by James Raffan
“Memory remains eternally as the foundation of future awareness.” But much of that wisdom, those memories, is found in languages and ways of knowing that don’t easily translate into categories of the Library of Congress or conventional Western epistemological frameworks.
Contained in the hearts and minds of people of many different dying language groups, many different cultures in crisis, may be solutions to the essential problems of humankind, the keys to “future awareness.” Climate change is just the tip of that melting iceberg.
In that great open changing sea, the bear swims, and swims, and swims, its future more uncertain with every heartbeat. As most northerners would tell us, solutions can begin with a simple shift of perspective, a switch in point of view that could lead to profound changes in approach, in lifestyle, in inclusion, in wealth, in happiness, in fate control and all the rest.
We are the bear.
EPILOGUE
AFTER THE COLD RUSH
It seemed fitting at the end of my journey to return to Iceland for a conference called Arctic Circle, convened in October 2013 by the irrepressible Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson. Big money and big business had come together to talk about climate change as opportunity. Although Arctic NGOs, women, youth, and indigenous people were in noticeably short supply, particularly on the speakers’ list, there was a warmth and collegiality among the thousand delegates from forty countries that could have led an observer to the conclusion that the world was indeed warming—but that, all things considered, science was doing what it needed to do, meetings were being convened, and things were generally where they should be at the top of the world.
Standing under a giant screen bearing the logo of a major international shipping company, President Grímsson welcomed everyone to an evening reception at the Icelandic National Art Gallery, housed in a repurposed warehouse on the Reykjavik waterfront: “It is fitting that we gather in this old warehouse where Iceland first did business with its neighbours around the circumpolar world.”
On the way north, as a guest of the ever-hospitable Icelandair (suddenly wistful that I wasn’t on one of the planes it had leased to Air Yakutia in deepest darkest Siberia), I ticked over in my mind some of the things that had happened in the three and a half years that it had taken me to make my way around the Circle.
In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued another report that stated that it was “extremely likely” that climate change was of anthropogenic origin. Also in 2013, as summer minimums of northern ice cover continued to decline, two voyages of note took place in the mild months. In August, the first ever commercial container vessel to take the Northern Sea Route, the Yong Sheng, knocked a full two weeks off the conventional journey from Dalian, a port in northeastern China, to Rotterdam by sailing east across the top of Russia. And in September, the ice-strengthened seventy-five-thousand-tonne Nordic Orion, with a load of coal (how ironic was that in an age of global warming?), became the first bulk carrier to transit the Northwest Passage over the top of Canada, en route to the furnaces of a steel producer called Ruukki Metals in Pori, Finland. Although the journey from Vancouver was only four days shorter than passage through the Panama Canal, analysts estimate that Nordic Bulk Carriers, the Danish owner of the ship, saved something in the order of US$200,000.
In anticipation of this increase in ship traffic around the pole, and following its first legally binding resolution in Nuuk regarding search and rescue, the Arctic Council unanimously passed an agreement on marine oil pollution preparedness and response. Critics were quick to dismiss the agreement as inadequate, given that it failed to impose any practical minimum standard on governments regarding preparedness or on-the-ground response capability, nor did it do anything to increase the level of liability for companies operating in the North in the event of an actual spill. Supporters, however, said that cooperation of this sort was a significant step in the right direction.
Still in the political arena, a federal election in Norway in September 2013 saw the ouster of the incumbent prime minister in favour of a four-party coalition that, as part of a common platform, had agreed to halt drilling and further oil exploration in Lofoten, Vesterålen, and the areas close to the ice edge in the High Arctic. And political decisions made as if the natural environment mattered had been matched occasionally by similarly enlightened public processes conducted as if the Arctic were a peopled place. An example of that happened at a meeting in Bangkok on March 7, 2013, when delegates voted not to ban commercial exports of polar bear parts in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species—a move that particularly delighted the Canadian Inuit leader Terry Audla. Score one for Arctic indigenous peoples.
