It was in northern Labrador last summer that PhD student Monica Young boarded the Canada C3 vessel that traversed all three marine coasts in 2017 to mark the country’s sesquicentennial. A member of U of G’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG), Young spent a week between Labrador and Iqaluit collecting soil mites for her own research project and gathering insects for CBG colleague Jeremy DeWaard. This year, they will conduct DNA barcoding on those samples to identify and catalogue northern species.

Mites play a vital role in soil nutrient recycling, Young says, but biologists know little about their prevalence and diversity, particularly in the North. She hopes to help establish baseline data so that scientists may track climate change effects. “Being able to monitor environmental change is important, but if we don’t know what’s there to begin with, we can’t measure changes.”

Monitoring ecological change also drives a long-term project by integrative biology professor Andrew McAdam in southwestern Yukon. As part of the Kluane Red Squirrel Project in the territory, he studies the animals to learn about evolutionary biology, including how populations are affected by genes and environment. Among his projects, McAdam is looking at how the squirrels communicate and adjust to their surroundings. He expects his results will help in understanding ecosystem interactions not just in the North but almost anywhere on Earth. “Ecosystems are changing generally,” he says. “We need to know how organisms are going to be able to cope with those changes.”

Ask integrative biologist Merritt Turetsky about the effects of climate change in northern Canada. The North has seen “some of the most rapid ecological change observed anywhere on the planet, and that’s because of climate change,” she says. Over the past two decades, Turetsky has studied wildfires in Alaska and the Northwest Territories. Her studies connect climate change with fires that burn longer and stronger and that hamper regeneration of the boreal forest. She has also observed the effects of melting permafrost on people and ecosystems, from undermining of built infrastructure to the potential release of carbon long locked in frozen soils.

Along with researchers at U of G and elsewhere, she is now exploring the possibility of growing crops in the North. Various modellers have predicted that Canada’s traditional crop zones will move northward under global warming. At U of G, a recent simulation by geographers under the University’s Food From Thought project suggests that crops including wheat may eventually thrive in a broad belt stretching from northern Quebec and Ontario to the Northwest Territories and into Yukon. Team member Krishna Bahadur KC says further research is needed to learn about factors from precipitation and soil traits, to lack of farming infrastructure, to the potential release of carbon from newly cultivated soils. “Not all northern soils are high in carbon,” he says. “Maybe we focus farming on areas of low soil organic carbon.”

Referring to experimental projects in various communities, including the Northern Farm Training Institute in Hay River, Northwest Territories, Turetsky says, “The North needs economic opportunities. The highest level of food insecurity in Canada is among Indigenous households.” She says precision agriculture may enable farming while mitigating greenhouse gas release and other environmental problems: “We can’t just say no. We need to develop technology.” (In a separate project, environmental sciences professor Mike Dixon has looked at modular farm systems for growing crops in the North. He says use of controlled environment technology – akin to life-support systems envisioned for long-distance space travel – might help feed northern communities and offset the cost of importing perishable produce from the southern United States and Mexico.)

From health to biology to food security, changes in the North may seem far removed from the lives of most Canadians clustered near the country’s southern border. That’s changing as more southerners look to explore a more accessible Arctic aboard expedition cruise ships. For her master’s degree completed in 2016 in the School of Hospitality, Food and Tourism Management, Brittany Manley surveyed cruise passengers about their environmental attitudes and behaviours. Many participants said that, post-cruise, they paid more attention to environmental issues, from volunteering or donating money to supporting environmental protection initiatives to choosing more sustainable products. Now operations coordinator for Adventure Canada based in Mississauga, Ont., Manley serves aboard a chartered vessel during summer voyages through part of the Northwest Passage, along the Labrador coast and on other northern jaunts. She says passengers learn how Northern ways of life are changing: “They learn how impacts like climate change are affecting the North so much more than here in the south.”

Those impacts on Inuit lives and livelihoods are evident to the Labrador Institute’s Cunsolo. In 2013, she filmed the documentary Lament for the Land with the five Inuit communities of Nunatsiavut. “We did interview after interview of people crying and sharing very strong emotions and talking about sadness, loss and grief,” says Cunsolo, who is also an associated graduate faculty member at U of G. Last year, she published Mourning Nature, a collection of essays about ecological change worldwide, co-edited with SEDRD professor Karen Landman. “People talked about grieving for the environment and mourning nature,” says Cunsolo. “More people are having very real grief responses and asking how the idea of grief and mourning can change policy action.”

Besides film and literature, fine art has also served to document changes in the environment and ways of life in the North. Some of those impacts were evident in works selected for 150 Acts: Art, Activism, Impact at the Art Gallery of Guelph earlier this year. Drawn from the gallery’s extensive collection of Indigenous art featuring Inuit drawings, paintings and sculpture, the exhibition included pieces by Pudlo Pudlat, Jessie Oonark, Shuvinai Ashoona and Annie Pootoogook, among others. Senior curator Andrew Hunter, who joined the AGG last fall from the Art Gallery of Ontario, has visited the North through his ongoing work with Inuit artists.

He recalls a mid-winter visit onto the sea ice with Cape Dorset artist and hunter Tim Pitsiulak, who died in 2016. For a southerner like Hunter accustomed to thinking of the North as white and silent, that trek offered a sensory awakening, from their snow-squeaking footsteps to the ever-changing blues, purples and greys of sky, snow and ice. Upending preconceptions about Northern Canada is partly the point of the gallery’s collection, he says: “How can art address issues, share and build a dialogue – and not just show things but engage viewers? Art is both public and political.”

Those ideas resonate with other researchers, including Cunsolo. She says it’s important to gather evidence for making decisions that integrates Indigenous and western science. Paraphrasing one Mi’kmaq elder who likened the tension between western and traditional knowledge to travelling with an Inuit komatik sled, she says, “Sometimes you have to pull from the front. Sometimes you have to push from the back. Sometimes other people push and pull while you take a rest. You’re all moving in the same direction; the key is to know when to pull, when to push, and when to rest and let others take the lead. We all have different skill sets, different ways of understanding and experiencing the world.”