Devi Lockwood wanted to put stories of climate change in dialogue with each other. To humanize an issue often discussed only in terms of numbers. Here is a snippet from her journey.
There were also beautiful things. I arrived to the sound of ice melting on the beach, when a few flowers were blooming. There were insects on the hillside by the cemetery. Mosquitoes: one. Spiders: two. Sheryl, my host for the first two weeks, went to collect her water as ice or frozen snow in 5-gallon orange paint buckets. She scooped the ice with a saucepan and boiled it back home for consumption.
A few years ago, she went seal hunting by boat, and brought the animal onto the land to eat fresh seal meat with her family. The skin looked “really old, and it was very easy to break,” she said. She blames this on increasingly warming water temperatures. Caribou hunting has also changed. In the 1970s and ’80s, she went caribou hunting on Baffin Island in August. Back then, it was “very, very hot, with lots and lots of mosquitoes. Now it doesn’t have any mosquitoes.
While people in town might not notice these changes, the hunters do. New birds come to Nunavut annually, and the diversity of sea creatures is shifting, too. “Seals are scarce,” Theo said, which tells us that “the food source of the seal is somewhat diminished.” Humans, polar bears, foxes, and wolves all rely on the ringed seal for food.
Sightings of killer whales have increased throughout the territory in recent years. “Because the ringed seals have never seen a killer whale before, they don’t look at it as a predator, the ultimate predator,” he said. “They’re not even afraid of it.” As a result, killer whales go from bay to bay, wiping out everything. “It’s one killing machine that’s coming into our neighborhood,” he added. “It’s not just the humans; the animals aren’t aware of what’s happening out there.
Every season brings something new: beluga, narwhal, caribou, arctic char, walrus. Terry works for the government of Nunavut, coordinating programs that teach hunting to youth and document elders’ hunting methods. He is a leader in his community. “Usually in early summer, there’s no wind,” he said, noting that hunting is easier when the water is calm and there is less ice. The high winds that day had prevented him from going out fishing.
Many people can no longer afford their traditional lifestyle. Sharing the bounty is the norm and a necessity. Once the meat is distributed, it is time to harvest more.I spoke with Leah Angutiqjuaq, age 42, in her relative’s home in Igloolik. We had just boiled water for tea. The most pronounced climate impact, for Leah, is in the timing of the seal hunt. “The weather is changing,” she told me. “We used to go out seal hunting for one to two months. It’s only three weeks now.
It’s easy to think that sea ice would impact only the ocean, but there are many energy exchanges between the terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Seabirds, for example, nest on an island, forage in the water, and then come back on the land, where their guano fertilizes plants. The tundra, as a low-productivity area, relies on energy inputs from the marine environment. This means that when sea ice dynamics change, not only marine food resources but also terrestrial resources change.