But in late 2012, the Russian government had moved unilaterally to suspend the operations of RAIPON, the only organization representing all three hundred thousand indigenous people in forty-one different groups across Russia’s 172 degrees of longitude. Happily, the international community rallied to protest this action, reminding Moscow that the well-being of indigenous peoples was a stated priority in a host of official Russian policies; after a moment of studied indifference, the Kremlin caved and allowed the organization to be reinstated, but not before meddling in the election of its next president. My friend from Salekhard, Sergey Kharyuchi, whose signature on a letter of introduction had been instrumental in my journey, was out; after the people’s favourite candidate, Pavel Sulyandziga, withdrew, Moscow-friendly Grigory Ledkov was in.
In a move that was quietly celebrated by almost all concerned, Canada returned to the chair of the Arctic Council, and in the leading role was Leona Aglukkaq, an Inuk from Nunavut. The move was trumpeted by the Canadian federal government as one that “underlines the priority that the Government of Canada places on the Arctic as well as its commitment to ensure that the region’s future is in the hands of Northerners.” With all due respect to Minister Aglukkaq, having a northerner in this position was a promising start, but when it came to the lives of everyday northerners in 2013, nothing could be farther from the truth. The region’s future was not in the hands of northerners.
Every day, stories on the inside pages of newspapers around the world—if they even got that far—told of continued heartache in communities around the circumpolar world: suicide, substance abuse, kids dropping out of school, family violence, incest, crime, and unemployment, all at levels that spiked well beyond the national and international averages. If I had learned anything from visiting with northerners around the circumpolar world, it was that in spite of the enormous challenges they faced, most had found ways to cope, even to thrive; without a strong sense of well-being, however, nothing more was possible, including participation in anything beyond their immediate sphere of living—traditional, modern, conventional, or otherwise.
And so it was with a sense of hope and optimism that I disembarked at Keflavík Airport and headed toward the Arctic Circle conference. Outside the impressively glazed Harpa conference centre venue—”If people have been wondering what Icelanders have been doing since the economic collapse of 2008,” quipped Ólafur Grímsson in his opening remarks, “we have been building an amazing meeting venue”—were four Greenpeace volunteers in polar bear suits, protesting Russia’s incarceration of thirty of their peers, who had been arrested trying to draw attention to an offshore drilling platform in the Barents Sea. The first thing I learned about the Arctic Circle conference was that bears were not welcome—indeed, any mention of Greenpeace brought audible scoffs from the audience, strange as that seemed, given Grímsson’s call for open dialogue as “House Rule Number One” for a successful conference.
House Rule Number Two was that fact-based science should guide all decision making, and Rule Number Three was that indigenous peoples of the North should be a “significant part of the process.” The problem was that although, presumably, indigenous peoples had been invited to attend, only one of the six permanent participants in the Arctic Council was represented. For the Inuit Circumpolar Council,
with 155,000 members in Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Russia, Aqqaluk Lynge was present, but there was no one officially representing the Saami Council, RAIPON, the Aleut International Association, the Arctic Athabascan Council, or the Gwich’in Council International. That, for me, was a problem.
Of course, many northerners might have wanted to come but couldn’t afford the ticket to Iceland. But I knew of others who felt that President Grímsson’s initiative ran contrary to the intentions of the Arctic Council and its multitude of working groups and adherent forums. Although it was not clearly specified in the pre-conference literature, the lingua franca of the conference was English, so participants needed personal translators; there was no simultaneous translation of any kind. And yet, as Alice Rogoff, an Alaskan publisher and co-founder of the conference, said in her opening remarks, the gathering was open to all comers (excluding bears). In contrast to more formal gatherings, she said—referring however obliquely to the protocols and communiqués of the Arctic Council—delegates might think of the Arctic Circle conference as a “cross between Davos and Woodstock” or as conversations around the “Arctic water cooler.”
