344
Arctic Yearbook 2014
Granted, budget cuts to natural resource management agencies have not been restricted to Canada
in recent years. The United State’s federal budget sequestration in March 2013 has also had a chilling
impact on NOAA’s hiring of new staff and has further drained the agency’s grant and contract
funding for the year (Berger 2013). However, the budget woes of the United States have not been
accompanied by such a targeted and systematic dissolution of federal industry oversight as has been
observed in Canada. At the same time there has also been an increasing alarm among many in the
Canadian scientific community over the administration’s “muzzling” of scientists with research or
evidence that does not support and advance the administration’s current pro-industry and prooil/gas development agendas (Fitzpatrick 2012; Linnet 2012). The ability of resource managers and
government scientists to engage with communities in meaningful ways has become highly politicized
according to a recent report from the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Clinic. This is
due, in part, to the administration’s new policies requiring all government scientists to receive
consent from public relations officers before answering questions from the media (Greenwood
2013).
Both the dismissal and silencing of Canadian scientists are not just issues of concern for researchers
monitoring the downstream impacts of industry, however. For many years, Canadian researchers
have also played an important role in international efforts to describe and model climate change.
Charles Emmerson (2010) has recently addressed the ongoing significance of these efforts. As he
succinctly states, “get it right, and we will save money and lives; get it wrong, and we will waste
money and lose lives. The case for supporting Arctic scientific research, therefore, is unanswerable.
And the case for supporting its internationalization – to allow for the best global talent to emerge
and to allow for a common scientific understanding of climate change to be forged – is compelling”
(141). As collaborative international science and research has also been a dominant means of
establishing Canada’s presence in the power dynamics of the emerging Arctic world region,
reverberations from the felling of environmental science and research may portend surprising upsets
to Canada’s geopolitical clout in the years to come – and these surprises will, no doubt, have
implications for Canadian lives and livelihoods.
Already, for many people in the Canadian Arctic, the ongoing international debate over whether or
not we have exceeded the prescriptive environmental boundaries needed to provide “a safe
operating space for humanity” is no longer moot (Rockström et al. 2009). The reality of the
Canadian North is concretely one of a climate-altered environment. Yet, while this international
debate persists, much of the environmental management theory and literature remains co-opted by
ongoing calls for scientists and policy-makers to work on building greater ecosystem resilience as a
way to deal with the extent of climate change uncertainty. However, as Berkes et al. (2005) have
emphasized, “discussing vulnerability only in the positive terms of resilience and capacity places the
onus on Aboriginal people to absorb and counteract negative environmental impacts caused by the
industrial economy, rather than targeting the problems to demand change” (65). In lieu of ecosystem
resilience theory, calls are now being made by some environmental ethicists