Gigi On Earth

This year, I read The Right To Be Cold by Sheila Watt-Cloutier. The book explores Sheila’s journey to protect the Arctic—a fight not just for the Inuit in Canada but also for the communities in Russia, Scandinavia, and Alaska who rely on a cold climate to maintain their way of life.

One passage in particular really struck a chord with me, probably because I work in communications. Sheila observes that so many campaigns about Arctic preservation focus almost entirely on the animals—the emaciated polar bears stranded on shrinking ice floes. It’s as if these campaigns can’t go without a polar bear to get their point across. But there’s rarely any mention of the people who live there, maintaining their history, culture, and way of life.

This made me wonder: How have we, as a society, become more empathetic toward animals than people?

It seems to me that as we’ve grown more individualistic, we’ve started to see people as flawed or self-serving. It’s like we’re all too focused on protecting our own slice of comfort and security. And I get it! For decades, our cities and social structures have encouraged us to look out for ourselves, to keep to ourselves, and to measure success by our personal gains. The climate crisis is asking us to expand our empathy and connect with people that we’ll never meet. Yet, as Sheila points out, preserving the Arctic not only protects a culture it also benefits the world as the Arctic acts as the world’s refrigerator.

So, why don’t more Arctic campaigns show the faces of the people who live there? Maybe it’s because we’re all caught up in securing our own future, even if it comes at someone else’s expense. So we depict the Arctic as a place where few live, a frozen landscape where only animals roam. And if that land becomes unlivable for its people, it’s almost as if they never existed so we haven’t lost anything at all.