ASK THE EXPERTS

摘要

For Canada's hard-pressed Inuit, climate change is far more than a distant threat. Sue Armstrong visits the people who are tackling the consequences head-onrnI'm in a cosy clapboard house on the frozen shore of Baffin Island in Canada's high Arctic, being introduced to Inuit "country food". It's a kindly, unchallenging introduction, with firm, pink slivers of raw fish rather than the chunks of seal fat and blubber-rich whale skin the Inuit call "muktuk" that are their real passion. Beyond the picture window, across the frozen bay bathed in ethereal light from the midnight sun, we see an antlike figure moving on the ice. "A hunter going out for seals," explains my hostess, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. These days, she comments, hunters are facing unexpected dangers. "The ice is thinning and people are falling through it." Only two months ago, she .says, her neighbour—a hunter of long experience and great skill—did just that, and lost both legs to frostbite.