For Toku Oshima, a hunter from Greenland, the quest to bring renewable energy to her hometown of Qaanaaq is not just a fight against climate change — it’s a fight for cultural survival.
Albert was at first dubious that she could help. But as she opened her mouth to explain that renewables weren’t her speciality, she thought to herself: “What a cop out. You have a PhD in engineering. Are you really going to tell these people there’s no way you can help them?” Among them is Oshima, who was born in Qaanaaq in 1975 to a family of hunters. Although she left to study electrical engineering in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, she eventually returned. She now hunts and runs a workshop where she cures skins and butchers meat. “I’ve never been an inside woman,” she says. “Here, there are more chances to go out into nature.”Credit: Mary Albert
“Most communities only have one shot at getting all the diesel they need for the year,” says Martha Lenio, a renewable-energy specialist in the World Wildlife Fund’s office in Iqaluit, Canada. Increasingly erratic weather and sea ice sometimes means that the ships the communities rely on never come in. In 2019, unusual ice conditions prevented barges from making their annual diesel delivery to several hamlets in Canada’s Northwest Territories; in the end, the shipment had to be flown in.
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Source: Nature - 🏆 64. / 68 Read more »