Ikuo Oshima stares wistfully from his porch over a scattering of stubby, multicolored cottages toward Robertson Fjord, dotted this August morning with drifting icebergs.
“The old Eskimo word for winter, ukiug, also means ‘a year,’ but not anymore,” says Oshima, one of 90 hardy souls residing in Siorapaluk, a Greenlandic Inuit settlement that seems to be thriving despite the fact that it is believed to be the world’s northernmost hunting and fishing village.
And Siorapaluk’s location, about 845 miles from the North Pole, places it squarely at the frontier of the Inuit people’s struggle to maintain a traditional lifestyle in the face of an unprecedented meltdown of the Arctic ice sheet.
The word “Inuit” refers collectively to the primary indigenous people of the Arctic. Originating in Central Asia, they migrated to the Russian Far East, then across Alaska and Canada, reaching Greenland about 4,500 years ago. Eskimo is an archaic term, as is igloo. They prefer to be called Inuit, and they live in houses nowadays, usually painted one of the colors of the rainbow.
“We can’t live as we once did,” laments Oshima, a native of Japan who took up life as a professional hunter in Siorapaluk more than 35 years ago. “When I first came here, there was plenty of seal, walrus, narwhal and polar bear, and we hunted only by kayak and dog sled. It was all here at our front door. But now the sea ice comes later, and we have to go much farther away to hunt.”
Siorapaluk is one of several remote ports of call on a newly introduced northern Greenland voyage of the Norwegian expedition cruiser MS Fram. Travelers hoping to see Greenland before it melts are drawn to the world’s largest island, 85 percent of which is still covered by ice.
Among 220 passengers on an August 2007 sailing, my wife, Jan, and I have come ashore to explore and to find someone who speaks English who can tell us about life in the settlement. We’ve been directed to Oshima, who is university-educated and fluent in four languages. As such, he is much in demand these days by visiting media hot on the trail of global warming.
“Japanese television, the BBC, National Geographic and many others have come to make reports here,” says Oshima, who is quick to point out that climate change is not the only problem facing the Inuit population.
“Pollution is a frightening problem, as well, because it doesn’t look like there’s any problem,” he says. “It appears to be quite pristine here, but toxins are carried by ocean currents from the industrial nations up into the Arctic waters, where they enter the bodies of marine animals and polar bears. These are our sources of meat, and so now the breast milk of Inuit mothers contains five times more contaminants than that of American mothers.”
Modernity creeps in
Even in this remote and rawboned village at the planet’s livable fringe, commercialism and politics are combining to make life more difficult.
“There are goods and services available now — electricity, phones, microwaves, computers — that I wouldn’t have dreamed possible 35 years ago,” says Oshima, who, with his Inuit wife, Anne, has raised five children here. “The more you buy into these things, the more they control your life. We worry now about paying the bills — not just about what’s happening to the ice.”
Government policy with regard to support of traditional settlements has shifted in recent years, causing uncertainty among the roughly 9,500 residents of 67 small settlements, most of which are scattered along Greenland’s northwest coast. Technically Greenland remains a part of the Danish kingdom as it has since the 18th century, but it has gained an ever-increasing measure of home rule since 1979.
Oshima is getting restless, and he tells us that he is, in fact, becoming weary of interviews.
“Reporters, politicians and environmentalists all come with the same questions and concerns,” he says, “but I’m not seeing enough being done to reduce greenhouse gasses to help stem the tide of climate change in the Arctic. We hope for such efforts, of course, if it is not already too late.”
Up and down the coast, from Qaanaaq to Ilulissat on Disko Bay, we hear similar lamentations, mostly to do with the effects of thinning ice and melting glaciers. Tour operators and outfitters in Qaanaaq, Uummannaq and Qeqertarsuaq complain that diminishing ice, both on sea and land, has shortened the season for dog sled tours by several months.
Incomes have suffered as a result, and so have many of Greenland’s estimated 30,000 sled dogs — a huge number when you consider there are only 57,000 people here. These are large dogs, expensive to feed, and many are becoming undernourished and diseased. Some are simply shot when owners can’t afford to feed them.
But while they seem beset with problems that threaten their traditional existence, climate change chief among them, Greenland’s Inuit revealed in a recent landmark survey of the Arctic’s indigenous peoples that the majority (69 percent) claim they are satisfied with their quality of life.
More than 96 percent of respondents rate their health as excellent or good, and a surprising 92 percent speak the native language, an indication that the Inuit culture is alive and reasonably well. Unemployment and alcohol abuse were cited as the community’s major problems. The overall unemployment rate is about 8.6 percent but is higher in most of the settlements.
“It was quite surprising to most of us on this project to discover such a high degree of contentment among most indigenous peoples,” notes Birger Poppel, project chief of the Survey of Living Conditions in the Arctic and a guest lecturer on MS Fram.
Danish-born but a resident of Greenland since 1984, Poppel served as chief statistician for Greenland’s Home Rule government before joining the University of Greenland as a social science researcher. It was a role that supported his involvement with the survey, which was conducted in collaboration with universities, independent researchers and representatives of Arctic indigenous peoples.
“Greenland’s hunters and fishermen don’t want handouts or the government meddling in their lives. They take pride in pursuing a lifestyle that has allowed the Inuit to survive for millennia under harsh conditions,” Poppel says, “and they are generally satisfied with their lives. At the same time, we know from this research that a majority of hunters are advising their sons to choose different trades.”
