http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38046-canadian-supreme-court-prepares-to-hear-inuit-case-with-global-implications
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Canadian Supreme Court Prepares to Hear Inuit Case With Global Implications
Wednesday, 19 October 2016 00:00
By Chris Williams, Truthout | Report
On November 30, 2016, a case will come before the Canadian Supreme Court
that will have momentous and potentially global implications. In April
2016 the Canadian Supreme Court, which hears only 5 percent of referred
cases, agreed to judge an appeal brought by the Inuit community of Clyde
River, Nunavut, against a five-year plan to carry out seismic blasting
in Baffin Bay. The people who live in Clyde River, situated on Baffin
Island, use the waters and ice of the Bay for hunting, a central
component of their culture and primary source of food.
With Greenpeace helping to cover legal costs, this is the first time the
Supreme Court has ever taken up a case from the autonomous Inuit
territory of Nunavut in the 17 years since it split from the Northwest
Territories. To bolster the legal campaign by amplifying the voices of
Inuit activists and to respond to Inuit requests for alternatives to
fossil fuels, Greenpeace sailed their ship Arctic Sunrise to the Arctic
in August. At the formal invitation of the Hamlet Council, Greenpeace
activists -- including British actor Emma Thompson -- were allowed to
sail the Arctic Sunrise to deliver solar panels to Clyde River in
response to the community's stated desire for alternatives to fossil
fuel-driven development and the expense and pollution of diesel. For as
Inuit campaigner, Nobel Prize Nominee and author Sheila Watt-Cloutier
has legitimately asked in her book The Right to be Cold:
With the sea ice and permafrost of the Arctic rapidly melting,
these mining operations are becoming more and more feasible and
potentially profitable.... It's understandable, given the poverty, lack
of food security and increasing difficulty of maintaining our
traditional hunting culture, that the lure of resource-related jobs
would be so great ... [But] all over the world, Indigenous peoples have
suffered the devastating effects of these industries on their lands....
Given the wealth of evidence about the dangers of the extraction
industries, we Inuit should be asking ourselves, "Why would it be any
different for us? How will this industry, which is so counter to our own
culture of stewardship of the land, be any different in the Arctic than
it has been in other parts of the world?"
The Greenpeace vessel -- with current mayor of Clyde River, James
Qillaq, former mayor Jerry Natanine and his daughter Clara aboard to
help document changes to sea ice, observe wildlife and inform the other
activists on board of the key issues -- set sail from St. Johns,
Newfoundland, on the evening of August 4. At the invitation of
Greenpeace I was onboard the Sunrise to document and report on the trip.
As we slowly emerged out of the protective harbor, long, slow swells set
the ship rolling; the rounded hull is designed to rise up over thick
ice, using the ship's mass to drop down and crack open safe passage.
However, there's a drawback: the Arctic Sunrise is notoriously prone to
pitching and lurching her way through even moderate seas.
Astern, the sun set over Newfoundland as we left one of the first
European colonial settlements in North America, the port of St. Johns,
named after John Cabot who sailed into the bay in 1497 on the feast day
of Saint John the Baptist. Redolent with that imperial history, staring
silently out to sea silhouetted atop the dark bulk of Signal Hill was
Cabot's Tower, built in 1898 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his
fateful landing on the island.
The clouds were a luminescent series of glowing oranges, reds and
purples as the sun sank below the receding promontory, turning the
heaving ocean crimson. With each turn of the propeller, the jaws of the
bay narrowed behind us. Over the bow, the horizon stretched into curved
infinity. In the distance, blowholes spewed water from the heads of
giant underwater mammals.
Our first whale sightings electrified the ship's complement of activists
and crew. The life of whales is part of the reason we were heading far
above the Arctic Circle to Clyde River. With a surface area comparable
to Western Europe, the 37,000 Inuit living in communities across Nunavut
share the high Arctic with several species of whale, as well as
narwhals, walruses, seals, polar bears, caribou, fish and birds, all of
which the Inuit hunt, eat or otherwise use.
