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Distant Early Warning LISA BIRD-WILSON
We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change
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n 2017 a decommissioned Canadian Coast Guard ship was refurbished to sail around Canada’s three coasts for 150 days, in fifteen legs, from Toronto to Victoria via the Northwest Passage. Participants on the journey represented a cross-section of Canadian society, including youth, Elders, newcomers, scientists, educators, artists, musicians, community leaders, the media and Indigenous peoples. This was Canada C3, a signature Canada 150 project led by the Students on Ice Foundation with the purpose of “celebrating our environment, sharing the stories of coastal communities and connecting Canadians from coast to coast to coast.” Canada C3 focussed on engaging the four themes of Canada 150: Diversity and Inclusion, Reconciliation, Youth Engagement and the Environment. Invited to join the Canada C3 adventure for one of the ten-day legs in the role of featured author, I opt to join the voyage in Kugluktuk, Nunavut, and finish in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories—Leg 11 of the journey. I am especially keen to visit the Arctic to witness and learn about what’s happening to the environment in the Canadian North. As the ship moves through Arctic waters, it stops daily for us to disembark on Zodiac boats and visit islands and communities along the way, where Inuit hunters and Elders 50 Geist 112 Spring 2019
talk about the changes witnessed in their lifetimes. They discuss deviations to the way the ice behaves and the impacts of those changes on hunting. In The Right To Be Cold, Sheila Watt-Cloutier details the intense social, cultural and environmental changes to her Arctic home of Kuujjuaq, Nunavik. She discusses the ways hunting transformed over the course of her lifetime, where she experienced a childhood of travelling by dogsled until the transition to motorized travel with the introduction of snowmobiles. Shifting traditional hunting patterns and accompanying cultural
changes are some of the great transformations she describes. On the second last day of our journey aboard the C3 ship, we land on Baillie Island, where we witness the permafrost melt. In the sun, the permafrost winks and glitters through its covering of dirt and snow as its meltwater runs into the Beaufort Sea like a steady tap. Tanya Tagaq’s haunting words in her book, Split Tooth, resonate: “Who knows what memories lie deep in the ice? Who knows what curses? Earth’s whispers released back into the atmosphere can only wreak havoc.” It will be impossible to forget the sound of the meltwater as it spills into the sea and the sight of permafrost that may have existed for hundreds of thousands of years dissolving before our eyes. Both impressive and awful. On uninhabited islands and in settled communities are the remains of abandoned Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line radar stations, created during the Cold War to detect a Soviet nuclear strike. After the end of the Cold War, the sites, full of lead, PCBs and other contaminants, ultimately left more than a hundred landfills across the Arctic. Some sources blame DEW Line construction for permafrost melt and much environmental damage in the Arctic, and by extension, the impact on human rights and settlement in the far North. DEW Line stations scarred the landscape and brought profound social
