This is all I could think about while reading "The Inuit right to Culture Base on Ice and Snow" by Sheila Watt-Cloutier. In this piece the author focuses on the deteriorating environment that their people had lived off of for generations. Teaching their kids to hunt and navigate the land from season to season depended mostly on the environment staying relatively similar from year to year. In a sense, the elders were passing along the land sort of as a hand-me-down to their younger generations so they can reap the same benefits off the land the elders had during their lifetime. Unfortunately, with all the pollution modern man is pumping into the atmosphere, the land is ever changing. Permafrost melting, the heating of the oceans and the extinction/decrease of native animals are all negative blows to the land of Inuit people making their survival more difficult with every passing year.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier points out that"several communities...are so damaged by global warming and climate change that relocation at the cost of millions of dollars is now the only option." I strongly believe this to be a true statement. The environment is currently in such a bad way that it is going to take not only millions of dollars, but also millions of people coming together to make a difference. The people of earth do have a moral obligation to take action in order to secure the environment for further generations. Unfortunately, we as a species have completely dropped the ball on this assignment. Industrialization worldwide has cripple the the atmosphere and destroyed ecosystems for countless other species that call this planet home. Humans have sucked resources out of the earth with no remorse or thought of what could go wrong leaving my generation and those to follow to attempt to pick up the pieces. With the planet being in the state that it is, while getting worse everyday, there will be nothing good to pass along as hand-me-downs to our kin
Take Algeria for example. Algeria's landscape problems are opposite those of the Inuit's described by Cloutier in the sense that Algeria has too little water and the Inuits are facing too much water but both sides are faced with a changing ecosystem that will not be in good shape to hand down to future generations. The Encyclopedia of Earth throws out an estimation the approximately 80% of Algeria is desert (EOE). This makes water and farmland very scarce and a top priority because we can't survive without food or water. With water accessibility being very low, water privatization came in to effect in Algeria in 2005 when the cities of Algiers, Annaba, Constantine and Oran contracted companies and these companies were given rights to manage water sources. It became a new idea to think of water not as a resource but as a commercial good (Wiki). On one hand, I find it a little shady to put the "rights" to water in the hands of corporations, but this does look like a positive move. At least the Algerian government realizes that the water crisis is real and is looking for ways to combat the shortage in order to make the small amount of water they have available to everyone.
As far as I can tell, Algeria currently has no affiliation with the climate research group 305 or any other big name environmental groups but they most definitely should considering their environmental state. But Algeria isn't taking a backseat in its own fight against climate change. Since 1982 Algeria has been instating regulations and laws such as the Hunting and Environmental Protection laws in order to establish a defense against the disappearing ecosystems. Algeria has also been headstrong in protecting the Sahara desert working with the Convention of Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), the CITES Convention and the Ramsar Convention. These governing bodies are working towards erasing the threat of desertification hand in hand with Algeria's Minister of the Enviorment, M. Cherif Rahmani, who was a big part of setting up the World Deserts Foundation in 2002 (SC).
It's promising to see lower economy countries such as Algeria take a stand against climate change but it does not come close enough to solving the problem. As it was stated earlier, only millions of dollars and millions of people are going to be our only hope in combating the pollution raised by previous generations. It won't be an easy task but the fight needs to be taken to a global scale NOW. If we wait any longer, we won't have anything to box up as hand-me-downs for our children and our children's children.
Written by Tom Sanders
Bibliography
Reading - Moral Ground by Sheila Watt- Cloutier (p 25-29).
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