The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future (34 page)

CHAPTER 10

The New North

W
ithin hours after the CCGS
Amundsen
docked at Churchill, my life had changed completely. After months of railroads through desolate boreal forest, long empty coastlines, and the cold salt air of Hudson Bay, I sank back into the smog-choked din of my sweating desert megacity. It was familiar but surreal, exhilarating but perturbing, all at once—in short, the typical reaction most Arctic scientists have at summer’s end when they migrate from north to south, like overeducated birds, to reintroduce themselves to society.

What makes coming home so jarring, compared to other returns from other exotic places—isn’t simply culture shock. It’s
human
shock, seeing so many people again after dwelling in a place so empty of them. Even Iowa farmlands seem crowded after one has steamed for days along the Labrador coast or flown hundreds of miles overland, seeing virtually no trace of humans. To experience true northern solitude is both spooky and thrilling, like being time-warped to another planet without us. The question is how many more years things will remain like this.

The number of people wishing to visit, exploit, or simply become informed about the Arctic grows larger every year. The count of prospective students contacting me to pursue graduate degrees has leapt from none to dozens per year. At annual conventions of the American Geophysical Union, research presentations about the Arctic now overflow giant convention halls where before there was a tiny room of lifers talking only to each other. Some ten thousand scientists and fifty thousand participants from sixty-three countries participated in the 2007-2o09 International Polar Year.

Research and development spending is rising too. The U.S. National Science Foundation alone now funnels nearly a half-billion dollars annually toward polar research, more than double what it did in the 1990s. I wish that this trend meant winning a research grant was half as hard, but with so many new young scientists around, they are more competitive than ever. Global investments in the International Polar Year totaled some USD $1.2 billion. NASA and the European Space Agency are developing new satellites to map and comprehend the polar regions as never seen before. NASA’s investment alone will likely reach USD $2 billion by the middle of this decade.
⁵²⁹

Thanks to heavy media coverage, images of drowned polar bears, bewildered Inuit hunters, and satellite maps of shrinking sea ice are now commonplace in people’s minds. In a remarkably short span of years these phenomena have changed the world’s perception of the Arctic from unconquerable ice fortress, to militarized zone buffering two nuclear superpowers, to frail ecosystem on the verge of collapse (or business bonanza, depending on one’s point of view). A place perceived as a maritime graveyard and killer of men even into the 1980s is now perceived as dissolving into a frontier ocean, laden with natural-resource riches for the taking. With so few actual Arctic residents around to protest these frames, all of them have been freely cemented into public consciousness by the words and images of their times.

On the following page, the image on the left reflects the height of the Arctic exploration craze in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The one on the right is a popular stock photo currently circulating on many climate-change Web sites and blogs. Both portray the same geographic location—the Arctic Ocean—but to very different effect. At left (
Abandonment of the Jeannette,
circa 1894) it is a darkly foreboding place, deadly and impregnable. At right (
The Last Polar Bear,
circa 2009) it is a place of sunny skies, an alluring glass-calm sea, and a magnificent animal doomed to extinction.

Both are stylized, of course. The craggy spires ensnaring the
Jeannette
more closely resemble alpine mountains than sea ice; upon magnification, shadow angles and other subtle details in the photo reveal that the polar bear has almost surely been digitally inserted. Each has its own message it is trying to advance. But stylized or not, it is images like these that powerfully reflect—and shape—the perceptions of their times. And, as any good advertising executive knows, when it comes to spending money, perception is everything.

Frames of the Arctic: (Left) impregnable killer of ships and brave men, ca. 1894; (Right) imperiled ecosystem or business bonanza, depending on one’s point of view, ca. 2009.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explorer accounts of glorious adversity shadowed by death persuaded urban donors around the world to loosen their wallets and fund expeditions to the Northwest Passage and North Pole. During World War II and the Cold War, fears of Japanese invasion, atomic bombs, and communist ideology loosened enormous national expenditures of blood and treasure to essentially open up the North for the first time. Today, scientists, through USGS oil and gas assessments and climate model projections, are convincing governments and investors that the region is a place of rising strategic value that is opening for business. And history tells us, when it comes to human decisions about spending money, this growing perception is as equally important—perhaps even
more
important—as the climate changes themselves.

Viewed in this light, disappearing sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is profound—but so also are the decisions of NORC governments to begin military exercises there, to start buying frigates and F-35 fighter jets, or to commit to the long and costly process of filing UNCLOS claims to its seafloor. Thawing permafrost is profound—but so also are the business decisions of private capital to snap up Canada’s northernmost railroad and port of Churchill, to buy USD $2.8 billion in Arctic offshore energy leases, and to begin developing specialized LNG tanker ships and platforms for offshore drilling in icy environments.
⁵³⁰

Environmental groups around the world, horrified at the prospect of an entire ecosystem going extinct, are raising money for, and awareness of, the Arctic. And unlike most other fields of geoscience, when yet another polar ice shelf crumbles the news media actually reports on it. My colleagues and I routinely field reporters’ questions on subjects, like soil carbon storage in permafrost, once relegated to the dusty bin of academic obscurity.

