Sheila Watt-Cloutier is a Canadian Inuit activist who drew climate change, as a Human Rights issue, to global attention.
With rising temperatures in the Arctic regions, the life, culture, food traditions and housing systems are being put at risk. While the world is rightly concerned about the loss of habitat for polar bears, nonetheless the human impact is not receiving sufficient attention.
Ms Watt-Cloutier sums up her work by saying: “I do nothing more than remind the world that the Arctic is not a barren land devoid of life but a rich and majestic land that has supported our resilient culture for millennia”.
She adds that the idea of “the right to be cold” is less relatable than “the right to water” for many people. This isn’t meant to denigrate the people in the warmer countries, but rather to point out that the global connections we need to make in order to consider the world and its people as a whole, are sometimes lacking. Because as hard as it is for many people to understand, for us Inuit, ice matters. Ice is life.
She was a Nobel Prize Nominee and is the past Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), the organization that represents internationally the 155,000 Inuit of Canada, Greenland, Alaska, and Chukotka in the Far East of the Russian Federation.
The right to be cold is her book on the right to protect the ice world, a memoir of the human story of life on the front lines of climate change, told by a woman who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most influential Indigenous environmental, cultural, and human rights advocates in the world.
Climate Hero