CLIMATE CHANGE AND FUTURE SCENARIOS
IN THE ARCTIC REGION
ROUND TABLE
(Venice, 11-12th December 2014)
Maria Pia Casarini
Direttore, Istituto Geografico Polare “Silvio Zavatti”, Fermo
e-mail: zip.fermo@gmail.com
The impact of climate change on Inuit and Nunavut and the activity of the
Istituto Geografico Polare “Silvio Zavatti”
First a bit of personal history. Adele Airoldi and myself met in 1988, when we both
followed the course of Master of Philosophy in Polar Studies at the University of
Cambridge, at the Scott Polar Research Institute, where Peter Wadhams was Director.
We are still the only two Italians to have that qualification.
Now I’d like to introduce to you the Istituto Geografico Polare “Silvio Zavatti”.
This unique institution in the panorama of Italian polar involvement was the creation
of a scholar, Professor Silvio Zavatti, born in Forlì, near Bologna, in 1917. His
passion for the polar regions brought him to found the Istituto Geografico Polare in
1944, just after the liberation of that part of Italy on the part of the Allied Forces. A
year later, in 1945, he founded a Bulletin of polar information, very similar in scope
to Polar Record, the official publication of the Scott Polar Research Institute in
Cambridge, England. He called it IL POLO, and the first number was just one page,
because of the shortage of paper caused by the war. It soon became a journal in its
own right, and it still is the only Italian polar journal, in continuous publication for 70
years, an anniversary which we will celebrate in the coming year 2015.
Zavatti had been posted to the Marche region during the Allied liberation of Italy on
account of his excellent knowledge of the English language. There he remained,
having married a local girl, and settled in Civitanova Marche, in the province of
Macerata. He had two sons, and the younger, Renato, still plays a part in the life of
the Institute which is now dedicated to his father, as President of the Associazione
Amici del Museo Polare.
It is hard to describe the depth of involvement of Silvio Zavatti in all things polar, and
the personal sacrifices he made to study the polar regions and their inhabitants. As he
had to support his family he took a number of teaching jobs, related to natural
sciences, then became professor of Geography at the University of Urbino. He also
wrote literally hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, as well as over 100
books.
The 1960s were the years of his polar arctic expeditions. But previously he had tried
in vain to get support from the Italian Government for an Italian participation in the
IGY (International Geophysical Year) of 1957-58, centred on research in the
Antarctic. He had identified the tiny Bouvet Island, owned by Norway, as the place to
establish a meteorological station. If his idea had been implemented, Italy would have
been one of the original signatories of the Antarctic Treaty, which came into existence
as a result of the successes in research and international cooperation achieved by the
12 nations who had taken part in the IGY: United States, the USSR, Belgium, Japan,
Norway, Sweden, France, UK, Argentina, Chile, Australia, New Zealand.
In the early 1950s Canada had started a program of relocation of their people of the
North, the nomadic group then called Eskimos, in order to give them legal status.
With this came a disruption in their way of life, which changed them forever. Small
children were taught in English, and then taken away to Southern Canada to be
educated, hunting for subsistence became a thing of the past, they were made to live
in wooden prefabricated houses, in villages. Zavatti wanted to study the life and
customs of these natives before these disappeared altogether. His research took him
first to Rankin Inlet, on the western side of Hudson Bay, in 1961. His acute
observations and unique records, both written and visual (films and photographs) are
now part of this book, called Terre Lontane (Far-away Lands), a transcription of his
original diaries. He loved the Eskimos of Rankin Inlet, a society in deep transition,
where traditional life was threatened by modern western habits. He then talked openly
of genocide.
In 1962 Zavatti went BY CAR to study the reindeer herders of northern Scandinavia.
He actually passed through Kiruna. Lack of funds forced him to cut short this
expedition.
Yes, let’s talk about funds. He never received any public help or grant, every
expedition was organised with very little money, borrowed from friends, with small
local sponsorships, and remortgaging his own home, as well as selling philatelic
envelopes. In order to have the necessary equipment he offered to test tents and
parkas for the Italian Army, and part of the sponsorships were in provisions for his
survival in the cold Arctic regions.
In 1963 he was in Greenland, in Ammassalik, where he noted the great difference
between the natives there, who had been already colonised by Denmark, and those of
Rankin Inlet, where he returned in 1967, finding already some hopeful signs of
change, for instance, a teacher from Southern Canada was teaching the younger
children in Inuktitut.
In 1969 Zavatti organised his last Arctic expedition, this time to Repulse Bay, on the
Arctic Circle, a community created by Canada only a very few years earlier, with
groups of natives from various parts of the area. Here he noted the first signs of
“Eskimo Power”, the beginning of a bid for independence, which will 30 years later
bring about the creation of the Province of Nunavut, on 1 April 1999.
