ECOLOGY

INUIT FILE HUMAN RIGHTS COMPLAINT AGAINST U.S. OVER WARMING

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE -The people of the Arctic filed a landmark human
rights complaint against the United States, blaming the world's No. 1
carbon polluter for stoking the global warming that is destroying their
habitat. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference, representing native people in
the vast, sparsely-populated region girdling the Earth's far north, said
they had petitioned an inter-American panel to seek relief for Canadian
and US Inuit.

"For Inuit, warming is likely to disrupt or even destroy their hunting
and food-sharing culture as reduced sea ice causes the animals on which
they depend to decline, become less accessible, and possibly become
extinct," said Robert Corell, who spearheaded an Arctic climate impact
assessment.

More than 150,000 Inuit, formerly called eskimos, are spread throughout
the vast frozen northern territories of Alaska, Canada, Greenland,
Scandinavia and Russia. . .

The petition urges the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights to declare the United States to be in violation of the 1948
American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. It also wants the
Commission to recommend that the United States adopt mandatory limits of
its greenhouse-gas emission and join international efforts to curb
global warming. And it wants the Commission to declare the United States
should help the Inuit adapt to unavoidable impacts of climate change.