NYT: Eskimos Seek to Recast Global Warming as a Rights Issue

[DeepModem Mom]

Eskimos Seek to Recast Global Warming as a Rights Issue
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: December 15, 2004


The Eskimos, or Inuit, about 155,000 seal-hunting peoples scattered around the Arctic, plan to seek a ruling from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the United States, by contributing substantially to global warming, is threatening their existence.

The Inuit plan is part of a broader shift in the debate over human-caused climate change evident among participants in the 10th round of international talks taking place in Buenos Aires aimed at averting dangerous human interference with the climate system.

Inuit leaders said they planned to announce the effort at the climate meeting today.

Representatives of poor countries and communities - from the Arctic fringes to the atolls of the tropics to the flanks of the Himalayas - say they are imperiled by rising temperatures and seas through no fault of their own. They are casting the issue as no longer simply an environmental problem but as an assault on their basic human rights....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/15/international/americas/15climate.html

[roguevalley]

1. This is good. Very, very good.

[KT2000]

2. Assault on their very existence

This is like the genocide of the Native Americans when the Europeans came to this country.

The Democratic Party needs to take a stand on this - human rights indeed.

[dbt]

3. Kick!

My .000000000000004 Native American blood is still enough to cheer the Inuit on with this case!

:bounce:
dbt

[NVMojo]

4. hooray for these brave people!!!

[texpatriot2004]

5. Thank Goodness. I feel the same way. They ruin our

environment and we just have to take it. NOT! I hope this approach will succeed. I am so grateful that they are using it. Recently I wondered if citizens could file a class action suit against polluters and those who are spilling oil in the oceans and using explosives in the oceans too. We all have to live here and it's our air and our ocean. They shouldn't be able to destroy it, we have rights too.

[rucky]

6. The Bushies could always try to sell them snow. n/t

[Kolesar]

7. if you are looking for a "moral issue", here it is

A 19th-century style extinction of a native population. It is akin to murdering the plains "Indians".