[news] Arctic thaw

[Resist!ca]

by Charles W. Petit | November 2, 2004 "Eskimo? I must tell you. We are not Eskimos," says Percy Nusunginya, 63, president of the Inupiat tribal council in Barrow, Alaska, northernmost city in North America and home to 4,600 souls, mostly indigenous Alaskan natives, on a dusty gravel strand between vast tundra and the Arctic Ocean. "We are hyperboreans," the weather-beaten whaling captain says proudly over breakfast in tiny Osaka Restaurant. Nusunginya leans slowly forward with a small smile: "It's from the Greek. Hyperborean." He has his etymology right, perhaps more than he realizes. Dictionaries show hyperborean as the general designation for high Arctic denizens. But the word has even greater resonance for today's environmentalists and scientists. In Greek myth, the Hyperboreans live in a warm, perpetually sunlit polar land beyond the north wind. That notion -- of warmth in a polar land -- is today becoming uncomfortably close to the truth.

URL: http://resist.ca/story/2004/11/4/201343/174