Don’t Lose Hope for the Planet
By: Ajai Raj
Tags: Defiant Science, Climate Change, Environment

Don’t Lose Hope for the Planet

Indigenous peoples haven’t, and neither should we

by AJAI RAJ

“Doom. Gloom. All I ever hear.”

— Case, Neuromancer by William Gibson

I’ll be the first to admit it: reading and writing about climate change can be a real drag. Not only does the news seem uniformly bad — a relentless march of cold, implacable facts signifying an oncoming catastrophe — but there is a whole cottage industry (more of a mansion industry, really) devoted to discrediting those facts.

It can feel like reporting on the impending razing of your own house, accompanied by a chorus of aggressively ignorant naysayers (who, by the way, live in the same house) insisting that everything is fine. Not unlike the picture of that dog in the bowler hat that’s so popular these days. You could argue that climate change was patient zero of the “fake news” phenomenon.

But on another level, I get it. Leaving aside the longstanding role of the fossil fuels industry in actively misleading the public, very much like the tobacco industry, I can understand why one would prefer to deny that climate change is happening, to instead cling to feeble arguments to the contrary and accuse scientists (and meteorologists, and the weather) of orchestrating a worldwide conspiracy.

It’s the same reason that I, when I was a cigarette smoker, found myself Googling for assurances that my risk of getting cancer wasn’t really that high— and that was after my dad died from complications following surgery on an abdominal aortic aneurysm, a smoking-related condition which, like most cardiovascular diseases, has nothing to do with cancer. Like the old saying goes, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

Actually, the more I think about how dreadful and dystopian climate change headlines can sound, the more I understand the appeal of climate change denial. And the more I see the inevitability and destructiveness of the cycle. In a perverse way, to deny climate change is to be able to have hope for the future. So the worse the headlines, the fiercer the denial. Round and round we go, the serpent eating its tail.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to lose hope. We can change the narrative from one of doom and gloom to one of healing and hope, and we can do so without denying facts or ignoring reality.

We not only can. We have to.

That’s the message of Snowchange Cooperative, an Finland-based organization that’s at the front lines of climate change, and one that’s unlike any other on the planet. For almost 20 years, Snowchange has been combining modern scientific techniques with the traditional wisdom of indigenous peoples— including the Saami, Chukchi, Yukaghir, Inuit, Inuvialuit, Inupiaq, Gwitchin, Icelandic, Tahltan, Maori, Indigenous Australian, and many others that this writer admits to having never heard of before reporting this story — to help these communities document and adapt to the effects of climate change all over the world.

Tero Mustonen, PhD and president of Snowchange, embodies this duality perfectly. Not only is he a scholar of Arctic biodiversity, climate change, and issues facing indigenous peoples, he is also the head of a Finnish village called Selkie, in the eastern region of North Karelia. Dr. Mustonen lives off of the land, in a land-based economy complete with fisheries, in the middle of an old-growth (read: ancient, undisturbed) forest, with his wife, a couple of goats, a few chickens, and no running water.

“The boreal [regions] and the Arctic are one of the places where climate change has been proceeding faster than almost anywhere else— a lot of the things that were predicted in 2001 or 2002 have manifested in many ways throughout the arctic,” Dr. Mustonen said.

“One of the things we try to put forward are practical solutions and opportunities, and things that actually address the impacts [of colonialism, and the environmental damage wrought by industry] and also the larger scale of what we need to do in terms of nations, and cultures, and economies, and things like that— so we operate from the grassroots level in many, many remote communities, all the way to very high policy levels, including the UN, US, UK, and Indian governments.

“For this year, we have a number of flagship activities on ecological restoration. Many of these remote communities are better off if they are able to restore and address past land use changes that have taken place,” most often through colonial land theft and industrial pollution, “and through that, rebuild their resilience, for example in the context of rivers and catchment areas.”