Abstract
By ethnographically delineating a specific climate culture—a locally rooted framework for making sense of environmental changes—and weaving it into a broader historical and economic context, this chapter shows how the mainstream discourse on anthropogenic global climate change does not necessarily latch on to people’s everyday lives. Ethnographic field work in northern Manitoba, Canada, has revealed that while one particular local resource—polar bears—and its future reflect a popular element of accounts of warming temperatures worldwide, on-site it is interpreted in a profoundly different way. This leads to a setting with a distinct seasonality in terms of making climate change an issue or not. Taking this seasonal disparity as a point of entry, I show that the concept of anthropogenic climate change or rather its rejection enables a reinforcement of collective positioning and maintaining a particular social reality while at the same time, facing economic challenges, notions of warmer temperatures foster hope for a brighter future.
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Notes
- 1.
The material presented here has been gathered between 2010 and 2012, as part of my ongoing PhD-project within the framework of the Junior Research Group (JRG) Climate Worlds (see Heike Greschke’s Chap. 7, this volume).
- 2.
“Bear jail” is the vernacular for “Polar Bear Holding Facility.”
- 3.
I wish to express my gratitude to my fellow members of the JRG Climate Worlds (Jelena Adeli, Robert Lindner, Julia Schleisiek, Lea Schmitt) as well as my supervisors (Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Peter Schweitzer) for their comments and discussions throughout my project on which this chapter is based. In particular, I am thankful for the editors’ remarks and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this text.
- 4.
All names are pseudonyms chosen by the author.
- 5.
In 2012, the so-called single-desk policy regarding the Canadian Wheat Board (which ensured that a grand portion of Canadian grain was shipped through the Port of Churchill) came to an end (cf. p. 7 in Canadian Wheat Board 2012).
- 6.
- 7.
“trop--” indicates an abruption in the word “tropical.”
- 8.
Amongst other regions, Lake Agassiz covered what is now Manitoba in the Pleistocene (cf. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online 2013).
- 9.
During my stay in Churchill, I found myself in a couple of situations where people tried to persuade me to come back or in fact told me that they had already heard that I would do so. This is meaningful especially in the light of municipal efforts to increase the population and people’s hopes for it.
- 10.
Even though they share many characteristics, hunting and trapping are considered separately here, as they are locally. Furthermore, they refer to different subgroups of the community. Most trappers hunt, but not all hunters trap.
- 11.
- 12.
Such as hunting and fishing rights granted to First Nations (First Nations, together with Métis and Inuit, constitute the indigenous population of Canada; the term has replaced the word ‘Indian’) or specific hunting seasons for particular animals that have to be kept in mind.
- 13.
Polar Bears International.
- 14.
Dawson et al. speak of the possibility that unhealthy and troubled bears naturally might not attract as many tourists (cf. p. 321 in Dawson et al. 2010).
- 15.
Who are in many cases not based in Churchill, but rather elsewhere, leading to much of the tourism money not staying within the community.
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Grill, C. (2015). Animal Belongings: Human-Non Human Interactions and Climate Change in the Canadian Subarctic. In: Greschke, H., Tischler, J. (eds) Grounding Global Climate Change. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9322-3_6
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