The material he had gathered during these five expeditions, in the form of carvings, in
ivory, vertebrae of seals, soapstone, serpentine; of skeletons of dead animals such as
walruses and other land animals, even the foetus of a whale, items of everyday life,
such as ulus, the woman’s knife, old soapstone lamps, and other items, became the
first nucleus of his Polar Museum, which occupied then two rooms in the newly
founded Town Library, for which Zavatti had campaigned for nearly twenty years.
The beginning of the Polar Library, now the largest polar library in Italy with well
over 4000 books, plus pamphlets, reports, foreign polar journals obtained in exchange
with IL POLO, dates from that time.
Zavatti’s health had been undermined by the hardships of his expeditions. He
continued to write valuable books on polar subjects, a number of informative books
for youngsters, and to increase the material in his Polar Museum, which is still the
only one in Italy. Disagreements with the Municipality of Civitanova Marche brought
him to withdraw his entire collection and library, When he died, in May 1985, he
knew that the Municipality of Fermo, a beautiful town nearby, would acquire his
entire collection and Museum, and house it in the lovely Villa Vitali, built in 1854,
which had belonged to the family of Count Vitali. This is what I found in 2011, when
I started being Director, and where we are now, with an ever expanding Polar
Museum and Polar Library, thanks to donations, with relics of the airship Italia thanks
to the friendship between Zavatti and Umberto Nobile, and the quarterly journal IL
POLO which I have now turned into a bilingual publication in Italian and English.
This is a real opportunity for me to encourage all of you polar people to contribute to
it with articles on any polar subjects, and help me to make both the Institute and its
journal better known in the world. An agreement with the Zavatti family assures that
the Municipality contributes a fixed yearly amount of money, for exhibitions and
initiatives as well as for the journal’s publication. In 2011 we organised a workshop
entitled “Oil Spills in Sea Ice. Past, Present and Future”, which was attended by 40
people of 14 different nationalities, as well as exhibitions in 2012-2013 to
commemorate the 100th anniversary of the conquest of the South Pole with
exhibitions on Amundsen, Scott (in the form of the unique collection of the Lost
Photographs of Captain Scott) and the Japanese Lieutenant Shirase, who was also in
the Antarctic at the same time.
So what happened to Zavatti’s beloved Inuit. First of all there is the change in name.
They were still called Eskimos in the 1960s, and while in Greenland they are also
called Inuit, in Alaska they still want to be called Eskimos.
Paul Gibbard described yesterday the creation and structure of Nunavut. It has an area
of over 2 million square km, and a population of 33,000 people, of which over 60%
are under the age of 25. The creation of Nunavut, let’s note, happened without any
conflict, and is a major achievement towards the natives being considered part of
Canada. The Canadian exhibition at the Venice Biennale of this year was dedicated to
“Nunavut at 15”. It has been said that the Inuit passed “from igloos to Internet in forty
years”.
And of course the works of the Arctic Council are in themselves a major achievement
in a world where the north is playing a major part.
We have heard yesterday about the great changes in the Arctic environment. This in
turn impacts on the way of life of the inhabitants of the North.
• The melting of permafrost makes some buildings in the communities of the north
unsafe. I remember seeing in a village along the Northwest Passage on Herschel
Island a grave with the slab on top half opened, due to the instability of the terrain.
• The changing ice conditions create new challenges.
- For instance, hunting in winter, when it was possible to use skidoos over the thick
ice, is now unsafe, as the ice is much thinner;
- The opening of the Arctic to more ships, on account of the diminished ice cover,
has brought also fishing vessels of different nationalities, which deplete the waters
and take away food from the Inuit;
- Beach and shoreline erosion is occurring along the Arctic Ocean coastline
(especially important for Alaska) because the retreat of sea ice creates a bigger fetch
for the wind to generate waves. In one case in Alaska this has led to the forcible
relocation of a village. Sea level rise is certain to cause further disruption to coastal
communities.
- The changing ice cover is bringing changes to the habitats of animals that are
hunted by the Inuit – polar bears, seals, fish. Bowhead whales, migrating along the
coast of Alaska, now keep further out to sea and are harder to hunt.
On the other hand:
• Inuit gain a new status on the world’s stage, as they are given a voice in deciding
whether oil and mineral exploration can proceed in their areas. They can then take
part in the industrial process that results.
• A new, cutting edge architecture provides now excellent buildings designed
especially for arctic conditions, as shown in the Biennale exhibition, where carvings
of buildings in the north were commissioned from Inuit resident artists, such as this
soapstone carving of Kiilinik High School in Cambridge Bay, made by Noah
Enowyak.
I wish also to remind people that an exhibition on the Inuit is taking place in Cecina
(Livorno) until January 25, 2015, organised by the Hermann Geiger Foundation. It is
open every afternoon. We have sent 9 items, mainly Inuit carvings, from our Polar
Museum.
I wish to finish by expressing my deepest thanks to Consigliere Tornetta, who
believes in what we represent, and helps the Zavatti Institute to be better known.
Thank you.