asked. He could not. The ship couldn’t drop sonar rays in the water without NATO permission. “They’d wonder why we were asking,” he said. “And if we did detect something, we’d say, ‘Hey, we found your sub,’ and the Americans would say, ‘No you didn’t,’ and we’d say, ‘Yes we did.’ It’s a touchy subject.” I asked about the relative size of the two navies. “The Americans, jeez, I can’t count how many ships they have. They have sixty thousand people working in Norfolk alone. On one base. That’s as many as we have in our entire armed forces. They have massive fleets. Massive. And we’re obviously, you know, small.” Our tour guide interjected, “But we can punch above our weight class.” The officer agreed. “Yeah, we punch above our weight class.”
One deck below the ops room was the lower-ranks mess, and I went there one afternoon to hear Commissioner Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, the formal head of Nunavut, address the troops. She told them about her childhood speaking only Inuktitut, her forced relocation to Toronto for schooling, and her Canadianized life in journalism and politics. “I have to disabuse southerners of their igloo notions,” she said, “and explain that there’s more to us than drumming and throat singing.” A sailor named Roberts, one of perhaps five black people on the entire ship, asked how climate change was affecting the Inuit way of life. The commissioner said that autumn was getting noticeably later, and that they were having difficulties forecasting weather and ice conditions; now there were only six seasons rather than the traditional eight. She showed us slides of her homeland and put a cassette into a boom box to play some throat-singing music for us.
After the music stopped, I walked down the hall and found Sergeant Strong once again promoting his plan for the Hans Island dispute with Denmark. “It could be something as simple as putting a couple of guys up there with a trailer,” he told a reporter from one of the in-flight magazines. “How much would that cost? The problem would just go away.”
• • •
THAT OCTOBER, I traveled to Vancouver to meet the legal scholar Michael Byers, the former director of Duke University’s Canadian Studies Program and a widely respected expert on Canadian security and sovereignty. Byers, who was a young-looking forty years old and wore the same two days’ worth of beard he seemed to display every day, had recently returned home, surrendering his U.S. green card to a border guard in a burst of patriotism. He had taken a position at the University of British Columbia, and I was invited to sit in on his graduate seminar on climate change, a ten-person class held in a corner room with tall windows looking out on tall fir trees. When I walked in fifteen minutes late, a lanky student named Ryder McKeown was delivering a PowerPoint presentation called “Climate Change and National Security.” He wore jeans and glasses and Puma sneakers that happened to be red, white, and blue.
“Given the choice between starving and raiding,” one of McKeown’s slides read, “people raid.” He wasn’t talking about refugees from the tropics—at least not just them. The United States has a worsening water shortage, he said, and Canada has 20 percent of the world’s freshwater. He described “fantastic schemes” to export it across the border in bulk, including NAWAPA, the North American Water and Power Alliance, a 1960s proposal by the Los Angeles engineering firm Parsons to divert Canadian rivers to run southward rather than northward. In another plan, fjords in British Columbia would be dammed at one end and filled with freshwater; tankers would arrive, top up, and chug south to California. “We have it,” he said. “They want it.” Byers jumped in. “We are talking about 300 million people”—ten times the population of Canada—“with the world’s largest military and with a desperate need for water,”