Pursuing new economy
If there is a brighter side to this Arctic meltdown, Poppel says it is evolving in southern Greenland where agriculture (chiefly sheep and root crops) has been given a lift because of the longer, warmer growing season.
Alfred Jakobsen, Greenland’s minister of the environment, sees an upside, as well.
“Global warming could result in an opportunity to develop other resources,” he says, pointing out that several oil companies have applied to explore offshore; mining companies are sniffing out gold, zinc and uranium; and there’s an aluminum smelter in the planning that would utilize gushing glacial meltwater for hydroelectric power.
Jacobsen acknowledges the environmental risks, but claims, “It would be hard for Greenland to ignore these gifts from nature.”
Another bright spot has been a dramatic rise in tourism. Greenland Tourism reports a 151 percent increase (to 104,000 visitors) from 2000 to 2006, and those numbers are expected to jump significantly for 2007 and beyond, boosted by an influx of cruise visitors with the debut in May 2007 of MS Fram.
Tourism on the rise
The new 318-berth, 374-foot vessel, purpose-built for polar cruising, carried out a dozen Greenland voyages following three seperate itineraries in 2007. According to Monika Tillman, U.S. marketing communications manager for the Norwegian cruise line Hurtigruten Group, nearly 3,000 passengers signed on during the vessel’s inaugural season.
Hurtigruten Group, formerly known in the United States as Norwegian Coastal Voyages, operates a coastal service in Norway utilizing a fleet of passenger-carrying cargo vessels and has expanded in recent years to become a leader in explorer cruises in polar regions. The company offers itineraries in the Antarctic, Spitsbergen and now Greenland with the new ice-rated polar ship MS Fram.
“We certainly felt that we should come sooner rather than later to see the glaciers,” says Joan Dolian of Dartmouth, Mass., who joined MS Fram with her Norwegian husband, Per Moen, a retired cruise ship captain. “We also love the remote settings and the extraordinary people who make their lives here.”
Remote settings are indeed the order of the day on Hurtigruten’s 15-day “Disko Bay and Thule” itinerary. Cruises originate at Kangerlussuaq, a former U.S. Air Force base on Greenland’s central west coast that now serves as the country’s international airport.
European passengers arrive via SAS/Air Greenland flights from Copenhagen or Reykjavik, Iceland, while Americans can take advantage of newly instituted Air Greenland nonstop service from BaltimoreWashington International to Kangerlussuaq. These comfy six-hour flights operate twice weekly during the summer.
The voyage ranges north almost 1,700 miles — or until MS Fram can no longer push through the sea ice — visiting villages such as Sismiut, Qeqertarsuaq, Uummannaq, Qaanaaq (New Thule), Upernavik and Ilulissat, plus Ikuo Oshima’s distant settlement of Siorapaluk. A relatively small and agile vessel, MS Fram carries a fleet of inflatable boats that enable excursions to undeveloped shores and through ice-clogged bays and fjords.
Capt. Rune Andreassen has pledged to push as far north as possible up Smith Sound, a narrow passage that normally is frozen year-round, between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island. There are a couple of days at sea and some long stretches between ports of call that provide ample down-time for those bent on relaxing and the opportunity for a number of lectures and slide shows for more inquisitive adventurers. A top-flight staff of European and Greenlandic lecturer-guides gives presentations on the geography, geology, wildlife, history and politics of Greenland.
While the Arctic ice cap isn’t going to disappear overnight, scientists and environmentalists from around the world have expressed heightened concern about the meltdown owing to a faster-thanusual loss of ice just last summer.
One of America’s leading Arctic specialists, Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, warns that Arctic ice that has been shrinking for decades might be reaching a “tipping point that could trigger a cascade of climate changes reaching the Earth’s temperate regions.”
He says changes yet to come will be more dramatic than anything that has happened so far.
“A few years ago I predicted the Arctic might lose its ice by 2100 or maybe 2070. But now I think 2030 is a reasonable estimate,” he says. “The Arctic is going to be a very different place within our lifetimes, and certainly within our children’s lifetimes.”
Studies link the loss of Arctic ice not only to a predictable rise in sea levels but to altered atmospheric patterns that cause weather changes around the world. Although he doesn’t believe that the 13- to 20-foot rise in sea levels predicted by some scientists is likely to occur during this century, Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona, cringes at the thought of a mere one-meter (3.2-foot) rise.
“A one-meter increase in the sea level,” he says, “would see the Maldives disappear, make most of Bangladesh uninhabitable, and would inundate low-lying cities like New Orleans.”
Concern over climate change seems to be gaining intensity by the day. As we were leaving Greenland, some 200 religious leaders and scientists were boarding MS Fram for a week-long symposium titled, “The Arctic: Mirror of Life,” led by Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual head of the world’s Orthodox Christians and seen as part of a widening spiritual drive to combat climate change. In a poignant moment, attendees united in silent prayer alongside the rapidly retreating Jacobshavn Glacier near Ilulissat.
Dave G. Houser is a writer and photographer in Ruidoso, N.M.
The details
For information about Greenland cruises aboard MS Fram, contact the Hurtigruten Group, 800-323-7436 or . For 2008, the 15-day “Disko Bay and Thule” itinerary is offered Aug. 14 and 28. Fares range from $10,699 to $21,899 per person. Discounts of $350 to $500 are available for bookings made before Jan. 31 for cruises May 22-Sept. 11. For information about Greenland, visit the Greenland Tourism and Business Council at green . or e-mail ask@greenland.com.