All of this publicity has spurred a massive increase in tourism to the area. In 2004 more than 1.2 million passengers traveled to Arctic destinations on cruise ships. Just three years later the number more than doubled; by 2008 there were nearly four hundred cruise ship arrivals in Greenland alone.
⁵³¹
Many passengers cite the desire to “see the Arctic before it’s gone” as motivation for the pricey tickets. And while a liquid Arctic won’t arrive anytime soon, the new tourism companies, port-of-call businesses, and other new stakeholders springing up to meet this demand will.

This tide of interest in the Arctic is being spurred by the dramatic climate-change impacts that are happening there. They are recasting the world’s perception of what the place is. By transforming its frame from empty fortress to ecological catastrophe, from military theater to business opportunity, climate change is triggering yet another powerful feedback loop in the region, a distinctly human one, that will transform it in very tangible ways. For the region’s development, its perceived strategic value, and its ties and economic linkages to the rest of the world, this may prove the most profound feedback of all.

But does a thawing Arctic deserve all of this hype? I myself travel often to this remarkable area to study the torrid pace of climate change there. But as we’ve seen, climate is but one of four global forces driving this story of change. Furthermore, the Arctic proper (northward of the Arctic Circle, approximately 66°33’ N latitude) is actually tiny relative to the outsized attention it enjoys with news media, science funding agencies, commonly used map projections, and the public imagination. Only 4.2% of the planet’s surface and 4.6% of its ice-free land (meaning not buried under glacial ice) lies north of this parallel, nearly all of it treeless, deeply frozen in permafrost, and plunged into polar darkness for much of the year. North of the 45° N parallel, however, we find 15% of the planet’s surface area and a whopping 29% of its ice-free land.
⁵³²
While the Arctic is unique, extreme, and home to remarkable people, it also drags the spotlight away from the vaster NORC areas to the south. With their greater land area, population, biological productivity, and economic clout, it is these much larger regions—together with their Arctic hinterlands—that form the heart of a New North, a place of rising world interest and human activity in the twenty-first century.

By a more generous definition,
⁵³³
the “Arctic” contains some twelve million square kilometers, four million people, and an economy of USD $230 billion per year. Those numbers are surprisingly large to most people. However, that entire GDP is less than one-half of the annual U.S.-Canada trade figure alone. Relative to the total NORC geographic area, population, and economy its numbers are dwarfed, even after restricting U.S. participation to the northernmost states.
⁵³⁴
Even using this narrower geographic definition of NORC members, they collectively control some thirty-two million square kilometers, a quarter-billion people, and a $7 trillion economy. Such a bloc, if so measured, would represent the world’s fourth-largest economy behind the BRICs (Brazil, India, Russia, and China, $16.4 trillion), the European Union ($14.5 trillion), and the United States in its entirety ($14.3 trillion). Its population would approach that of the entire United States, its land area more than triple that of China. Viewed in this way, the NORCs are an impressive collective (see table on following page).

Unlike the European Union or United States of America the NORCs are not, of course, a formal alliance or free-trade bloc. However, the previous chapters reveal numerous connections among these countries that go well beyond the obvious geographic ones. Nearly two decades after NAFTA the economic and cultural embrace between Canada and the United States is arguably stronger now than at any other time in their history. It will clench even tighter if oil production from the Alberta Tar Sands (and possibly water exports someday) rises as projected. Despite memberships in the EU, Sweden and Finland feel greater cultural and economic kinship to Iceland and Norway than to Italy or Greece. Since the 1990s, even cantankerous Russia has been forging ties with its NORC neighbors, including participation in the Arctic Council, healthy trade with Finland, the Ilulissat Declaration, an expressed desire to open a shipping lane to Canada’s port of Churchill, and an orderly filing of seafloor claims under UNCLOs Article 76. The NORCs collaborate constantly on issues of fisheries, environmental protection, search-and-rescue, and science. They share peaceful, stable borders that count among the friendliest in the world. Aboriginal groups like the Inuit and Sámi both identify and organize across national borders. Among these eight NORC countries, I see many more ties and similarities than say, among the BRICs, or even many countries of the European Union.

Gross Domestic Product, Land Area, and Population of NORCs versus Other Major World Economies

The foundations of this New North run far south of the Arctic Ocean, to global immigrant destinations in Toronto and natural gas markets in Western Europe. They are laid by the global forces of demographics, natural resource demand, globalization, and climate change—together with lesser actors like the shipping industry, UNCLOS, and aboriginal land claims agreements. A broad set of “push” and “pull” forces—physical, ecological, and societal—are set in motion. The changes will unfold along the preexisting bones of geography and history, the legacy of past political decisions, the birth rates and migrations of people. They will be constrained by physical realities like the continental effect, sea ice, thawing ground, and an uneven distribution of natural resources. In many ways, this coming-of-age for a new geographic region is just business as usual in the history of the world. But unlike past human expansions it will probably be orderly, bearing little resemblance to the violence and genocides so common in the past.