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Sunday 25 February 2007

Selling Sun Cream to Eskimos

You might of heard a little about the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 nominations. The names are said to include ex-vice president Al Gore, the Bolivian President and Opray Winfrey (they gotta be kidding, right?!), although we will never know for sure as the names are kept secret for fifty years. Ever wondered how the prizes work? Nobel.org.

For me, and I suppose this blog, one candidate stands out, Sheila Watt-Cloutier. Sheila is an Inuit or more commonly known as an Eskimo. What most impresses me is that Sheila was brought up in the traditional way, in fact for the first ten years of her life, her only transport was a sled and a pack of dogs. Naturally, this is not the reason for her nomination.

After her education at McGill University in Montreal, Sheila became spokesperson for the Inuit people holding many representative positions and contributed to the negotiation of the Stockholm convention. Her most recent work is taking on the US government for the violation of Human Rights of the Inuit people. It sounds a little over board, but I think Sheila is putting a face to the climate problem by telling the Inuit story, maybe a story like this:

ps: before you start you might want to look up Shaman and taboo



Did you enjoy it, thought so. Here are another 2 short scenes, I love the the way the question is answered .

Hope they will never need any, sun cream that is, but that is up to you and I.

Well done and good luck Sheila!

2 comments:

Peter said...

>It sounds a little over board, but I >think Sheila is putting a face to >the climate problem by telling the >Inuit story...

1. It is not overboard, it is the power of stories. See Stephen Denning in HBR, May 2004.

2. It is not overboard, it might be a very good idea for a web-based blog/site to build a library of stories sourced from the net. A kind of one-stop, 'telling the story of climate change'. Maybe it could be interwoven with technology articles.

The idea needs some development but might work. It might work very well.

3. Have a look also at Al Gore's presence on the web and, in particular, Current TV.

Stephen said...

Al Gore, never come eye to eye with a polar bear, eaten walrus or recycled nappies via the Peter 12 gauge method.... Politician (ex?) self interest, doesn't do it for me.

Thanks for the lead though, current TV has lots of great material, just need to figure how to embed it.