In the Empire of Ice (22 page)

THE IGLOOLIK town hall is quaintly called the hamlet office—as if this were a scenic village of thatched-roofed crofts. Brian, the red-haired town manager, and his wife, Mary, a sharp-eyed young Inuit woman, recently arrived from Sanikiluaq in the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay. Brian is wiry, full of praise for the town mayor, and eager to keep traditions alive. “I took the job because they really needed someone up here to try to straighten things out. I came because I was needed. The most traditional communities are struggling hardest. I help run the municipal government. But it really isn’t a legitimate government at all.”

His office is cluttered and busy. The door is always open. People come in and out and coffee is poured. He leans forward as he talks, all earnest exuberance. “If I were king, I’d use councils in the smaller communities. The elders say they have to get these kids out hunting and fishing, but the kids say they don’t want that. They want to go to high school so they can go to college in Iqaluit or Ottawa. Only a few do that. There’s an enormous dropout rate. The families want them home to be providers of food, to be traditional hunters, but the kids want to leave.”

When the territory of Nunavut was formed, there were 25,000 people. Now there are 31,522, an average educational level of the eighth grade, and a housing shortage. “If you are 12 years old, it’s hard to do your homework with 14 other people living in the house of all ages, plus visitors coming by,” he says. “There’s lots of stress. That’s where drugs and alcohol come in. They’ve been here for 30 years. Total prohibition won’t work. Where Mary and I lived before, in the Belcher Islands, it was dry, so an underground culture developed. Alcohol comes into town piecemeal and is consumed as soon as it gets here. You can order so many liters at a time through a committee, but they add to it by getting people who don’t drink to order their quota for them. Ed DeVries, [a candidate for] the Marijuana Party…set up shop here for a while. Can you believe it?” He laughs. “On the other side of town the Jehovah Witness people are burning books. And in between, all sorts of things are going on. Some good, some bad.”

When Brian arrived in Igloolik in 2004, there was a 2.3-million-dollar deficit on a 4.5-million-dollar budget. This had been going on for three years, but there was so much internal conflict, nothing really happened. “The Nunavut government is supposed to be monitoring these things, but they didn’t get to it. No one had been doing the books. I was told that half a million dollars had gone missing.

“I don’t mean to sound too critical. The Nunavut government is young. It was only established in 1999. They thought that after settling the Land Claims Agreement it would be clear sailing. Enormous expectations have been put on people in the north who have very little education or administrative experience. The pace of change is too rapid. People here only came out of a seminomadic life 40 or 50 years ago.”

Townspeople are targets for the extractive industries, he tells me. Baffinland Iron Mines gave a presentation on its huge open pit mine at Mary River. “They talked as if it was a done deal. They never consulted the community. They came to tell the people here what they were going to do and asked only one question. It was about the shipping route through Foxe Basin. The hunters said the east side of the basin would be better because the west side is the migration corridor for the walrus. It is where they breed and calve in the spring. The mining company paid no attention. They announced a plan to ship the iron ore down the west side, through the walrus.

“During the discussion, I noted that the elders were quiet. They knew it was wrong, but they felt the younger generation just needed the jobs.”

ON THE RADIO in John and Carolyn’s house, a woman is giving the school lunch menu, followed by drumming and singing in Inuktitut. I’m reading a 2006 DNA report on a hybrid polar bear/grizzly shot near Sachs Harbour on Banks Island in western Nunavut. Are brown bears moving north as the climate shifts and mating with polar bears, or was it just an anomaly?

The hunters in Taloyoak on Boothia Peninsula say that polar bears in their area are leaner and more aggressive, that one “broke a cabin in town,” and that they are afraid to live in their camps because there are too many hungry bears around.

World Wildlife Fund biologists claim that the 15,000 resident polar bears in Nunavut, representing five of the Arctic’s subpopulations, are declining in number in west Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay, Kane Basin, Norwegian Bay, and the south Beaufort Sea. But are all populations suffering? I ask John, and if so, why?

