I highly doubt that the Yup’ik fishermen are even contributors to global climate change, but we expect them to then completely stop fishing the waters they have fished for decades because of change we're largely to blame for?
From forced settlements to fishing bans, we're still forcing our will on indigenous people.
Edit: the religious argument does seem a stretch to me, and wouldn't be necessary if common sense was used.
The modern regulatory state forces pretty much everyone to do all sorts of things. People are prevented from aging cheese less than 30 days, from having sex with people for money, forced to purchase unwanted health insurance, and penalized if they don't rent or purchase a home. A person can own a piece of land for decades, and suddenly wetland regulation or a community action board can prevent them from using that land.
Why is it bad to impose similar burdens on the Yup'ik?
They've been fishing those waters for thousands of years.
the religious argument does seem a stretch to me, and wouldn't be necessary if common sense was used.
Their religious argument is actually an expression of common sense, and has more to do with the scientific method than it seems. Indigenous people hunted, fished, and gathered every year for generations. Through direct observation, they noticed many patterns. When you hunted the same area too consistently, fewer animals came back in the following seasons. So they came up with a belief system along the lines of, "If you hunt too much, you have offended the animals, and you must stop hunting for several seasons until they return."
The scientific approach makes the same observation, and the same recommendations, from a different explanation. Dismissing the religious approach is easy when people don't understand how it was developed, and what role it has in guiding people's interaction with their entire environment.
There are a couple of problems with this kind of argument.
First, do we really want to have different laws for different races? (Aside from the moral issue, that's explicitly unconstitutional in Alaska.)
Note that I'm talking about the fishing limits here. You mentioned forced settlement, which is, of course, a reprehensible thing. It is also a case of enforcing the law differently for different ethnic groups.
Second, we need to watch out for implicit assumptions that native americans are somehow different from the rest of us -- perhaps intellectually inferior, or morally superior, or committed to a traditional lifestyle. But really, these are just regular old people: just as smart and just as selfish as you and I, and just as uninterested in living the way their ancestors did in past centuries (short lifespans? famine every few years? no tech? no Cheetos?). And so they are also just as capable of short-sightedly wrecking the environment.
During Prohibition, there was an exemption for sacramental wine. Surely that's a precedent for exempting a particular group from specific laws on religious grounds?
If humans cause climate change and industrialization began around 1850, then logically, there'd be an exponential and consistent increase of global temperatures. Al Gore himself said that, in five years, the polar ice cap would be ice-free.. and he said that 7 years ago. There hasn't been warming for almost 18 years, yet CO2 emissions (especially from China are still increasing.)
The facts are very clear: CO2 increased, temperatures have not. Another fact: the climate changed long before humans were around to drive Escalades.
The AGW movement is nothing more than an anti-capitalist false flag with a professed desire for wealth redistribution. Al Gore, for example loves the environmental movement so much because he became a multi-billionaire as it's Chicken Little. Those who still follow the religion of human-caused global warming are like a bunch of elderly Soviets nostalgic about Stalin's First Five Year Plan.
Ottmar Edenhofer, a UN official with the IPCC said, "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole." In that same interview he made the case that "climate change" policy was more of an anti-globalization policy than actual environmental policy.
Greenpeace cofounder Dr. Patrick Moore, who would presumably know more about environmentalism than almost anyone reading this, rejects the climate-anti-capitalism hysteria that has co-opted the "old" environmentalism of reducing pollution, whaling, overfishing, nuclear waste and other, more pure protections of our environment.
Let the downvoting begin! I am always amazed that within such a smart bunch as HN readers, that there is still a large number that ignore critical scientific analysis and instead let political or ideological beliefs cloud their otherwise rational minds. It's almost religiously intense. Rarely do I see a balanced debate on the subject of human-caused climate change. It's like telling Christians that Jesus wasn't resurrected.
Globar Warming is definitely contributing to this process, but I think some people are definitely trying to fight natural processes which would have happened anyway. Sure, it's sad that a village or a road got taken by water - but that would have happened eventually anyway, right?
