Environment

Inuit and environmentalists clash over polar bear

by Rob Peters | January 15, 2008 at 09:57 am

727 views | 1 Recommendation | 5 comments

To save the polar bear, or to respect a way of life, that is the question.

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Leaders of Canada's Arctic Inuit people denounced U.S. environmentalists on Monday for pushing Washington to declare the polar bear a threatened species, saying the move was unnecessary and would hurt the local economy.

The United States last week delayed a decision on whether global warming threatened polar bears on the grounds that it needed more time to analyze the data. Three U.S. green groups said they would sue for quicker action.

The Inuit fear that if Washington does declare the bear a threatened species, it will deter U.S. hunters, who spend millions of dollars a year for the right to shoot the animals in the Canadian Arctic.

Environmentalists say global warming is shrinking the sea
ice that polar bears use as a platform to hunt seals. The fate
of the bears has received widespread media coverage.

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mamabird5o

at 16:26 on January 15th, 2008

I'm appalled that people would pay to shoot these bears. This is no longer a case of the Inuit needing the bears for subsistence; to say that their way of life is threatened because they can no longer sell the right to kill an endangered species calls into question which ways of life must be protected. If my indigenous group supported itself through any other distasteful means, would there be an obligation for others to allow this to continue? The reasoning here is faulty, and I'm afraid that the sentient being is going to have to lose this round.

Thanks, Carol Butler

mamabird5o has contributed a photo to this story.

dblaywell5

at 16:38 on January 15th, 2008

This picture was taken at the Cincinnati Zoo by my daughter.

dblaywell5 has contributed a photo to this story.

MagicSword

at 07:54 on January 16th, 2008

This is quite an interesting reversal of the situation with Iceland's whale hunters. While the inuit want hunting polar bears to remain legal to sustain their tourist industry, Iceland has recently stopped issuing quotas to hunt whales because whales are much more valuable to the country as a tourist commodity (whale-watching etc.) than they ever were as a marketable source of food.