipse everything.”

  Grise Fiord, Canada’s northernmost community, is a small village of about 150 people, mostly Inuit, and two Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers who rotate through every couple of years. Perched on a desolate, rocky stretch of Ellesmere Island, the village was founded in 1953 through a Canadian government resettlement scheme to assert national sovereignty in the far north. Inuit from Quebec Province were promised land, support, and good hunting, then shipped hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle and more or less abandoned. They were isolated by sea ice, visited by a government ship once a year, and spurned by the local RCMP. Informed on arrival that hunting in the region was severely restricted because of recent wildlife protections, the
resettled Inuit struggled to survive in near-starvation conditions, coping with neglect, malnutrition, depression, and suicide. In recent decades, after the founding of the Inuit-governed territory of Nunavut, the settlers and their descendants were offered the chance to return to the south. Many took it. The ones who remained proudly call Grise Fiord home.

  Our cultural expedition there started with a visit from Grise Fiord’s elders to the Ocean Endeavour. They sat awkwardly onstage in the Nautilus Lounge while Cedar’s two-year-old daughter danced around them. There were some speeches, then a Q&A. Among the questions about native dress, seal hunts, how much food costs in the north, and the effect of technology on kids today, one passenger asked: “Is the weather changing in Grise Fiord?” This seemed apt: the Inuit name for the town, Aujuittuq, means “Place that never thaws,” but the bay we’d anchored in was mostly clear, save for a few icebergs in the distance and a chunk of ice melting in the shallows.

  John Houston, a bushy-browed, bearded filmmaker and culturalist on staff with Adventure Canada who had grown up in the north and lived among Inuit all his life, translated the question into Inuktitut. One of the female elders took the microphone and spoke, then John translated back: “Yes, she’s really seen those changes. One of them is the loss of snow. Another is warmer air. The ice is melting much more quickly. The shorefast ice vanishes in the spring almost overnight. And there are many more changes, many changes. There are a lot of signs of climate change here.”

  Then Larry Audlaluk, one of the senior elders, stood up and took the mike from Houston. He spoke in English. “I want to dispel a notion about polar bears,” he said. “I hear a lot about polar bears, a lot about what people down south think about polar bears. I want to tell you that polar bears are very healthy. There are very many polar bears, far too many of them. The ice hasn’t affected our polar bears. The polar bear is just fine.”

  I was perplexed. Why was he talking about polar bears in response to a question about climate change? And weren’t polar bears threatened?

  In the Canadian Arctic, it turns out, polar bears are political. The fundamental conflict is between international environmental concerns and local economics. On one side, scientists and environmentalists argue that the polar bear is endangered by climate change, specifically by the loss of sea ice. The United States has declared the bear threatened and has lobbied to ban international trade in their pelts. On the other side, Inuit in Canada depend on bears as one of the few sources of cash in what is mainly a subsistence economy. As Houston explained to me: “There isn’t that much cash income for senior hunters since Greenpeace and friends basically gutted the fur trade. The real cash income for a senior hunter would be to guide a nonresident sport polar-bear hunt, the purse for which can be $20,000 or more. In many cases it would be, by far, the majority of their annual cash income.” In addition to the purse, a single pelt can sell for up to $10,000 Canadian.

  Complicating the polar-bear question are two factors. First, while scientists have a strong case for describing what’s going on with bear populations, they don’t have very strong data to back that case up. Andrew Derocher, a biologist at the University of Alberta and the author of Polar Bears: A Complete Guide to Their Biology and Behavior, told me that the bears are a highly specialized apex predator dependent on sea-ice ecosystems for their main prey, ringed seals. Less ice means fewer bears. “We expect to lose about two-thirds of the polar-bear population by midcentury,” he said. Yet he also told me that current estimates for the global polar-bear population, around 20,000 to 25,000, have a margin of error of plus or minus 40 percent (meaning the range could be anywhere from 12,000 to 35,000). Data on the bears is spotty, out-of-date, and hard to gather. Inuit call the polar bear Pihoqahiak, “the ever-wandering one,” characterizing nomadic tendencies that, for biologists, make the bear difficult and expensive to study. The simple fact is that if we want to know what’s going on with polar bears, we need more science.

  The second factor complicating the polar-bear question is that Inuit and outfitters from Labrador to Cambridge Bay have reported seeing more bears today than in the past. Tagak Curley told me: “We know for a fact, from our forefathers, from the time we were little boys, that polar bears are increasing. I think you will see that anywhere. As my friend Mikitak Bruce said, ‘Nanuit nungujjangittualuit.’ Polar bears will never disappear.” Even if Derocher is correct in predicting that polar bears will be affected by loss of habitat, local observers may still be right: polar-bear populations have probably grown in recent decades, after midcentury overhunting was curtailed in the 1970s. In addition, decreasing pack ice would likely send bears inland for food, where they’ll run into more humans, thus giving the appearance of greater numbers.

