Nobel Nominee: Global Warming A Human Rights Issue

[RestoreGore]

Sheila Watt-Cloutier is a true champion of climate change and the Inuit people. And while I truly believe Al Gore deserved the nomination and to win, I also believe Ms. Watt-Cloutier deserves to win as well. I really hope it is possible for the two of them to share in the prize as the work both of them are doing is so very important to the dialogue on this crisis and subsequent action taking place soon. The Inuits are running out of time and it is because of our behavior that this is being exacerbated. To do nothing is simply immoral. As far as global warming being a human rights issue it most certainly is. If the U.S. continues to spew GHGs at the current rate or reach the 19% increase that is predicted, it is going to be catastrophic for indigenous peoples who depend on the environment they live in for survial. For governments to know the affects of climate change and yet continue the same behavior that leads to people losing their homes, their way of life, and their lives is a human rights issue and should be declared so.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070304/ts_nm/globalwarming_rights_dc_1;_ylt=AvEiGFA13.rcFyl.ylylEjpxieAA

Global warming is human rights issue: Nobel nominee
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

Sun Mar 4, 9:03 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It sounds like a sick joke about global warming, with a series of horrible punch lines:

How hot is it? So hot that Inuit people around the Arctic Circle are using air conditioners for the first time. And running out of the hard-packed snow they need to build igloos. And falling through melting ice when they hunt. These circumstances are the current results of global climate change, according to Nobel Peace Prize nominee Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit born inside the Canadian Arctic, who maintains this constitutes a violation of human rights for indigenous people in low-lying areas throughout the world.

Watt-Cloutier and Martin Wagner, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, argued this case on Thursday before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States in Washington. "We weren't going to go to court," Watt-Cloutier said in a telephone interview after her testimony to the commission. "It wasn't about lawsuits and suing for damage or compensation. "It was more about really trying to get the world to pay attention and see this as a human rights issue."

Their best hope is that the commission will write a report on this issue, though even getting a hearing in Washington is a victory of sorts. The commission earlier rejected a petition to hear about alleged rights violations based solely on U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases. The human rights commission has scant powers and can do little more than publicize its findings and propose a resolution to the 35-member organization. In her address to the panel, Watt-Cloutier acknowledged the challenge of connecting climate change and human rights, but noted a practical purpose for protecting the people she called "the sentinels of climate change."

snip

"The glaciers are melting so quickly that where our hunters used to be able to cross safely, now it's so unsafe that it's become torrent rivers ... and we've had a drowning as a result of that as well," she said. Watt-Cloutier quoted a hunter in Barrow, Alaska, to sum up the impact climate change has had on Inuit life: "There's lots of anxieties and angers that are being felt by some of the hunters that no longer can go and hunt. We see the change, but we can't stop it, we can't explain why it's changing. ... Our way of life is changing up here, our ocean is changing."

[RestoreGore]

1. Question: Is global warming a human rights issue? n/t