Living in harmony with nature

Living in harmony with nature is the recognition that human beings are participants in a living world, not its masters. The idea runs from the physical reality of travelling across Arctic ice to the consequences of pollution carried across oceans, and finally to the problem of encountering the Yrr: survival, in this view, requires relationship and understanding rather than conquest.

Nature as a Living World

For Leon Anawak, the principle becomes tangible as the expedition sets out across the frozen sea. Its decisions, he understands, will be governed by Nature. The landscape is not merely a route or backdrop: beneath the ice, fish continue to swim, while meltwater gathers on the surface and the runners of the qamutik jolt over rough patches. The travellers move through a world whose conditions they must attend to, not command.

Anawak’s journey carries him away from Baffin Island and towards the north-east, with the peaks of Bylot Island and a glacier descending to the shore in view. The ice beneath the sled is a crust over ocean; the terrain makes that fact impossible to forget. His sense of time has already been unsettled by another night beneath the midnight sun, and the ride towards the floe-edge feels like a passage into a deeper, less familiar realm. In this setting, living in harmony is not an ornamental sentiment. It begins with recognizing that human life depends on forces and beings that do not take human purposes as their measure.

That recognition contrasts with the idea that the Arctic is a place waiting to be possessed. Anawak, who has spent most of his life on Vancouver Island and has dedicated himself to marine biology, knows a landscape shaped by human use. But the Arctic unsettles the expectation that nature can be made accommodating: it is at once beautiful and fatal to anyone who mistakes human presence for mastery. Settlements appear as attempts to claim a land that resists subjugation. The journey across the ice thus gives the concept a demanding form: people may travel through this environment, but they cannot make its limits disappear.

The Costs of Breaking the Relationship

The novel’s account of environmental harm makes the connection between human action and distant consequences concrete. Anawak knows that industrial chemicals, including DDT and highly toxic PCBs, are carried by wind and currents from Asia, North America, and Europe into the Arctic Ocean. They accumulate in the fatty tissue of whales, seals, and walruses, then pass to polar bears and to the people who eat those animals. The circulation of pollutants exposes the weakness of treating environments as separate places where damage can be contained.

The costs fall heavily on Inuit communities. Anawak recalls that breast milk from Inuit women contains PCB levels twenty times higher than the amount the World Health Organization lists as harmful, and that Inuit children suffer neurological impairments. The Arctic is not remote from industrial society’s consequences: wind and water carry those consequences there, and they enter bodies and food chains. The idea of harmony therefore includes environmental justice. Those who bear the harm are not necessarily those who produced it, and distant industrial activity can become an intimate danger to people living within the affected ecosystem.

Anawak links this damage to the possibility that something in the deep ocean has decided to stop it. The thought does not make the Yrr’s identity or purpose certain; it reframes the crisis through the history of human disruption. Nature appears neither as a passive storehouse nor as a moral instrument designed around human needs. The possibility of a response from the sea makes the limits of human control part of the story’s central problem.

Contact Instead of Conquest

Ijitsoq Akesuk gives Anawak a way to approach the unknown force that science alone cannot settle. Akesuk invokes a shamanic understanding: the beings may be regarded as spirits associated with the living, and the destruction of life has angered the spirits of the sea, including Sedna. His point is not that Anawak must accept this account as scientific fact. Rather, the counsel challenges the assumption that the crisis can be resolved by fighting an enemy into submission.

Akesuk proposes treating the Yrr as part of the same world—and, by analogy, as part of a larger whole in which one cannot claim mastery without consequence. Anawak objects that they are not people, but Akesuk answers that their status as people is not the decisive question. His comparison to hands and feet stresses interdependence: something need not resemble humanity to belong to the world on which humanity depends. Contact, in this account, means trying to understand an unfamiliar form of life and healing divisions, not pretending that the differences have vanished.

The proposal also reaches back to Anawak’s relationship with Inuit life. Akesuk asks him to make contact with the Yrr as he is making contact with the alien world of the Inuit. The parallel resists a simple division between a familiar human community and an utterly foreign nonhuman intelligence. Anawak is asked to approach both with attention rather than presume that scientific expertise, cultural distance, or human identity grants him mastery. The principle is not passive surrender: it is a refusal to confuse understanding with domination.

Life, Death, and Human Limits

Jack Greywolf’s interpretation of a story about vengeance gives the principle a sharper, less comforting edge. Against the reading of the tale as an eternal battle between good and evil, Greywolf understands it as a story about life and death. A person’s life remains in flux, but that person does not control everything that happens. Living in harmony with Nature may allow her to heal; fighting her may bring destruction. In either case, Nature is not under human command.

This account does not promise that good conduct will protect people from suffering, or that every event can be explained as a moral reward or punishment. Its emphasis falls on the limits of control: nature’s power precedes human judgment and exceeds human intentions. Read beside the Arctic expedition, the environmental contamination, and Akesuk’s argument for contact with the Yrr, Greywolf’s account gives the concept its fullest implication. Harmony is not a guarantee of safety, but a way of recognizing dependence and acting within it. The alternative is the fantasy of mastery—a fantasy whose damage can travel from industrial centres to the Arctic and whose conflict with unfamiliar life may end in death.