Working in small groups of two to five tent-dwelling families, they follow the centuries-old traditional cycle of taking their caribou north for the summer, where the animals graze on the exposed tundra. The people and their herds move south for the winter so that the caribou can dig into and feed upon snow-covered lichens. The Nenet retain animist beliefs that all their world and its component parts—animal, vegetable, earth, and human—are inextricably bound together as a “spiritual” whole. But both their world and worldviews are threatened.
The Yamal is one enormous gas field and is now being exploited in its commercial development by the Russian conglomerate GazProm, bringing the railroad, settlements, and roadways to the region. Now, each Nenet family receives a monthly $30/£20 allowance from the state to help them meet the necessary costs of encounters with twenty-first-century materialism. One hangover of the old Soviet system is that all Nenet children must now go away for state boarding school education for at least ten years from the age of seven; many Nenet teenagers fail to grow up learning the traditional crafts and skills to maintain their culture’s nomadic lifestyle.
In 2013, global warming was acknowledged to have led to a winter thaw then refreeze, which resulted in the starvation and death of over 15,000 caribou and thus sixty families lost their livelihoods. They became wage-slaves and predominantly slaughtermen, killing their remaining and other caribou to help feed the railroad staff, construction teams, and gas workers. Now the number of caribou is not being viably sustained, because of those growing human demands, so a vicious cycle of potentially terminal decline has begun for both Yamal’s caribou and the traditional Nenet way of life.
Second, in the Antarctic’s oceans, a battle is raging. Each year, the Japanese whaling fleet is challenged by the ships, helicopters, and tactics of the international marine wildlife conservation organization, Sea Shepherd,2 to prevent the further killing of whales. My views about the consumption of whale meat and personal objections to the hunting of whales are already documented.3 The publication and broadcast of my two-voice graphic poem about the demise of a South Atlantic whaling station are in the public domain.4 My commitment to peacemaking and nonviolent action5 makes me question the more extreme tactics of Sea Shepherd’s fleet.
Having seen orcas from the Orkney ferry and minkes off the Irish coast, I love whales and their graceful joie de vivre as they swim wild as God intended. They are gentle creatures, although the adjective is relative when considering the courtship rituals of the larger species (which weigh many times more than yellow school buses!). Most whales feed on plankton or krill and even the alpha predator orcas have never been documented as deliberately killing humans in the wild (in marked contrast to captive orcas6). Why do allegedly civilized nations, like Japan or Iceland, persist in the hunting of increasingly endangered whales? How many Japanese or Icelandic consumers have witnessed the innate cruelty of harpooning a live, unanesthetized giant of the sea and dragging it to a slow death by drowning?
Despite the International Court of Justice ruling in 2014 that Japanese whaling is illegal and must stop, the Japanese declared in late 2015 that they would resume limited whaling in 2016; as we go to press this saga continues. There are sustainable alternative sources of marine protein. No wonder acquaintances who support Sea Shepherd have challenged me to be a volunteer for the internationally staffed Antarctic fleet; regrettably, my life-limiting heart condition means I could not even pass the medical to be a ship’s cook.
Both of these narratives describe learning journeys. Each year the Nenet find that ancient migratory herd-ways are now blocked by new rail-track or road embankments. Although most Sea Shepherd volunteers are white, westernized, and well-educated, they are also of all creeds or none and learned about the plight of whales, making considered choices to risk their lives to “save the whales.” In today’s world, as the hunt for resources strengthens in the face of human need, we all have to do three things:
1. Recognize the plight of the planet for both human and other species.
2. Learn about the cost of making changes for the benefit of all.
3. Decide how much commitment each of us will make to ensure those changes occur—whatever the cost.
As the economist Robert Costanza summarizes: “Probably the most challenging task facing humanity today is the creation of a shared vision of a sustainable and desirable society, one that can provide permanent prosperity within the biophysical constraints of the real world in a way that is fair and equitable to all of humanity, to other species and to future generations.”7
It is relatively simple to see how this can apply to caribou, Yamal, and the Nenet or whaling in the southern oceans. Yet between the poles is literally a world of similar tensions perhaps not so easily identifiable nor solvable. Theologian Sallie McFague personalizes the cost of Costanza’s vision: “The route to it, however, for folks like me and you . . . involves limitation and sacrifice, a radically different view of abundance. It involves re-imagining the good life in just and sustainable ways.”8 If the Nenet, their caribou, or Antarctic whales are to have a future, we must learn to see ourselves as part of that shared future, too.
Oikos means “household”
The interconnectedness of planetary life is masked by westernized consumerism and lifestyles. Would GazProm in their commercial search for profit welcome the global community’s intervention to protect the Nenet people and the caribou? However, the increasing moral support for the Sea Shepherd organization demonstrates that globally people are prepared to object when westernized consumerism goes too far. Over some time, without baleen whales, the exponential growth of krill will ultimately clog up the oceans, just as effectively as a chemical pollutant. Hunting whales to extinction engenders geo-suicide.
We have to make connections. That “we” means people like you and me who have both time and education to read books, to explore the issues, and to act both politically and economically for change. In my lifetime, we have seen the growth of the multinational (a.k.a. transnational) corporation, whose economic powers transcend those of single nations and whose political might can overcome community protest or ecological concerns. A relatively neutral example is that (as I write) World Bank statistics identify that the gross turnover of Coca-Cola is greater than the gross national product of all but four African nations and the majority of European Union countries.
We now live in a global community. No longer can we consider our own nation as its own household. There are at least as big if not bigger transnationals, whose economic priorities can (and often do) override the best interests of our own nation. We have to learn to live as part of a new global community, in which decisions taken in one region can have repercussions around the world. The global financial crash of 2008 is often attributed to Japan as its source by those who would prefer to divert attention from the overselling of subprime mortgages in North America or a too-rapid fiscal expansion of the European Union. We are in this together—but what we should note is that all these contributory factors took place in westernized, northern hemisphere regions. Westernized Australasia may have been implicated in the recession but was not to blame for the crash. But what is more frightening is to realize that one billion-plus nations of India and China also cannot be held responsible for the 2008 crash. Neither can the poorer southern hemisphere nations, meaning that over half the world’s peoples had no say in what could destroy their economies. They have no real control over the north’s effects upon them. It is as though the prophetic challenge of the 1980 Brandt Report9 never happened.
There