In Poland there used to be a church build right by the sea on a cliff - but the sea has eroded the cliff(as seas do), and now only one wall of that church stands, on a tiny piece of land , and which is getting further eroded every single year. Yet because the church(or rather, those few bricks of the last remaining wall) have a religious significance to some people, millions of zlotys are spent each year trying to reinforce that one remaining bit of rock. Why? The cliff erosion is a completely natural process which was bound to happen. And there are even people who say it's "work of god" that the wall is still standing - while to others it's completely clear that only massive reinforcements that are built with hard cash are keeping it standing.
> Sure, it's sad that a village or a road got taken by water - but that would have happened eventually anyway, right?
That's not the point of the article anyways. I think we can agree that the Yup’ik people understand that their villages are going to disappear and that they will have to move. Traditionally they were nomadic people as it was, although they don't really have many choices as to where to go these days.
I don't think the ruins have any particular religious significance. It's protected because it's a landmark. Even the communists tried to stop the erosion.
Oh, and it was built like a mile from the sea originally.
> there are even people who say it's "work of god" that the wall is still standing
I find it amusing that those same people would probably not be too receptive to a comment that it was the "work of god" that caused the erosion of the cliff and consequent collapse of the other walls of the church.
If global warming is killing your god, it may be time to find a new god. After reading the description of Yup’ik religion in the article, all I can say is that their perception of what is necessary to do is not the only possible response to the situation that faces Yup’ik people in that place. The environment has been changing throughout the existence of human beings (we know from archaeology that humankind has lived through ice ages and some major changes in sea level already), so human beings will have to go on being adaptable to face the changes that are inevitable in the environment, and think with sound judgment about how to keep some kinds of changes from happening, if that results in the best trade-offs for humankind. Religion can not be exempted from that general process of human beings reality-checking their own thinking to see if their adaptations to their environment (and adaptations OF their environment) are successful or not.
This is about much more than religion. The western approach to life is to work at a job to earn money to pay for food an shelter. The subsistence approach is to spend much of your time hunting and gathering, and maybe some of your time working for money.
Many people are so far removed from the subsistence approach, that they can't relate to what these people are going through. Asking these people to stop fishing and move to a place where they can find other work is the cultural equivalent to telling everyone on HN to stop working in tech-related fields, and go find something else to do. Sure you could do it, but it would take part of your identity away. When your two-year old kid looks up and asks why you're not doing something your people have done for thousands of years, that's a hard question to answer. The Yup'ik people, and all other people who lived subsistence-based lifestyles responded to previous environmental change by finding a different area to live their subsistence lifestyle. That is not really an option. The move away from subsistence is much more drastic than many people can fully understand.
My perspective on this is shaped by having moved to Alaska 12 years ago, and knowing many people who live a subsistence lifestyle to varying degrees.
I was hoping the title would refer to, you know, our tacit "God": our unrelenting faith in gratification through material consumption; essentially unbounded and ever-accelerating growth; and the idea that we can safely ignore any non-human impact this pursuit of "happiness" may have (or for that matter, to future human generations).
[+] [-] themartorana|11 years ago|reply
From forced settlements to fishing bans, we're still forcing our will on indigenous people.
Edit: the religious argument does seem a stretch to me, and wouldn't be necessary if common sense was used.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|11 years ago|reply
Why is it bad to impose similar burdens on the Yup'ik?
[+] [-] japhyr|11 years ago|reply
They've been fishing those waters for thousands of years.
the religious argument does seem a stretch to me, and wouldn't be necessary if common sense was used.
Their religious argument is actually an expression of common sense, and has more to do with the scientific method than it seems. Indigenous people hunted, fished, and gathered every year for generations. Through direct observation, they noticed many patterns. When you hunted the same area too consistently, fewer animals came back in the following seasons. So they came up with a belief system along the lines of, "If you hunt too much, you have offended the animals, and you must stop hunting for several seasons until they return."
The scientific approach makes the same observation, and the same recommendations, from a different explanation. Dismissing the religious approach is easy when people don't understand how it was developed, and what role it has in guiding people's interaction with their entire environment.
[+] [-] ggchappell|11 years ago|reply
First, do we really want to have different laws for different races? (Aside from the moral issue, that's explicitly unconstitutional in Alaska.)
Note that I'm talking about the fishing limits here. You mentioned forced settlement, which is, of course, a reprehensible thing. It is also a case of enforcing the law differently for different ethnic groups.
