Canadian environmentalist, Gore, favourites for Nobel Peace Prize

Canadian environmentalist, Gore, favourites for Nobel Peace Prize
Randy Boswell , CanWest News Service
Published: Saturday, October 06, 2007

If the unfathomable moment really does come to pass, the phone in Sheila Watt-Cloutier's home in Iqaluit will ring next Friday around 4 a.m., and someone in Norwegian-accented English will tell the 53-year-old Inuit leader and climate change activist she is about to become the first Canadian in 50 years to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

"And if it doesn't," she said with a chuckle Friday, "I'll still have some normalcy in my life, and I'll go back to sleep."

But with less than a week to go before this year's winner of the world's single most important award is announced in Oslo, normalcy appears set to disappear from Watt-Cloutier's life -- as surely as it has from the Arctic homeland she's gained fame defending in the face of record warming trends and disturbingly rapid ecological and cultural change.

Experts in Norway say Watt-Cloutier and her co-nominee - eco-oracle Al Gore, the former U.S. vice-president who created and starred in the hit documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth" -- are, in fact, the leading contenders to take the $1.5-million prize, a choice that would make Watt-Cloutier the first Nobel peace laureate from Canada since Lester B. Pearson took the top global honour in 1957.

"I think they are likely winners this year," Stein Toennesson, director of Oslo's International Peace Research Institute and a longtime Nobel Peace Prize watcher, told Reuters on Friday.

"It will certainly be tempting to the (Nobel) committee to have two North Americans -- one the activist that personifies the struggle against climate change, raising awareness, and the other who represents some of the victims of climate change."
Two rival legislators from Norway -- the country's former Conservative environment minister Boerge Brende, and Socialist MP Heidi Soerensen -- announced their joint nominations of Watt-Cloutier and Gore in February.
Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, also predicted last week "the whole issue of climate change and the environment will come at some point and reflect in the prize."

The prize committee's selection of a winner, to be drawn from a list of some 180 nominees from around the world, will be revealed Friday morning.

"I've been told," said Watt-Cloutier, "that they call the winner or winners just a few minutes before" the official announcement. "I think that will be 10 or 11 Oslo time, or about 4 in the morning here. I'll be here, in my Arctic home."
It's a home that has undergone startling changes even in the past few months. Scientists announced in September that, based on satellite images, the Arctic Ocean ice cover had experienced a record-setting summer melt and the fabled Northwest Passage had completely opened for the first time.

"The big melt," she said, "is very true, very real."

Watt-Cloutier says that Iqaluit, at the southern end of Baffin Island, experienced an oddly cool and rainy summer this year. But a recent trip to the northern Quebec town of Kuujjuaq, where she was born in 1953, revealed bushes and trees "way taller than ever before" and new species of insects that never used to come so far north.

Watt-Cloutier emerged in the 1990s as a key political leader in the Canadian Arctic and, in 2002, was elected international chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which represents 155,000 Inuit living in Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia.

Now working on a book tentatively titled The Right To Be Cold, Watt-Cloutier first shot to international attention in 1998 pleading with industrial nations to curb their emissions of long-range pollutants, such as PCBs, that accumulate in the Arctic environment.

Her evocative testimony at a UN meeting about contaminants showing up in the breast milk of Inuit mothers established her reputation - only enhanced as she turned to the climate change battle in recent years - as a persuasive, media-savvy communicator.

"It's been a long haul and a daunting task to get the message out," Watt-Cloutier, the inaugural winner of the Governor General's Northern Medal in 2005, told CanWest News earlier this year. "When you're 155,000 people at the top of the world, there aren't very many people who even know who you are or what you're facing."

In 2005, after Arctic residents began to report thinning ice, eroding coastlines and other first-hand evidence that climate change could threaten the Inuit way of life, Watt-Cloutier announced plans to take the U.S. government to court over its failure to limit greenhouse gases.

Already highly decorated for her environmental and cultural advocacy, Watt-Cloutier was given a top UN humanitarian award at a ceremony in New York this summer.

Pearson was Canada's senior UN diplomat and a future prime minister when he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his key role in defusing the 1956 Suez Crisis, a conflict over shipping through the Middle Eastern canal that threatened to explode into a global war.

