Where some see a vast expanse of frigid waterways and sea ice, Okalik Eegeesiak sees a highway.

“Inuit are an international people. We did not create the boundaries or borders that we live under,” says the former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, from her home in Iqaluit.

“We have always travelled through the waters, travelled on the ice, following our food sources.”

But the traffic on the figurative highway that is Canada’s North is growing — and changing. More government icebreakers, research ships and even private yachts are voyaging north as, thanks to climate change, the sea ice that once made travel difficult or impossible for much of the year recedes. Some are also eyeing future shipping shortcuts, a prospect with the potential to disrupt not only transportation networks, but southern beliefs about the remoteness of the North.

One study calculated that the total distance travelled by ships in the Canadian Arctic tripled between 1990 and 2015, and the total distance logged that year was just over 918,000 kilometres, which is roughly equivalent to circling the globe 23 times.

While much travel remains unpredictable and many areas icebound for much of the year, the renewed interest in the Arctic has kick-started a debate about who should be travelling in the Arctic, and why, and, furthermore, who should decide.

Recently, a smattering of global companies — including retail juggernauts such as the clothing giants Gap and Puma — pledged not to send goods through the Arctic. In October, the American-based Ocean Conservancy partnered with Nike to launch the Arctic Corporate Shipping Pledge, which saw companies publicly commit to not ship via three Arctic routes.

One of them is the famed Northwest Passage, which skirts the top of Northern Canada. It was once among the final frontiers of European exploration, but a warming climate has made it increasingly navigable for a short period each year. It is estimated that a ship looking to get around the Americas could one day shave hundreds of nautical miles off the trip by going through the Northwest Passage instead of the Panama Canal.

In an emailed statement, Detlef Trefzger, the CEO of shipping company Kuehne + Nagel International Ltd., a signatory of the pledge, says the decline of sea ice has made polar routes more attractive for shipping, but “even if these routes can shorten the time between major trading markets, the increased shipping traffic is a risk to the Arctic ecosystem.”

Dan Hubbell, the Conservancy’s shipping emissions campaign manager, says the pledge takes aim at bigger vessels — “ships that wouldn’t necessarily even be stopping in ports along the way but they would just be passing through” — and get companies thinking about how things like their supply chain affect the environment on a larger scale.

He stresses that the organization is not trying to interfere with local shipping for things like resupplying small communities, but feels a duty to help protect the northern ecosystem.

“(The Arctic) isn’t a shortcut, it’s a place. Putting the right conservative and protection measures in is essential for us,” he says, adding that most Arctic regions lack the infrastructure, personnel or equipment to deal with, for example, a spill of heavy fuel oil — a type of marine fuel that has a lot of pollutants.

“There are other complications given the remoteness: distance, the weather, the periods of 24-hour darkness, that regardless of how much ice is ever present are just simply never going to change,” he says.

But Eegeesiak says Inuit are well aware of the risks posed by more ships in Arctic waters. They worry that more traffic is affecting wildlife migration routes or behaviour patterns: “It’s our food insecurity or food sovereignty that’s impacted,” she says.

But the shipping industry represents economic opportunity, too, and she says Inuit communities often support development when given the chance to participate in decisions and monitor their own waterways.

Jackie Dawson, a Canada Research Chair in Environment, Society and Policy and the scientific director of ArcticNet, which studies climate change and modernization in the Canadian Arctic, is part of a federal project to use local knowledge and better mapping and navigational information to identify low-impact shipping corridors in the north.

For example, she says people from Pond Inlet, just off Baffin Bay in Nunavut, have pointed out the clam bed on the ocean floor right outside of their community, and asked that boats not anchor there when the clams are breeding — a restriction Dawson says most ship operators are happy to follow.

“It’s not that (shipping) should be a free-for-all cowboy Wild West, but there are different mechanisms that we should be focusing on,” she says.

“Canada should be a leader in the future of sustainable and green shipping that supports self-determination and self-determined and sustainable development.”

A desire to protect the Arctic from harmful development hit the mainstream a few years ago with Greenpeace’s protest against drilling in the Alaskan offshore, according to Heather Exner-Pirot, the managing editor of the Arctic Yearbook, an online publication devoted to analysis of the Arctic.

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She argues that southerners tend to see the Arctic as “one big homogenous place,” or a pristine environment where any development is bad, when in fact there are people who live there who understand the trade-offs.

“I think … people in the south feel like they’re entitled to and have a right, even a responsibility, to determine what kind of development can take place in the Arctic, and I think ethically probably they don’t.”

Eegeesiak isn’t sure what the future of shipping will look like, but she’d eventually like to see Arctic communities equipped with the resources to welcome ships to their community and participate in any economic benefits they offer. Many communities don’t have things like docks to load and unload ships, she says.

But whatever happens, she says it’s important for Inuit to take the lead: “We are here, and we are not going anywhere.”

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