United Nations: “Feel The Anger Flow Through Your Body”

7:11 pm, 2/1/07

United Nations: "Feel The Anger Flow Through Your Body"
After their bungled anti-war campaign that involved burning a village of helpless Smurfs, the UN turns out another inconvenient work of children's fiction.

The United Nations has ventured into children's publishing with a scary story about a small boy who loses a dogsled race because of global warming. In November the odd little picture book cum policy brief, Tore and the Town on Thin Ice, made the rounds at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Kenya.

The night after he loses the race by falling through a weak place in the ice, Tore has a dream in which he sees the Inuit goddess Sedna, who warns him that "rich countries use-and waste-an awful lot of energy. Huge cars. Too many cars instead of efficient trains and buses." The animal kingdom comes out in full force with some nightmarish warnings of its own. A snowy owl tells Tore winning dogsled races "might not be your top worry" soon, since "some people who hunt for a living are already going hungry because a lot of seals and walruses are heading north." A polar bear moans that he is starving, and then-when Tore gets upset-a whale calls to him: "That's the spirit! Get good and angry. You'll need all that energy to make a difference."

Yes, he will, since anger is pretty much the only tool he's got, "reason" and "facts" not being in his favor. Coincidentally, that's pretty much how it works for Islamists, too.

Besides, the historical record suggests that the Innuit are only so far south to begin with because of the same ice age that drove the Norse out of Greenland, a dramatic and completely natural climate change that destroyed their civilization.

After roughly 1350, the climate grew colder during the Little Ice Age and the Inuit were forced to abandon hunting and whaling sites in the high Arctic. Bowhead whaling disappeared in Canada and Greenland (but continued in Alaska) and the Inuit had to subsist on a much poorer diet. Without whales, they lost access to essential raw materials for tools and architecture that were derived from whaling. Although the Inuit had always been nomadic, they were forced to move more and more often to maximise their return from hunting. Semi-permanent sod and whalebone dwellings were replaced by what has now become the symbol of the Inuit in many minds: temporary snow houses known as igloos.

The lesson: Nature ruins lives.

The changing climate forced the Inuit to also look south, pressuring them into the marginal niches along the edges of the tree line that Indians had not occupied, or where they were weak enough to coexist with. It is hard to say with any precision when the Inuit stopped their territorial expansion. There is evidence that they were still moving into new territory in southern Labrador in the 17th century, when they first began to interact with colonial North American civilization.

Sedna should be thrilled, what with the global warming making her people's ancient homeland available to them again and whatnaught. If they start whaling again though, it'd just be a matter of time before the Sea Shepherd suicide bombers show up.