Situated between Baffin Island and the southwest coast of Greenland,
Baffin Bay is a sensitive ecosystem with an unusually high number of
different species of Arctic marine mammals. Until the last century, the
only humans to regularly cross through the area were Inuit communities,
who have traversed and lived in the region for 4,000 years. Now,
however, the area and its Indigenous inhabitants are facing the threat
of seismic blasting to survey for oil and gas deposits.
New Threats From Seismic Blasting
For former mayor Natanine (and his generation), the decision to oppose
drilling for oil and gas was something he initially did not consider
until he spoke with Elders about the consequences of seismic testing
carried out in the 1970s:
Our community here of Clyde River experienced seismic blasting in
our area. My father's generation and his brothers were the ones who
experienced and saw firsthand what it did to seals. When they were
hunting seals, because [the seals] were deaf they could almost go right
up to the seals and puss was coming out of [their ears]. At one point I
was talking to my father, talking to my uncles trying to figure out
what's going to happen with seismic blasting ... because I was in
support of it, thinking it's going to bring all the resources and we'll
be able to build our infrastructure from it.
It took those conversations and the experience of the older generation
to start Natanine on the journey to activism and opposition to testing
and oil drilling:
My father and my uncle, they both said, "You know we have to stop
this, we have to do everything we can to stop this because of the
impacts it's going to have on seals." Seals are the mainstay, everyday
food and that really got to me because as a new generation after them my
dream was fancy lights and casinos and whatever. They changed my heart
and I started researching what seismic testing is, what it does and how
it affects everything around it. It's a destruction machine, that's what
it is; it's a destruction machine. They want to destroy, get the animals
moved away so that the humans will move away and not be in their way to
drill for oil.
Mounted on a specialized ship, seismic blasting (or "seismic testing,"
as the industry calls the practice) uses underwater air guns to send
high power air blasts through the water and into the subsurface rock.
When the signal bounces back to an array of detectors trailing six to 10
kilometers behind the survey ship, geologists analyze it to detect
differences in density that would indicate the location of a potential
oil or gas deposit. "Testing" is a prelude to drilling. According to a
survey carried out by the US Geological Survey (USGS) in 2008, the
Arctic as a whole contains a substantial amount of oil and gas: 13
percent of the world's undiscovered oil, 30 percent of undiscovered gas
and 20 percent of undiscovered natural gas liquids, with significant
deposits, as well as minerals, in and around the Inuit territory of
Nunavut (see the Greenpeace-commissioned Center for Sustainable
Economy's "Beyond Fossil Fuels" report for details).
Despite growing resistance to drilling in the Canadian Arctic and
elsewhere across the world, the current low price of oil and other
technical constraints, Brad Hayes, president of geoscience consulting
firm Petrel Robertson is confident that energy companies will make
progress in the far north because reserves "are simply of too high a
quality to be ignored.... They're not low-cost places to get at, because
of their remoteness and what you need to do to plug in facilities, but
once you have facilities and pipelines and so on, then you have an
enormous resource of very high-quality oil and gas."
The Canadian Government and Fossil Fuel Exploitation
No real consultation took place to find out what residents of Clyde
River thought about the proposed blasting. There was a meeting in 2014
before the National Energy Board's approval that was open to the public,
but according to Dr. Shari Gearheard, a climate scientist and researcher
for the National Snow and Ice Data Center who has been living in Clyde
River for the last 16 years, the message was, "We're here to tell you
what's going to happen."
The slide presentation was not in Inuktitut, drawings were not to scale
and according to Natanine, any questions raised about the plan were
summarily dismissed. When asked about potential impacts on marine life,
company representatives were unable to provide answers. Despite oil
industry assertions that seismic blasting is safe for underwater life,
it's hard to square with the common-sense idea that animals that depend
on sound for every aspect of their life activities could remain
unaffected by high-volume sound inundating their domain every 10 seconds
for months on end, with decibel levels comparable to .5 kilos of
exploding TNT. Michael Stocker, director of the nonprofit advocacy group
Ocean Conservation Research in Lagunitas, California, notes, "Most
animals in the ocean use sound the way animals on land use eyesight....
