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October 2008 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Grise Fiord Feature: Norway Carbon Tax The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte

Fewer than 150 people — almost all of them Inuit — live on the sawtooth southern coast of Ellesmere Island in Grise Fiord (above), the most northerly community in Canada. They have been there since August 1953, when federal civil servants relocated a handful of families from northern Quebec to Ellesmere, the world’s tenth largest island. Inuit had never in recorded history maintained year-round communities on the rocky, treeless, High Arctic island. Two months after the families were put ashore, the darkness of winter descended, and they survived in that twilight — in a place they had barely begun to know — until the sun cleared the horizon again in February.

That they not only survived that perilous first winter but managed, over the years, to build a permanent town is a testament to their astonishing resilience and adaptability. Those qualities will be essential to the continuing survival of their community in the age of climate change.

For our contribution to the collaboration, we sent writer Lisa Gregoire and photographer Patrice Halley to Grise Fiord for a look at how Inuit are coping with a climate that is changing more rapidly in the polar regions than anywhere else in the world. The editors at New Zealand Geographic put writer Kennedy Warne and photographer Giora Dan on an airplane to the tiny South Pacific island of Tuvalu for a story on how people there are adjusting to rising sea levels. Africa Geographic’s editors offered an article about how Tanzanian villagers are managing water conflicts in the rivers that flow from Mount Kilimanjaro’s shrinking snowcap. Australian Geographic’s contribution focuses on the rapid changes occurring in Antarctica. And England’s Geographical explores how the European wine industry is dealing with subtle climate shifts that will mean big changes to some of the world’s most celebrated vineyards.

Adapting to climate change means changing behaviour. One of the means of driving change is a carbon tax, variants of which have been introduced in Quebec and British Columbia and would become law in all of Canada if the federal Liberals were to have their way. We dispatched writer Chris Turner to Norway, which adopted a carbon tax in 1992, for a report on whether it has crippled the economy, as detractors warn, or helped curb the country’s carbon emissions.

In June, we published our annual environment issue on a paper stock we call the “wheat sheet,” which was made, in part, from wheat straw. Our goal — and that of our partner Markets Initiative (www.marketsinitiative.org), which initiated the project — is to convince the pulp-and-paper industry in Canada to diversify its fibre sources. Currently, the only fibre used in Canadian mills comes from wood cut largely in the boreal forest. Printing an issue of Canadian Geographic on the mixed-fibre paper was meant to demonstrate to magazine publishers that a high-quality paper stock could be made from excess wheat straw. And we believed that getting publishers interested would help convince at least one pulp-and-paper company to build a wheat-straw pulping line.

“The market response has been incredible,” says Nicole Rycroft, executive director of Markets Initiative. “So many publishers, printers and paper distributors have been calling us to ask whether they can get rolls of the wheat sheet. People are hungry for solutions such as this.”

And what about the pulp-and-paper industry?

“We’ve had conversations with several companies,” says Rycroft. “They recognize the market interest and the opportunity that it represents. Our goal is to have a commercial-scale facility in operation in Canada by 2010. I think that’s realistic.”

— Rick Boychuk

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