« It has to be very cold, freezing cold, for us to thrive. Not just survive, but thrive. »
As the Arctic is warming up, this Inuk activist from Quebec is fighting for the "right to be cold" to be recognized. She tells Brut Nature why this rise in temperature is already impacting Inuits' everyday lives.
As the Arctic is warming up, this Inuk activist from Quebec is fighting for the "right to be cold" to be recognized. She tells Brut Nature why this rise in temperature is already impacting Inuits' everyday lives.
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00:00Inuit culture is based on the ice, the snow and the cold.
00:20And for us, it has to be very cold, freezing cold for us to thrive.
00:24Not just survive, but thrive.
00:26And so, with the climatic changes and the environmental degradation that's happening
00:30in our homeland, what it means for us is that the royal life, our way of life, our hunting
00:38is minimized and destroyed as a result of climatic changes.
00:56The normal routing of our hunting grounds that we used to be able to take and travel
01:10on is no longer safe.
01:12So oftentimes, we now have to go much further distances to go to the same place to get our
01:17fish or our marine mammals or caribou, whatever fish, food that we are harvesting.
01:24And so economically, it impacts on our lives.
01:27The ice is forming much later in the fall and it's breaking up much earlier in the spring.
01:32We have new species of birds, of insects, of fish that are moving their way up into
01:39the Arctic, some of which we don't even have names for.
01:42We have coastal erosion that is happening very rapidly because we are a coastal people
01:47and it's impacting even homes in Alaska, for example, are falling into the sea.
01:54We have permafrost that is melting so rapidly that homes are buckling inward and having
01:59to be relocated and moved.
02:02There's just tremendous amount of changes that are happening in the Arctic that are
02:06making it very difficult for a way of life that we have depended on the predictability
02:12of our weather and climate and our land and our ice, and it's not the same today.
02:24Our right to health, our right to healthy food, our right to culture, our right to educate
02:35our children, our right to safety of homes, all of those things are impacted by climatic
02:42changes and that is why we defend our right to be cold.
02:54What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.
02:58The Arctic is the cooling system.
03:01It is the air conditioner, in fact, if you will, and it is breaking down, and as a result
03:07of the breakdown of the air conditioner of the planet, the warming is happening, the
03:11hurricanes are more intense, there are floods, there are fires, there are droughts, everything
03:18is happening because it's changing.
03:20What's happening in the Arctic is the early warning.
03:23We are those sentinels and we are signaling to the world that there is a problem with
03:29how we're doing business in the world and we're not addressing the greenhouse gas emissions.
03:33I think we can't always just rely on our political leaders to address these issues and that the
03:38younger generation must now take the urgent call, take the action that is required to
03:45make changes.
03:46It's your life, it's your future that you're talking about here and that you need to be
03:51the change agents that really step up to that plate because I don't think the movement
03:57will be in politics.
03:59The movement will be in you, the youth of the world.