Pearson's triumph was key to reshaping Canada's image as a nation of peacekeepers, and Watt-Cloutier is hopeful the buzz surrounding her Nobel nomination - and possible victory - will help make Canada a model for global environmental leadership.

"The nomination itself has been a win," said Watt-Cloutier, acknowledging her thrill at being considered a favourite for the "huge and prestigious award."

She added: "I believe that winning it would help enormously, and bring a lot of credibility to the kind of work I've been doing. I think it would squarely put climate change on the map as a human rights issue and a shared humanity issue."

Already, she said, the nomination with Gore has produced a flurry of invitations to speak at conferences and other events around the world. Reporters from China, Japan and elsewhere have arranged interviews with her in Iqaluit, and BBC World News was scheduled to speak with her Friday afternoon.

"The story is getting out," she said, noting her particular satisfaction with the planned Chinese spotlight, and how that country alone "can create a paradigm shift if they make up their mind to lead" the world in confronting environmental and human rights issues.

Watt-Cloutier admitted to some disappointment at the "lost opportunity" that she has never met Gore. She had hoped he would have visited her in the Arctic at some point, to witness first-hand the impact of climate change in a region widely viewed, in her words, as the "the world's most vulnerable place" in the age of global warming.

But she's far from losing hope, she adds, for the fate of the Arctic.
"I'm an optimist by nature."

hallo

testing this.. to see if there is time

It's a beautiful day today. The sun is out, and the snow and those crystalline structures clinging on the house are melting away in a backdrop of light blue hues of sky, the sound of birds singing, and the swish-swash of water drizzling down in little puddles.. what marvellous, beautiful nature.

Reading week has proved to be quite useless to me. Have been doing a lot of thinking, but not enough action. Just a lot of wishful thinking. sigh...

So many songs that tug at my heart I'm listening to. Someone I am thinking of now.. will he ever come back some day? He said he'd be back... but it's been 3 years...

Everyday still gets harder...

Breakaway - Kelly Clarkson

TEA just sent this song to the girls..

Wanted to post. She is right, the lyrics do have meaning to all of us, in our own individual ways. Love you TEA.

Grew up in a small town,
And when the rain would fall down,
I'd just stare out my window.
Dreaming of what could be,
And if I'd end up happy,
I would pray.

Try hard to reach out,
But when I tried to speak out,
Felt like no-one could hear me. Wanted to belong here,
But something felt so wrong here.
So I'd pray,
I could break away.

I'll spread my wings and I'll learn how to fly,
I'll do what it takes till I touch the sky,
And I'll make a wish, take a chance,
Make a change, and break away.
Out of the darkness and into the sun,
But I won't forget all the ones that I love.
I'll take a risk, take a chance,
Make a change, and break away.

Wanna feel the warm breeze,
Sleep under a palm tree,
Feel the rush of the ocean,
Get onboard a fast train,
Travel on a jetplane,
Faraway, and break away.

I'll spread my wings and I'll learn how to fly,
I'll do what it takes till I touch the sky,
And I'll make a wish, take a chance,
Make a change, and break away.
Out of the darkness and into the sun,
I won't forget all the ones that I love.
I've gotta take a risk, take a chance,
Make a change, and break away.

Buildings with a 100 floors,
Swinging around revolving doors,
Maybe I don't know where they'll take me.
But I gotta keep moving on moving on,
Fly away, break away.

I'll spread my wings and I'll learn how to fly,
Though its not easy to tell you goodbye.
Gotta take a risk, take a chance,
Make a change, and break away.
Out of the darkness and into the sky,
But I won't forget the place I come from.> I've gotta take a risk, take a chance,
Make a change, and break away.

Break away, break away

Keane - Somewhere Only We Know (Island)

As you may have already been told, Keane are the next Coldplay. To a degree this is true: they released their first single on indy label Fierce Panda, as did Coldplay, and appear to be middle-class, university educated boys whose approach is very much engrained in touching, piano-led music, just like Coldplay.