“Ask Mitch,” John says, and leads me down the path to his friend’s house. Mitchell Taylor is the controversial polar bear biologist based in Igloolik. An American who became a Canadian citizen, he created the Davis Strait polar bear project to assess the health of the bear populations between Igloolik, Baffin Island, and the northwestern coast of Greenland. He’s high energy, wiry, strong, and famously contrary. “For one, I don’t think the climate is changing, and secondly, polar bears aren’t endangered,” he says straight out and looks at me for a reaction.

“I’ll leave you to it,” John says, grinning as he backs out the door. I look for a place to sit. Mitch takes boxes off a metal chair and pulls it up to a table. His house is nearly empty because he’s leaving soon. “It’s a forced retirement,” he says glumly, then grabs an unopened box of cookies from his “sealift supply” and dumps them onto a plate.

He shows me a news report about the 10,000-year-old remains of a polar bear just found. “It means that polar bears have survived some huge climatic swings. Like the Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago when it was warmer than it is now, and the Holocene Climate Optimum 5,000 to 9,000 years ago. “Bears are omnivorous, just like us,” he says. “They love seal, but they can also eat ducks, seabirds, the occasional caribou or musk ox, and they can scavenge the carcasses of walrus and whales.”

Only one polar bear population in western Hudson Bay has declined since the 1980s because the reproductive success of females in that area has decreased. “I guess that climate change is affecting those bears,” he admits, “but really, there’s no need to panic. A USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] report came out in September that claimed two-thirds of the polar bears would die off in 50 years. That’s naive and presumptuous. They circulate this photograph of a skinny, bag-of-bones bear and use it as ‘proof’ that they’re starving. Well, that was an elderly male bear, probably going off to die, not a young female, as they claimed.”

He shows me records that indicate the Canadian polar bear population has increased from 12,000 to 15,000, a gain of 25 percent in the past decade. “Davis Strait is crawling with them,” Mitch says. “It’s not safe to camp there. They’re fat, and the cubs are strong. The Davis Strait population is now around 3,000, up from 850, and that’s not theory or computer modeling, that’s direct observation.

“See, people who don’t live here have trouble grasping just how many polar bears there are, the huge area they cover, and variability of habitat and latitude, ice movement and temperatures. Of course, climate change is having an effect on the west Hudson Bay bears—look how far south it is.” He points to the map on the way. “I just don’t know why people find the truth less entertaining than a good story. It’s just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on the current media-assisted hysteria.”

We munch on stale cookies and study the map. He tells me that before getting his Ph.D. in 1982 at the University of Minnesota, he served in Vietnam. The Arctic became a refuge for him. His thesis was on the distribution and abundance of polar bears in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

“The first polar bear I saw was in Barrow, Alaska,” Mitch says. “I’d thought nothing could live there. Then I looked out and saw this big male polar bear running through broken ice. He was pissed off at the helicopter bothering him. But that sight thrilled me to the center, like nothing else ever has.”

When Mitch came to Igloolik and started the Davis Strait polar bear project, people didn’t know what the populations were or where they went. He flew all over Baffin Island, Davis Strait, and northwestern Greenland and walked a good deal of that terrain. One day he ran into an old hunter who said that a polar bear had been coming from a big hole, a den, on Baffin Island. “He showed me where. That was the beginning.”

They put radio collars on bears in Canada and Greenland to see how they moved. “The West Greenland current travels up and upwells at Coburg Island,” he says. “The clockwise gyre takes the ice down to Bylot Island, and the polar bears stay with the ice. As the ice comes south, the bears go inland on Baffin, up to the areas where there’s snow and make snow dens there. At first we estimated that the population was between 300 and 600 bears. But they were crossing to Greenland on pack ice. Our study was in the spring only, and they had already begun moving. So we came back in the fall to Cape Dyer, Bylot, Devon, Ellesmere, and the mouth of Kane Basin. The count grew to 2,100 polar bears.”

They worked during the year from field camps in Davis Strait, Labrador, and Baffin Island. There were bears in camp most days. “I used to catch and tag 33 bears in one day and 846 in a season. They were all in good shape, with good cub production.

“There’s lots of controversy about polar bears and climate change. They may shift their territories, but they’ll be here. Maybe not in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, because the ice is more volatile there and the pack ice is retreating, but in Davis Strait they’ll thrive. See, climate change isn’t happening in the same way in every place. The Arctic is variable.

