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Polar Bear loses to Global Warming: Billy Connolly booms about Arctic Offshore Oil Drilling Bonanza
I get chills up and down my spine when someone like Scottish comedian Billy Connolly traces the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Circle at Canada’s extreme north and drops a bombshell.
The Scotsman travels by dog sled and fishing trawler from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean by way of the Arctic Ocean, courtesy of global warming, in his travelogue “Journey to the Edge of the World” on National Geographic. While he makes friends and shares laughter, raw seal meat and an igloo, glaciers melt and oil developers circle. A storm is brewing.
Glaciers melt, water levels rise, land floods.
Polar bears don’t give birth if they don’t have ice to hunt seal on. Polar bears are starving. 3000 beluga whales that breed and raise young at the mouth of the Churchill River in Manitoba are in danger.
”Commerce will be booming here soon,” Billy quips. Tomorrow the minerals, gas and oil reserves out of the untapped north will be flooding down through the Hudson’s Bay, Churchill and through the North South Corridor down into the US, Mexico, South America and the world. Wake up call: commerce is here, we just don’t hear about it.
There is a war brewing north of us in the Arctic, over resources. A war not among the tribes and first peoples that lived here for over 12,000 years – I mean a war among Russian, American, Danish and Asian trawlers, oil rigs and miners. Inspite of economic benefits locally in the far north, the people of Inuvik, in a gentle way, have tried to tell their story:
INUVIK, NT (May 19, 2010) Stop Beaufort Sea Ecosystem Offshore Drilling
http://www.irc.inuvialuit.com/publications/releases.html
Have we learned nothing from destroying people and habitats – rainforests and fragile marine ecosystems in the American Atlantic, New Orleans coast, Alaska, Amazon? Have we learned nothing from algae blooms strangling the oxygen and living organisms in Manitoba’s lakes due to farm fertilizers and pesticides draining into one the world’s largest sources of fresh water?
Is it too late for sustainable development in the north?
Do we care? People make ethical decisions about fair trade products every day – like where I choose to buy my coffee. Big companies like Nike have instituted humane measures like dropping child labour because customers demanded it.
So what’s so hard about protecting the continent hidden under ice and water in the Arctic? Fresh water preserved in glaciers and icebergs and other precious resources might save us all from extinction some day.
Today global media lights fires around the world about tsunami cataclysms and the 8.9 category earthquake in Japan, marshalling million of dollars and people to provide humanitarian aid.
One fisherman with empty nets
Why can’t the impending cataclysm in the north take up more valuable real estate in the news blogs or 6 pm sound bites? Just doesn’t make for a sexy photo-op – one lonely fisherman with empty nets on a disappearing ice flow.
If we can bring back ancient breeds of Chinese dogs from the brink of extinction and protect the panda and gorilla, can’t we do the same for the fragile north and its people? Our people. Our earth.
Kudos to Connolly, for cutting a path through the ice and taking us on a Journey to the Edge of the World…don’t miss it, it’s disappearing fast.
More from Connolly and the Journey to the Edge of the World series on National Geographic at itv.com:
“Loafers like me are given a wee window of opportunity to follow some of the most extraordinary men in history on what was once their quest for the holy grail of world exploration. One of the highlights of my trip was the Auyuittuq National Park, Nunavut. The landscape of this national park, carved by the last Ice Age two million years ago, was sensational. Holy Mother of God, I felt like I was in The Lord of the Rings. This was a miraculously wonderful place, so pristine, and yet it only had something like 600 visitors a year.”
The fabled (Northwest) Passage through the Arctic Ocean was sought after for five centuries as a commercial sea route and claimed hundreds of lives of those trying to discover a navigable way through, but now global warming means that for a few weeks in the summer the ice melts and gives Billy a chance to make an extraordinary once-in-a-lifetime journey.
Five centuries from now, will another explorer navigate the same ice and glaciers of the Arctic Circle looking for signs of us? Signing off for now, Wordbone.
Related Articles
- Polar bear swam 426 miles to find ice in Arctic seas (LA Times) (seattlepi.com)
- Polar Bear Spy Cams (mt-soft.com.ar)
- INUVIK, NT (May 19, 2010) Stop Beaufort Sea Ecosystem Offshore Drilling
- http://www.irc.inuvialuit.com/publications/releases.html
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