  Whether polar bears were endangered or adapting, the stark poverty of Grise Fiord made a much more compelling case for polar-bear economics than Larry Audlaluk had. The houses in town were bleak, the few residents we saw grim. A scowling grandma in a dirty jacket drove by on an ATV. Our tour guide, Rose, showed us the medical center, clean but sparse, and the co-op, a dusty, blighted general store restocked by ship each September. The prices were two to three times what you’d pay in Toronto or New York. Most people, Rose told us, relied on country food like seal, musk ox, and whale.

  We were taken to see a statue of a stout Inuk woman glaring at the sea, the official memorial honoring the sacrifice Inuit had made to Canadian national sovereignty. We were brought into the town’s cultural center and given samples of raw Arctic char and Beluga blubber, offered crude sealskin handicrafts and photographs of the memorial for purchase, and shown a performance of Inuit throat-singing and traditional dress. Two of my fellow passengers told me how much they admired Inuit for not being resentful and angry like some other indigenous peoples were.

  One of our other tour guides showed us his bear pelt. It was his second kill, he said; he’d shot the bear himself, from about ten feet away. He was sixteen years old. The bear’s thick white fur was rough to the touch.

  It was the same bear that appeared on the Adventure Canada logo. The same bear that’s become an icon for climate-change activists. The same bear that’s used to sell Coca-Cola. Who had the right to decide what this bear’s life meant? Who was entitled to say what it was worth?

  John Houston: “When you talk about time, often our people—white people—have tried to present themselves in a patient, tolerant, long-suffering, forbearing sort of a way, and the expression that sums it up that I’ve been hearing ever since I was a kid was: ‘Well, of course, it takes time.’ It’s a very tricky and complicated phrase, when the colonizers sigh to each other and say ‘It takes time.’ What do they mean? Well, it takes time to eradicate the native in the person, doesn’t it? That would take time.”

  Ian Tamblyn: “I’ve argued for Inuit rights and claims. The injustices done to them and our First Nations have been horrendous. It’s a really embarrassing part of Canada’s history. But whether the future of those rights is a right or a romantic notion, I don’t know. Sometimes I think the Inuit people see our presence in the Arctic as transitional. That one day we won’t be here. I don’t know if that will ever be the case.”

  Bernadette Dean: “People need to understand the true facts, and they need to change their attitude—whatever attitudes they may have about aboriginal peoples everywhere—and incorporate aboriginal values. When you come from a place like this, and you’ve lived here all your life and you know the seasons and you follow the plants and you follow what the land is doing, and then you get researchers who come up here for two or three months of the year and they’re acknowledged experts . . . All those people, when it comes to October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May, June, they’re not going to be up here. I’ll be here. Tagak will be here.”

  Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage was manned by adventurers who lived the motto of Enlightenment philosophy: Sapere aude! (Dare to know
!) Like us, they had believed that with technology, ingenuity, and daring, they could master the unknown. Franklin’s ships, the HMS Terror and Erebus, were outfitted with all the latest cutting-edge equipment, including steam engines, reinforced hulls, and three years’ worth of canned foods. They were crewed by brave, resilient, and skilled sailors. They were commanded by veterans of the Napoleonic Wars with years of experience in the Arctic.

  Somewhere in those frigid Northern waters, though, the ships caught fast in the ice. As the stout-hearted crew succumbed to starvation, hypothermia, and disease, they turned on each other, descending into madness and cannibalism. Franklin’s expedition ended in disaster. Franklin’s arrogance may have been partly to blame, as well as his cultivated ignorance of Inuit knowledge, but the real culprit—as Owen Beattie established conclusively in 1984—was the lead used to seal the canned food that Franklin had brought to ward off scurvy. Beattie and his team proved this by performing autopsies on three sailors Franklin had buried: Able Seaman John Hartnell, Royal Marine William Braine, and Petty Officer John Torrington. The men’s bodies lay interred on Beechey Island, a small, bare rock rising up out of Parry Channel.

  Today, as more and more cruise ships and private yachts ply the Northwest Passage, Beechey Island has become an important tourist stop. Indeed, when we arrived there on the morning of August 30, we found a 170-foot, custom-built Benetti yacht named Latitude in the harbor, with a covered runabout tethered beside. By the time our fifth Zodiac had unloaded for the day’s expedition, rumors were flying that Leonardo DiCaprio was on board (he’d been spotted camping on Baffin Island in July and had been in Canada filming The Revenant). Our ship’s videographer thought he’d spotted Michael Fassbender as well.