From Baffin Island to New Orleans.

• Author: Johansen, Bruce E.

SEVERAL YELLOW JACKET WASPS were sighted in Arctic Bay, a community of 700 people on the northern tip of Baffin Island at more than 73 degrees North latitude, during the summer of 2004. Noire Ikalukjuaq, the mayor of Arctic Bay, said he knew no word in the Inuit language for the insect.

In Kaktovik, Alaska, a village on the Arctic Ocean, a robin built a nest during the summer of 2003--not an unusual event in more temperate latitudes but quite a departure where, in the Inupiat language, no name exists for robins.

During the summer of 2004, hunters found half a dozen polar bears that had drowned about 200 miles north of Barrow, on Alaska's northern coast. They had tried to swim for shore after the ice had receded 400 miles. A polar bear can swim 100 miles--but not 400.

Global warming is leaving its evidentiary trail in melting ice as well as in the heating of the seas. The wrath of intensifying hurricanes and typhoons stoked by warming oceans has already devastated parts of the subtropics. The yellow jacket, the robin, the drowned polar bears, and the hurricane triplets--Katrina, Rita, and Wilma--are harbingers of an ominous future.

The Inuit can empathize with the people of New Orleans. You probably haven't seen Inuits on the evening news, but some hunters have died after falling through unseasonably thin ice. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on global warming on August 15, 2004. She said the Inuits' ancient connection to their hunting culture may disappear within her grandson's lifetime, as the melting ice makes it difficult for them to get to their traditional hunting and harvesting areas.

"My Arctic homeland is now the health barometer for the planet," she said. "We are an endangered species."

When I first met Watt-Cloutier in Iqaluit during the summer of 2001, she was just beginning to tackle global warming. Now she takes her case to international diplomatic and scientific forums. Equally at home in ornate conference halls and in a small boat hunting seals with other Inuit near Baffin Island, Watt-Cloutier leads about 155,000 Inuit who are struggling to maintain some semblance of tradition in a swiftly changing, melting, and often polluted Arctic homeland. She has the delicacy of a diplomat, the precision of a scientist, and the verve of a social activist.

In her spacious house overlooking Frobisher Bay, she serves visitors some of the best Arctic char sushi on the planet, along with an urgent message: "Protect the Arctic and you will save the planet. Use us as your early-warning system. Use the Inuit story as a vehicle to reconnect us all so that we can understand the people and the planet are one."

Climate change in the Arctic is accelerating year by year. During the summer of 2004, compared to the previous year, enough Arctic ice to blanket an area...