The Globe and Mail

Early in 2001, I ventured up into Canada's High Arctic on a magazine assignment to write about climate change. Guided by a local hunter from Resolute Bay (Qausuittuq), we travelled out onto the pack ice. Here at Canada's second most northerly civilian settlement, local elders were reporting that the ice was breaking up weeks and even months earlier and behaving erratically. The plane ride into Resolute gave me a glimpse of a large crack in the ocean ice, even though it was still February, with daytime lows of minus 40° Celsius. Outside, it was too cold to talk – the wind chill was minus 70° or more. All we could do was gaze off into the distance, across the frozen ocean and islands of the Arctic towards a horizon lit by winter twilight. Except for the wind it was silent, but beneath us everything was in motion.

We were travelling the route of the legendary Northwest Passage, the world's last great unconquered ocean passage and the legendary direct route coveted by explorers since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. To the local Inuit this largely icebound channel is a thoroughfare for polar bears, seal, walrus, hunters, wayward explorers, and pack ice. Later, skidding across the ice on the back of a snowmobile, I recalled the troubling stories of local hunters, who told of everything from freak floods and unusual bouts of open water and surges to disappearing wildlife – phenomena that run counter to generations of Inuit oral history and, more often than not, are reflected in the predictions of those who study climate change.

Not only are Inuit hunters losing their bearings while travelling on strange ice floes and resorting to GPS units for navigation, southerners have been travelling north to take their bearings and trace their own routes. In August 2007 the Northwest Passage was open to marine travel for the first time since records began, making it the world's most northerly navigational route. As ice coverage doggedly disappears across the summertime waters of the Arctic, shipping companies and trading nations are jockeying to run some of the world's biggest container ships and tankers on regular routes through the Northwest Passage, well before 2040, the estimated date when all summer sea ice in the Arctic will have disappeared. This major new shipping route is worth billions: what once took twenty-nine days to sail between Rotterdam and Yokohama would take just fifteen across the Northwest Passage and the Arctic Ocean. For the Inuit, environmentalists, and many locals, it's a scenario that presents hazards nearly as concerning as the regional effects of climate change, including oil spills, lost shipping containers, oil drilling, and economic development – basically relocating southern industrial development to the edge of some of our most northerly habitable communities.

“Within a generation the Arctic Ocean will be opened up to general cargo shipping,” said Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier in 2004. “This means wholesale social, economic, and cultural change in the circumpolar world, and will bring to the fore longstanding questions of national sovereignty and disputed boundaries. I don't think any of us are ready for these very big issues.”

While eroding sea ice is of great concern to many hunters, it is the heavy metals and PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) from the south that worry so many others, the long-distance byproducts of our cheap-energy addiction to coal-fired power, and the added load from cement plants and garbage incineration. Mercury accumulates in the Arctic: the persistent cold for much of the year literally freezes it out of the water vapour in the air so that it ends up on the ground. Caribou eat the lichens; polar bears and hunters – and their children – eat the caribou. “We are eager to manufacture metal, to forge steel and burn coal. Like in the south, all around the Great Lakes,” says one Inuk. “For the average farmer in the south, there is quality control. But for caribou meat, all we can hope for is that it is the same as a hundred years ago.”