The Emissary

Sheila Watt-Cloutier's people, who have lived in the Arctic for thousands of years, recognized the threat posed by global warming long before science confirmed their observations. When robins and barn owls began showing up in the North's frozen reaches, the Inuit had no name for them.

As chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference -- an alliance of 155,000 indigenous people -- Watt-Cloutier serves as an international emissary. This fall, the ICC is filing a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that accuses the United States of violating the rights of the Inuit by refusing to curb its climate-heating pollution. "Sheila is putting a human face on the problem of global warming," says Donald Goldberg of the Center for International Environmental Law.

Watt-Cloutier has only to look out of her living-room window in the Canadian town of Iqaluit to see the effects of global warming: Sea ice is melting and permafrost is thawing. "What you do in the United States is connected to people falling through the ice in the Arctic," she says. "What happens to the planet happens first up here. We are the early warning for the rest of the world."

A grandmother at fifty-one, Watt-Cloutier spent the first ten years of her life traveling by dog sled. Today she hopes the human-rights petition will show the rest of the world that the Inuit aren't simply helpless victims who can't make it in the modern world. "I don't think we're meant to be eliminated by globalization," she says. "We're meant to be the beacon, so that the rest of the world can understand what it's doing to itself."

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