“Anyway, like John, I’m still a doubter on the subject of global warming,” he says. “The Arctic Oscillation has changed polarities. So now it should start to get colder. In 20 years, you’ll see. Call me. Are you ready for an ice age?” Laughter.

His mood changes. “I’m on my way out,” he says, suddenly dejected. Now Lily, the young biologist, will take over. He turns on his computer. He wants to show me photographs. He clicks through image after image of the polar bears he has caught, tagged, radio collared, and talked to. “I’ve seen my last polar bear,” he says. The room is dark. There are tears in his eyes.

We make tea and eat more stale cookies. “I’ve tried all my life to make things better between animals and people, knowing I was doomed. That conservation wouldn’t overcome economics, that animals are never valued more than people. You have to start by understanding what we are as a critter. The only more dysfunctional system than capitalism is…” He doesn’t finish the sentence.

I give him a copy of my book
This Cold Heaven,
about traveling with hunters by dogsled in Greenland. He thanks me, then says, “If I was writing a book, I’d go to my own window and look at the land and see what was there. Then I’d look in the mirror and acknowledge the fact of human frailty. I’d do away with the notion that animal behavior is any different from human behavior, or that it always has to be human versus animal. It shouldn’t be. We’re all part of the same continuum.”

THE DAY IS A BOX of twilight buffeted by wind. Blowing snow is a scrim, a screen that adds light but never clears. I’m walking the coast below town. The houses are small and ragged. Men are working on Ski-Doos, hoods up, tools lying around. Snowdrifts are draped against overturned skiffs.

The first time I came to the Canadian high Arctic was in 1991, when I spent three weeks at a seal biologist’s camp. The ice that May was six feet thick. By mid-June it had melted completely.

A terrible storm came one day. It blew more than 85 miles an hour for three days and three nights. Our parcol—an insulated tent used by research camps on the ice—was coming apart, and we stayed up day and night, barely managing to keep it upright.

Our food cache was buried under 15 feet of snow. Our WC tent blew away, never to be seen again. When the storm cleared, two hunters from the village of Resolute came looking to see if we had survived. They were surprised to see that we had. “You should try living in a house with real walls,” one of them said, and laughed his toothless laugh at us and roared away.

At Mitch’s house I meet Sonia, who is using his spare room until she can find a place of her own. She’s a blue-eyed Midwesterner in her late 50s, on a Fulbright scholarship to write about life in a high Arctic town. She has a shambling, crooked gait as a result of polio, and walks with two canes. “I came here with my parents long ago. Now I’m back to stay for a year,” she tells me.

Eager to be on location for Zach Kunuk’s new film,
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen,
she caught rides out to camp with whomever would take her. “I like the way Zach works, making films where he lives, about the old ways and contemporary Igloolik,” she says.

Mitch interjects impatiently: “But the ‘old ways’ represent a lifestyle no longer considered viable by most of the young people. They’ve been taught to expect free money, nursing care, air travel, and gas subsidies by well-meaning people. In all of Nunavut there are only 800 ‘elders’ over 65 years old.”

When she first came to Igloolik, Sonia stayed with a family. “There were two elders providing food for all—five adopted children ranging in age from four to twenty-three.” She explains that two of the youngest children are actually grandchildren whom they adopted when social services removed the children from their drug- and alcohol-addicted mother. “Another six natural and adopted children live in the community, except for one son who is in jail for attempted murder. The boyfriend of the 23-year-old also lives in the house, and the couple is expecting a baby in the late spring. All are on welfare. No one has a job.”

She goes into the kitchen to make more tea and tells me how exasperating it is for a writer to live in such a household: “At last count the family had 16 grandchildren. At any time of day or night one can find people crammed in the small living room, visiting, eating a meal, or watching TV, often with the sound off since many older locals don’t understand English. None of the children know how to hunt, even though they come from a once prominent hunting family. Several say they don’t like to camp in the summer because they prefer to have daily showers, even though water supply is an issue here. Every month the family allowance is spent on gambling.