And when we talk about saturating their environment with noise, it's
going to have some impact, regardless of whether we know what that
impact is."
The National Energy Board says it plans to have one person spot whales
from the bridge of the seismic vessel and call off blasting if a mammal
is spotted within 500 meters. However, Stocker says, "Having somebody
sitting on a watch stand looking for whales at 1,000 meters is a token
gesture that's fairly meaningless." I would have to agree: Aside from
the fact that whales spend most of their time underwater, having now
spent many hours unsuccessfully looking for whales in the Arctic through
often dense and shifting fog that regularly limits visibility to a few
meters, it's hard to imagine such a system being effective even during
periods of high visibility.
A day's travel north by ship from Clyde River is the other-worldly
stunning beauty of Sam Ford Fiord, where cliffs soar a vertical mile
above the opal blue waters and we see abundant narwhals. Ninety percent
of the global population of narwhals is found in the Canadian Arctic and
Baffin Bay. One of only two surviving species of toothed whales in the
Monodontidae family and highly specialized Arctic predators, these
astonishingly odd-looking marine mammals sport a single giant tusk and
are a staple of Inuit diet. The narwhals are thought to be particularly
sensitive to noise.
In a NOAA study carried out in 2004, US government scientists found the
dominant signal reaching sound detectors placed near the Mid-Atlantic
Ridge on the floor of the Atlantic was from air guns operated 3,000 km
away, off the coast of Nova Scotia, western Africa and northeast of Brazil.
Even the since-renamed Minerals Management Service, the corrupt US
government agency that mismanaged the calamitous Deepwater Horizon oil
spill of 2010 and failed to adequately regulate oil drilling in the Gulf
of Mexico, registered "potentially adverse" impacts on sea life. As
documented in a Greenpeace-commissioned report on seismic testing by Dr.
Oliver Boisseau, a senior research scientist for Marine Conservation
Research,"It is clear that noise from seismic activity has an impact on
whales as it can damage their hearing, ability to communicate and also
displace animals, affecting diving behavior, feeding and migration
patterns. There are increasing indications that this could cause serious
injury, and may also disrupt reproductive success and increase the risk
of strandings and ice entrapments."
The Legal Fight to Stop Blasting
Knowledgeable and determined, Natanine has been tirelessly leading the
legal fight against the blasting, explaining to other Inuit the dangers
to their hunting grounds and the food they rely on to feed themselves.
Organized by Natanine and others, Clyde River took its challenge to the
National Energy Board's decision to grant blasting permission against
the wishes of the community to the Canadian court of appeal. The judge,
Justice Eleanor Dawson ruled against Clyde River in August 2015, writing
that consultation had been adequate and whether the community agreed
with the National Energy Board decision or not was irrelevant.
Undeterred, Natanine pledged to keep fighting. "We are going to appeal
the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada," he said, and that is
exactly where the case is now headed on November 30.
With the ongoing legal issues, seismic blasting has been successfully
postponed three times. In the intervening two years, a lot has changed
in the political and legal landscape of Canada, and some Inuits'
understandably intense distrust and outright hatred for Greenpeace --
dating back to the organization's anti-sealing campaigns of the late
1970s that devastated the Inuit economy -- has also shifted. Greenpeace
issued an apology for past mistakes and the negative impact they had on
Inuit livelihoods that was printed in Inuit media in 2014 and vowed a
very different approach. Natanine was eventually convinced to give the
organization another chance to help, not harm, Inuit. As Natanine
explains it: "At first, I thought, I hate those fuckers.... But, you
know, they're just human. They didn't know what they were doing. And
now, to acknowledge they were wrong and that they had this negative
impact on us, it touched me inside. I thought I would just forever hate
them."
