Nuclear Caribou
On the front lines of the new uranium rush with the Inuit of Nunavut
MARK DOWIE
PAINTINGS BY TONI ONLEY
A CARIBOU CALVING GROUND – Nunavut, Canada: June days
lengthen and snow melts to reveal tiny bright wild?owers and
nutritious lichens. Thousands of pregnant caribou gather in tight
circles. They are gaunt and exhausted from their six-hundred-mile migration from the boreal forests of Saskatchewan. They
have traversed steep mountains through howling blizzards and
crossed raging ice-choked rivers into the subarctic taiga, then in
single >le trudged on to the arctic tundra to o=er the world a
new generation. The castanet-clicking of heel bones mixes with
groans of delivery. The thrumming of desperate mothers and
the bleating of lost calves create a chaotic din that can be heard
for miles across the treeless expanse.
This is Kivalliq, a vast region of central Nunavut, the bleak
but starkly beautiful Inuit autonomous region of northern
Canada. If you are a caribou, it is not a safe place. Fragile cows
pace nervously around staggering newborns as winter-starved
grizzlies and wolves encircle the herd. A thousand caribou
swirl frantically up and down a slope, charging in unison like a
?ock of shorebirds to escape the bears and wolves. As many as
half the calves will be lost in the ferocious predation that follows. In the weeks to come, many more will succumb to
insects, disease, and starvation. As few as >ve of every hundred
born in that dramatic seven- or eight-day birthing period will
return to this same ground next year to relive this poignant ritual of birth and death.
The Beverly and Qamanirjuaq caribou herds of Kivalliq face
an additional hazard, of which they are completely unaware.
Beneath their Thelon Basin calving ground, about eighty kilometers west of the town of Baker Lake, is a massive vein of pitchblende, the raw material of uranium oxide (U O ), which is the
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