Second, we need to watch out for implicit assumptions that native americans are somehow different from the rest of us -- perhaps intellectually inferior, or morally superior, or committed to a traditional lifestyle. But really, these are just regular old people: just as smart and just as selfish as you and I, and just as uninterested in living the way their ancestors did in past centuries (short lifespans? famine every few years? no tech? no Cheetos?). And so they are also just as capable of short-sightedly wrecking the environment.
[+] [-] jackgavigan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briandear|11 years ago|reply
If humans cause climate change and industrialization began around 1850, then logically, there'd be an exponential and consistent increase of global temperatures. Al Gore himself said that, in five years, the polar ice cap would be ice-free.. and he said that 7 years ago. There hasn't been warming for almost 18 years, yet CO2 emissions (especially from China are still increasing.)
The facts are very clear: CO2 increased, temperatures have not. Another fact: the climate changed long before humans were around to drive Escalades.
The AGW movement is nothing more than an anti-capitalist false flag with a professed desire for wealth redistribution. Al Gore, for example loves the environmental movement so much because he became a multi-billionaire as it's Chicken Little. Those who still follow the religion of human-caused global warming are like a bunch of elderly Soviets nostalgic about Stalin's First Five Year Plan.
Ottmar Edenhofer, a UN official with the IPCC said, "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole." In that same interview he made the case that "climate change" policy was more of an anti-globalization policy than actual environmental policy.
Greenpeace cofounder Dr. Patrick Moore, who would presumably know more about environmentalism than almost anyone reading this, rejects the climate-anti-capitalism hysteria that has co-opted the "old" environmentalism of reducing pollution, whaling, overfishing, nuclear waste and other, more pure protections of our environment.
Let the downvoting begin! I am always amazed that within such a smart bunch as HN readers, that there is still a large number that ignore critical scientific analysis and instead let political or ideological beliefs cloud their otherwise rational minds. It's almost religiously intense. Rarely do I see a balanced debate on the subject of human-caused climate change. It's like telling Christians that Jesus wasn't resurrected.
[+] [-] gambiting|11 years ago|reply
In Poland there used to be a church build right by the sea on a cliff - but the sea has eroded the cliff(as seas do), and now only one wall of that church stands, on a tiny piece of land , and which is getting further eroded every single year. Yet because the church(or rather, those few bricks of the last remaining wall) have a religious significance to some people, millions of zlotys are spent each year trying to reinforce that one remaining bit of rock. Why? The cliff erosion is a completely natural process which was bound to happen. And there are even people who say it's "work of god" that the wall is still standing - while to others it's completely clear that only massive reinforcements that are built with hard cash are keeping it standing.
[+] [-] bojo|11 years ago|reply
That's not the point of the article anyways. I think we can agree that the Yup’ik people understand that their villages are going to disappear and that they will have to move. Traditionally they were nomadic people as it was, although they don't really have many choices as to where to go these days.
[+] [-] spindritf|11 years ago|reply
Oh, and it was built like a mile from the sea originally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruins_of_the_church_in_Trz%C4%...
[+] [-] mikro2nd|11 years ago|reply
I find it amusing that those same people would probably not be too receptive to a comment that it was the "work of god" that caused the erosion of the cliff and consequent collapse of the other walls of the church.
[+] [-] phaemon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] japhyr|11 years ago|reply
Many people are so far removed from the subsistence approach, that they can't relate to what these people are going through. Asking these people to stop fishing and move to a place where they can find other work is the cultural equivalent to telling everyone on HN to stop working in tech-related fields, and go find something else to do. Sure you could do it, but it would take part of your identity away. When your two-year old kid looks up and asks why you're not doing something your people have done for thousands of years, that's a hard question to answer. The Yup'ik people, and all other people who lived subsistence-based lifestyles responded to previous environmental change by finding a different area to live their subsistence lifestyle. That is not really an option. The move away from subsistence is much more drastic than many people can fully understand.
My perspective on this is shaped by having moved to Alaska 12 years ago, and knowing many people who live a subsistence lifestyle to varying degrees.
[+] [-] orlybadass|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamweapon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maaku|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gravityloss|11 years ago|reply
Sound familiar?
[+] [-] arlenmark0987|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerta|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gd1|11 years ago|reply
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
[+] [-] phaemon|11 years ago|reply