Worship of the Primitive

[ds1973]

This is out of control. According to this article, the US is responsible for destroying the primitive way of life of these people.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070416/ap_on_..._from_the_ice_4

"Inuit hunters are falling through thinning ice and dying. Dolphins are being spotted for the first time. There's not enough snow to build igloos for shelter during hunts."

"This is where a culture has lived for 5,000 years, relying on a very delicate, interconnected ecosystem and, one by one, small pegs of that ecosystem are being pulled out,"

This is a perfect example of man as an animal; a subsistence existence in which a small perturbation in environment wreaks havoc with their lives.

"She", in the quote below, refers to one of the Inuit hunters, expert in global climate change... Does she know what a greenhouse is?

She blames Americans for emitting one-fourth of the world's greenhouse gases which scientists say are very likely causing the warming. But it is not in the Inuit culture to be too accusatory, and she says it with a smile: "Unfortunately, you are the people who cause most of this climate change," she says to an American journalist.

This just blows me away. We're supposed to make drastic changes to our lifestyles because of an unproven hypothesis about mans effect on global climate to save a primitive way of life? Why isn't it ever suggested that these primitive cultures abandon their way of life & join the rest of the world?

The next quote tells it all, the primitive life is one in touch with "god"... according to Rosie Stancer, who is trying to become the first woman to have traveled solo to both poles.

"There is very little between you and nature and God," she says. "All your layers of materialistic crud just drop away and your life and its priorities are distilled down to pure survival."

This is mysticism over reason, force over mind & death over life. This is at the core of the environmental movement.

[softwareNerd]

This arctic city has it's own web-site.

I suspect that the commentary in those articles is not a fair reflection of what the local people think. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a high proportion of government funding subsidizing them, so that they don't have much reason to move somewhere warm.

[DavidOdden]

This arctic city has it's own web-site.

I'd just like to point out that those dudes are way south of the Arctic by some 200 miles -- only a bit north of Hell (where the Trondheim airport is, in southern Norway). They are pikers, when it comes to living in the frozen north. I'd suggest moving up here and herding reindeer, where some 10,000+ years of experience has taught how to deal with environmental problems. Clue: the secret to survival is to learn that stuff happens. As far as I know, the Saami have never relied on having a lot of snow to build hunting shelters from because, well, uh, snow is not reliable. Take your shelter with you. Rather than live a marginal existence based on the assumption that life if fragile, live a robust life based on the assumption that you can overcome the challenges that Mutha Nature throws at you.

Oh these poor primitives, being faced with the terrors of something new, like robins and finches! Why, I face this horrible atrocity on a daily basis -- what is the Saami word for "blog; SMS; snowmobile" (hey, I even know the answer to some of these questions). The guys who built the web page at least have the right idea, though ugh just try to read and cut-and-paste some of the Inuit text (JHC, grapics for letters?) The point which jerkface from Minnesota doesn't get is that life is not actually that fragile, and you buy a gun, a boat, and a snowmobile if that's necessary to live in the arctic. If it gets too intolerably hot in the midwest (yuck), we either move to Langyearbyen, or we buy central air. But stop the goddamn whining.