Renewable Energy and the Arctic
In their joint statement on the Arctic released in March, Canadian Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau and US President Barack Obama write about how
they will act "with partners" to implement "innovative renewable energy
and efficiency alternatives to diesel and advance community climate
change adaptation." They add, "We will do this through closer
coordination among Indigenous, state, provincial, and territorial
governments and the development of innovative options for housing and
infrastructure."
Yet it took Greenpeace, at the request of the Clyde River Hamlet
Council, to bring solar power to Clyde River to help them offset their
use of diesel. Nunavut's government spends 20 percent of its annual
budget on energy, primarily diesel for electricity production, heating
and transportation. Electricity and heating cost more in Nunavut than
anywhere else in Canada, which helps to explain why the government of
Nunavut recently voted to change the law to promote renewable energy
production through net metering. In recognition of this and the desire
to retain their culture while utilizing 21st century technology to
reject fossil fuel-based development, Inuit in Clyde River now have a
partially solar-powered community hall.
While solar cannot be a complete answer to electricity generation in the
Arctic, it will help offset the financial, environmental and health
costs of diesel and can begin to chart a different developmental
pathway. If solar panels can be successfully installed and maintained in
a remote community in the far northern reaches of land on the planet, it
naturally raises the question: What's stopping so many other communities
from using the wind and sun for power generation?
Echoing Watt-Cloutier, Natanine said that the real question facilitated
by the production of renewable energy is about self-determination and
social power -- not electrical power:
These companies are not in it to help us to gain that
[independence] and we know that from experience and looking at other
parts of the world. Oil and gas is not a good answer for us to gain
independence, and as Inuit we want to get back to independence where we
don't have to depend on anyone: that's what we have to work for. Get
away from fossil fuels where the companies and governments will control
us, to a point where we can have our own power. Maybe through solar
power and through wind power or other renewable resources, and that's
where we want to get to. We want to be able to control our own lives again.
Of course, if Canada were serious about genuinely addressing the issues
of poverty, racism, lack of infrastructure, health issues, inequality
and the impact of decades of neocolonial government policies for the
37,000 Inuit, it would be very easy. Given the hundreds of billions of
dollars made through tar sands extraction and mining by Canadian
companies around the world and with such a low population, it would be
entirely possible to eradicate poverty in the whole of Nunavut. From
data compiled by Idle No More, in which reparations for historical
crimes and land theft is taken into account, the Canadian government is
in debt to Indigenous peoples to the tune of trillions of dollars.
After years of struggle and three years of postponement of seismic
blasting, the people of Clyde River will have their day in court in
Ottawa on November 30. A location to write into the calendars of anyone
concerned with Inuit justice as the place to be. A second case based on
similar arguments is being brought by the Chippewa of the Thames First
Nation and will also be heard by the Supreme Court on November 30. The
Chippewas are fighting against the National Energy Board-approved
decision to back Enbridge's expansion and reversal of its 830 km oil
pipeline Line 9B, built in 1975, that runs from Sarnia, Ontario to
Montreal, Quebec across their land.
Whichever way those decisions turn, they will reverberate across the
whole of Canada. Furthermore, the Canadian Supreme Court is cited more
than any other as precedent by courts around the world. Therefore, the
decision holds implications for Indigenous peoples across the globe
fighting to control their land and resist the further expansion of
fossil fuel production. Further bolstering the Inuit legal case, on May
10 the Canadian government reversed its earlier stance and officially
signed UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples).
Whether they live up to that commitment will depend on how much pressure
can be brought to bear on the National Energy Board, the Canadian
government and Prime Minister Trudeau to live up to their climate change
rhetoric and documented support of Indigenous rights. We will find out
whether British Columbia Grand Chief Edward John was speaking in good
faith when, in response to the signing of UNDRIP he commented,
"Indigenous governments are not some inferior form of authority.... They
are the original form of authority over their lands, resources and
territories."
For more on this topic, please read the first article in this series,
"On Melting Ice: Inuit Struggle Against Oil and Gas in the Arctic."
[http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37921-on-melting-ice-inuit-struggle-against-oil-and-gas-in-the-arctic]
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