5 Feet of Fury

Are you ready for… ‘the climate change memoir’? My NEW Taki’s column

Comments will not be “JOOOOO!!”-y.

I feel I can safely guarantee that…

The author (some sort of “activist”) started out life as “Sheila E8-352” — a Canadian government moniker of the sort assigned to Nunavut residents during a less sensitive era — and ended up with her face on a stamp in 2012.

It would qualify as a bootstrappy success story, except we Canadians don’t generally approve of such sagas — or make them easy to pull off: you’ll notice that — from Indian Affairs to Canada Post — our author’s woes and triumphs seem to play out beneath the shadow of the leviathan State.

That Watt-Cloutier was co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore isn’t something I’d personally brag about, but it gets us to the message of her book, which is basically “global warming is melting stuff up here and wrecking our way of life.” Said way of life in Nunavut amounting to paying ten times the price for groceries flown up from the part of the country where we actually grow and make stuff, then sitting in the dark half the year getting drunk.