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cannot gather themselves. This cultural practice provides basic needs to the community as a whole. Intercommunity trade also equalizes regional differences in resource availability and forms symbolic relations that extend the social network groups can draw from in times of need. However as time passes the Inuit community has changed somewhat. Now the majority of people live in permanent settlements, subsistence knowledge changes and is incomplete and many young boys know how to use guns versus make snow shelters. On the ground education is less common, very few people with complete knowledge, many who know parts- say how to preserve food but not how to build snowshoes and there are only a few families who are on the land educating their children with subsistence knowledge and experience. There are also fewer hunters providing for more people. Now food is not just being traded but also other goods such as wage income and materials from the outside world. Intercommunity trade has increased as species abundances are changing so now snow geese and musk ox abundant in Sachs Harbor are traded for beluga whales and caribou, which are abundant in neighboring communities. This trade is based on generosity, sharing and generalized reciprocity not western rules of economic exchange. Despite the changes these communities have undergone, these strategies and cultural underpinnings provide buffering capacity to respond to and deal with environmental change. In the face of climate change the Inuit have adopted several coping mechanisms to respond to environmental change. Coping mechanisms: 1. Adjusted to the flexible timing of hunting, made back up plans and opportunistically switched foodstuffs based on availably. 2. Changing fishing locations and travelling farther. 3. Construction of new trails and routes to avoid permafrost thaw. 4. The use of ATVs versus snowmobiles. 5. Hunting from boats versus ice floes. 6. They utilize increased caution. 7. Weekly flights into the community are used as a source of information about ice conditions on a larger scale. To enable their community to respond to change quickly they have developed co-management arrangements so that they can participate and influence responsive change at that larger scale. These new institutional linkages facilitate co-learning and self-organization. They also provide cross-scale communication allowing community concerns to be transmitted from the local to the regional to the national and international scales. The Inuit community of Sachs Harbor has drawn from their oral history, culture, social organization, close knowledge of their environment, traditional practices of hunting and gathering, modern economic and social networks and technology to respond to climate change. This case study emphasizes the complexity of assessing social and ecological resilience and the multiple levels and sources of adaptive capacity. It also shows the intimate relationship between ecological and social resilience, as the ecosystem transitions into an alternate state as arctic ice melts, and species migrate, human communities embedded in these ecosystems who have also undergone historical change themselves must respond and try to find some new balance in this changed environmental and social context. Conclusion Resilience thinking arises at a particular time in which we need it the most. We have seen our current models of science and management exposed as limited and reductionist in the context of the large wicked social and ecological problems we are experiencing. We need scholars who think in systems, who allow for uncertainty and emergent behavior and who can identify feedbacks and integrate social and ecological systems simultaneously. We are in a position in which we possess the incredible assets of scientific prowess, resources, and institutional support and we have recently had the humbling realization that our current approaches to solve problems need to be modified. This presents an incredible opportunity to reprioritize our management goals and scientific questions to effectively address the real problems we face and to begin to build our collective adaptive capacity to foster resilience within the social and ecological systems that we depend on. After all adaptive capacity, the willingness and ability to respond to change, will ultimately determine our ability to sustain ourselves in this rapidly changing world. -IS Reference Berkes, F. and Jolly, D. (2001) Adapting to Climate Change: Social-ecological resilience in a Canadian Western Arctic Community. Ecology and Society 5: 2 (18). See also: Ford, J. D., and Pearce, T. (2010) What we know, do not know, and need to know about climate change vulnerability in the western Canadian Arctic: a systematic literature review. Environ. Res. Lett. 5 014008 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/5/1/014008 Photo Credit: Ascappatura 2010.
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