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NYT Syn dicate Leaning over the handlebars with one knee up on the seat, Derrick Pottle commanded his snowmobile between rocks and sheets of gray sea ice before stopping suddenly at the mouth of a bay. “It’s open,” Pottle said, turning off his machine. Ten yards away, the ice had cracked and opened a dark hole in the water that made it impossible to drive across the inlet. It was January 7, unusually late in the season for Pottle’s first trip to his winter cabin — a few hours drive by snowmobile from his hometown, Rigolet — over what should have been more than 60 miles of frozen trails and solid ice. Rigolet, a town on Canada’s eastern edge, has no roads leading in or out. Lakes, rivers and streams, if they freeze over, become what the town’s 300 residents call their “highway” — a lifeline to nearby towns and places to fish, trap and hunt. But as the climate has warmed, these ice roads have become unreliable, breeding isolation, and, some studies suggest, elevated mental stress. Pottle, a 61-year-old Inuit hunter, surveyed the land and water. In a lifetime in the north, he had travelled thousands of miles through blizzards, shot seven polar bears and fallen through sea ice. But this was an unfamiliar landscape. He strode a few yards toward the hole in the ice before turning back to his snowmobile. Pausing, he put his gloves back on his tattooed hands, revved the engine and took off through the spruce trees, searching for another route. A melted highway Just four decades ago, Pottle said, he would have crossed the same inlet over ice more than a foot thick in November. Since then, Labrador’s coastal ice has declined by almost 40 percent, making travel treacherous, if possible at all. “It’s a volatile place climatically,” said Robert Way, a postdoctoral fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland who studies Labrador’s permafrost. This climatic sensitivity, combined with Arctic amplification — a feedback loop created when reflective ice melts to reveal dark ocean water — Way said, had more than doubled the region’s rate of warming compared with the rest of the world. “And it’s only going to get worse,” he said. Shrubs that thrive in warmer temperatures have sprouted across the tundra and snow cover has diminished, Way said. Without the ice highway, hunters like Pottle often have no choice but to drive their snowmobiles through the wilderness. “You can’t get in or out of these communities,” he said. “We’re almost like prisoners.” Attempting the trip to his cabin earlier that winter, Pottle struck a rock, flipped his snowmobile and had to return home. The next time, the wind was relentless. Pottle said gales were becoming stronger. “These are the kind of conditions that can kill you,” he said. “The wind can get so severe, you can’t get warm.” While scientists have not established a link between Labrador’s wind strength and climate change, another recent study corroborated locals’ observations. “When it’s something you’ve relied on for your safety, you remember,” Way said. Deeper distress The Inuit have a word for changes they are seeing to their environment: uggianaqtuq. It means “to behave strangely.” But it is not just the weather that’s in turmoil. For the past decade, Ashlee Cunsolo, a public health researcher and director of the Labrador Institute of Memorial University, has seen the disorienting effects of climate change take a toll on the mental health of people along the coast. “When you’re in situations when you’re deeply reliant on the environment, even subtle alternations can have huge ripple effects,” she said. In hundreds of interviews conducted between 2009 and 2014 across five indigenous communities in the Nunatsiavut region of Labrador, including Rigolet, Cunsolo and her team found that the melted ice, shorter winters and unpredictable weather made people feel trapped, depressed, stressed and anxious, and, in some cases, led to increased risk of substance abuse and suicidal thoughts. In one town, a woman told Cunsolo’s team that not being able to get on the land made her feel like her spirit was dying. In another, a man said, “Inuit are people of the sea ice. If there is no more sea ice, how can we be people of the sea ice?” When Cunsolo first visited Rigolet in winter 2009-10, air temperature in the region was an average of 12.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. It barely snowed, and there was severe wind and freezing rain. Finally, at the end of January, the ice froze over — choppy, sharp and ten weeks late. By April, six to eight weeks earlier than usual, it was gone. In part, the warm winter happened because of a natural atmospheric process called negative Arctic oscillation, but the magnitude, Way said, could only be explained by a century of warming. What Cunsolo’s research revealed to be the “largest climatic and environmental shift in living memory” in Rigolet made clear to her what had until that winter played out at a slower rate. “A flood happens, or a Hurricane Katrina happens, and people say, ‘Oh, that makes sense that people are traumatised,’” Cunsolo said. When people “are exposed to this ongoing environmental stress, day after day, month after month, that has a tremendous impact.” Another form of colonisation In 1968, when Derrick Pottle was nine years old, he and his family moved from Rigolet to Happy Valley-Goose Bay under a federal government programme that relocated thousands of indigenous Canadians from remote communities. “Goose Bay was a very, very bad place to be an Inuk,” Pottle said, recalling systemic abuse and racism. At school, he was forbidden from speaking his native language, Inuktitut, and after the move, he said, his parents became alcoholics “overnight.” Climate change provokes a similar sense of displacement, experts say, particularly for hunters. An unpredictable environment means disempowerment. “It’s like another form of colonisation,” Cunsolo said. The experience of those on the front lines, Cunsolo said, was merely an indication of what was coming. “All humans, whether we want to admit it or not, are impacted by the natural environment,” she said. Pottle, for his part, is learning, painfully, to adapt. Blocked by the open water of the bay, he aimed his snowmobile along a path of low willow seedlings and mosses. Miles on, he would reach the tundra, where, in the distance, his red cabin sat against a white backdrop of sky and land.
