(Jane George/Nunatsiaq News, 24 November 2011) -- KUUJJUAQ - If you’re a high school student in Nunavut or Nunavik hoping to graduate in 2012, what are your options for post-secondary education? Soon you’ll be able to find that out more easily, by consulting a new website listing all the post-secondary education courses and programs aimed at northern students. Promoting current post-secondary programs is another step towards founding a university in Canada’s Arctic, one that will build on what already exists, says Thierry Rodon, a Laval university professor and instructor with Carleton University.

Rodon is leading a three-year project for the ArcticNet research network that will make recommendations on how to establish a northern university and improve Inuit access to post-secondary education. If any consensus has emerged a year into this research project, it’s that northern students want more than a virtual university which offers online courses, like UArctic’s “university without walls.” And they crave a “student experience” that involves fellow students and real flesh-and-blood teachers.

“You need a person. Education is a relationship,” Rodon stated in a Nov. 23 interview. But there’s also acknowledgement that finding millions of dollars to build a new university campus anywhere in the North will be hard to come by. So there’s agreement that a Canadian Arctic university should draw on what’s already available in terms of program and courses. And it should start off by using facilities that already exist. This idea resembles a proposal which has already been promoted by Yukon’s government and discussed among the three territorial colleges. A chance to discuss the past, present and future of post-secondary Inuit education drew a dozen participants to a workshop led by Rodon Nov. 22 in Kuujjuaq.

Tagged: Arctic, News, NorthernU

(Susan Kraemer/Clean Technica, 26 November 2011) -- If climate change continues along the business-as-usual path, the 24th century’s new world will be in some ways more like the world of Ancient Greece – with what’s left of the world’s inhabitants trading around a single sea. For the Ancient Greeks, it was the Mediterranean Sea. For those of our descendants that survive, it will be what is now the Arctic circle. ... The countries that will remain habitable after 300 years of climate change are centered on the now nearly empty lands around the Arctic Circle: clockwise this [is] Siberia [Russia], Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland [Denmark], Canada, Alaska [United States]. ...

In The North: The New European Frontier with Global Warming, Professor Trausti Valsson of the University of Iceland Faculty of Engineering argues for the inclusion of ”Iceland, Norway and Russia (because of Siberia) in the European Union, because the importance of these areas in the future, economically, militarily and as a future living space for the European community.” None of the three nations are currently members of the EU.

Valsson’s argument is that, combined with the uninhabitability of the rest of the planet as the world warms, that the shorter and more secure transportation routes across the Arctic Ocean between Europe and north-western Canada and the USA will make a completely different center to the world. Valsson includes this map [at right] showing the region that climate scientists projected to be become uninhabitable by 2300. Because of the scarcity of continental land below this region, the world’s population will have to concentrate towards the top of this map within three centuries, because of limits to human tolerance of heat.

Tagged: Arctic, News