But the comparison simply doesn’t do Keane justice. Longview were initially greeted in such a way, and ultimately found that familiarity breeds contempt. Somewhere Only We Know, as Keane’s debut on a major label, is epic. It crescendos perfectly, boasting vocals and sentiments that will make your hair stand on end.

Hyped bands seem to be cursed a lot of the time, but I suspect these three lads have already penned tunes that will far outlast any NME-driven media spin. A low key headlining gig is underway, and Somewhere Only We Know should pour from radio systems for months to come - an admirable, endearing and uplifting effort.

How to help tsunami victims

Remitting Disaster
Let disaster survivors get back to work—in the USA

Will Wilkinson

How can the United States best help the millions of people who were rocked by the Indian Ocean tsunami? America's generosity has been impressive. The federal government has pledged $350 million; private, voluntary donations from Americans will soon surpass that amount. American helicopters and aid workers have been critical for rendering aid in the aftermath of the disaster. All this will help.

But there is something more we can do that will have long-term positive benefits for the citizens of tsunami-battered nations—something that will buy us goodwill but cost us almost nothing.

Let them work in the U.S.

When migrants earn money while working abroad and then send it back to their families living in their home country, it's called a remittance. Not many people know that total remittances around the world now add up to $80 billion a year. That's impressive because it's twice the amount of government foreign aid.

Mexicans working in the United States ship close to $20 billion a year to their families on the other side of the Rio Grande. In some nations, such as Jordan, Albania, Nicaragua, and Yemen, remittances account for over 15 percent of GDP.

Unlike aid from governments and multilateral agencies like the World Bank, remittances are not squandered by bureaucracy and are not channeled through often corrupt governments, which routinely use money intended to buy milk to buy missiles. Instead, remitted money goes straight to common people on the ground, the people who need it and for whom it is intended.

In a 2003 Foreign Policy article, Devesh Kapur of Harvard University and John McHale of the Queen's School of Business in Ontario note that immigrant communities have begun to pool remittances and use them to finance small business and public works projects in their home communities.

Kapur and McHale report that remittances have helped people living in collapsed states such as Afghanistan, Haiti, Liberia, and Somalia to survive. They call remittances the “most reliable source of foreign money going to poor countries” and the “principle source of foreign capital for small family businesses throughout the developing world.”

The potential for remittances to help rebuild businesses, communities, and lives along the battered coastlines of South Asia should be obvious. But in order for remittances to work their magic, Indonesians, Malaysians, Sri Lankans, and other victims of the tsunami need to gain entrance to and employment in other countries. Help from the United States may already be on the way.

Last week, President Bush proposed a new temporary worker program that would allow foreign citizens to work legally in the U.S. for a limited time. The program is intended primarily to bring illegal Mexican and Central American workers into the legal labor market, and to expedite the ability of foreigners to begin working for American businesses who have offered them a job. However, the program could easily be reconceived as a prime source of aid to disaster-stricken nations.

American citizens have been laudably generous with their charitable giving. But South Asians need more than a sudden influx of money. And recall: Iranians received only a small fraction of the aid pledged by the UN in the wake of the Bam earthquake, and the Red Cross created a storm of controversy when it proposed to use funds donated to the victims of 9/11 for other purposes. The victims of the tsunami need the kind of steady, medium- and long-term support that remittances offer.

So Congress, with the disaster victims in mind, should speed the passage of Bush's temporary worker plan, and charities should begin working to match South Asian workers with American employers. Handouts initially produce gratitude that eventually shades off into resentment. But because everyone gains through trade, longstanding economic relations tend to engender friendship and trust.

A concerted effort to bring South Asian workers to the U.S. would not only provide tsunami victims with effective aid through remittances, and American employers with needed workers, but would also foster benevolent sentiments toward the United States in this largely Muslim part of the world.

Some pundits have excoriated the United States government for failing to win the government money-pledge numbers game. But Americans know that private charity can often help the needy better than the government. We also know that helping people to become independent is better yet.

By quickly implementing a temporary worker program, and working hard to bring South Asian workers to the U.S., Americans can demonstrate to the world the wisdom and compassion of helping people help themselves.



Will Wilkinson is a policy analyst for the Cato Institute.

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