There were quite a number of heavy hitters around that water cooler. United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-Moon opened the conference by video. He was followed by an impressive parade of current and former heads of state, ambassadors, government ministers, Arctic officials, legal specialists, scientists, explorers, financiers, and delegates of every conceivable industry, shipping company, tourism operation, university, or financial institution with Arctic interests. Significantly (and controversially), President Grímsson had made a point of inviting and making especially welcome some of the new countries that had been awarded observer status at the recent Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting. Presenters from Singapore, Korea, and China were on the program, alongside representatives from a number of the eight countries of the so-called Himalayan/Third Pole Region of mid-Asia, all gathered to talk about the challenges and opportunities—mostly opportunities—of climate change. The “cold rush” was on.
While the bears did sun salutations on the concrete plaza outside the conference, delegates were offered twenty plenary sessions and at least twice that many breakout sessions over three days with names like “Arctic Energy Cooperation,” “Arctic Security,” “Selling the Climate Crisis Message,” “Arctic Resource Development and Indigenous Religious Rights,” “Industry Leadership and Collaboration for Responsible Economic Development of the Arctic,” “Northern Sea Routes,” “Singapore and the Arctic,” “The Alaskan State of the Arctic,” “The Future of Arctic Cooperation,” “Polar Law: The Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” and “The Emerging Risks of the Arctic Bioeconomy.”
It was a veritable feast of Arctic information and know-how. To be sure—wide swings in subject matter, speaking style, and quality of visuals notwithstanding—it was a stimulating talkfest, with as much going on in the corridors and around the refreshment stations as there ever was around the metaphoric water cooler. Good people. Good ideas.
Things intensified during the Q & A session after a talk about Russia and the Arctic led by my Moscow friend, the explorer, Hero of the Russian Federation, and special envoy of President Vladimir Putin to the Arctic, Arthur Chilingarov. With the Sami parliamentarian Josefina Skerk at his side, Greenpeace International executive director Kumi Naidoo stepped up to the aisle microphone in the audience to ask if, given the speaker’s previous support of conservation causes, there was some way that he might intervene with his government to have the charges of piracy dropped or reduced for the thirty protesters involved in the Barents Sea rig incident. As he spoke, there was an audible groan in the room, as if this question were somehow offside. Chilingarov was, of course, on stage and took this as an opportunity to belittle Naidoo by saying that it was here, in forums like this, that they should make their points, not by breaking laws on the open sea. Until that point, Chilingarov had used a translator, who had delivered his formal remarks in English. But now he answered questions directly, clearly understanding and speaking English perfectly well. It was good theatre.
Naidoo persisted, saying, “Some months ago, my colleague Josefina and others dropped a flag through the ice at the North Pole, where you famously dropped your flag from a submersible, only our flag was signed by 2.7 million supporters who wish to save the Arctic on behalf of all nations, not to claim it for just one nation.” By then, delegates were shifting in their seats and clearing their throats.
Josefina Skerk stood poised, blond and beautiful in her traditional gákti, throughout this exchange. I’d met the twenty-six-year-old at the opening reception and learned that in addition to being part of the Greenpeace team that had taken the flag and signature capsule to the North Pole, she was a member of the Swedish Sami parliament, chair of the Sami Youth Council, and, in her spare time, studying law at Umeå University. “Is the Sami parliament a place to practise law when you graduate?” I had asked her. She sighed and said, “No. I think not. Perhaps I will work in the international sphere. It might have more effect there.”
That’s when it struck me: this gathering was mostly about energy, Arctic energy, hydrocarbons in the ocean floor. In fact, depending on whom you listened to and where they were getting their numbers, the received wisdom from science was that 10 to 15 percent of the planet’s undiscovered oil and gas is in sedimentary rock under the Arctic Ocean. It’s a huge number. Something like ninety billion barrels of oil is part of the Eldorado that is the melting Arctic. But at current consumption rates, the prize that industry is scrambling for would fuel the entire world for only three years. Moreover, there are new and growing fears that methane hydrates would be released from sediments into warming ocean waters by drilling, and many enlightened scientists are insisting that the only workable future for humankind involves leaving much of this petroleum in the ground.
Thanks to the work of the Arctic Council with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which almost everyone (except the Americans) agrees is a workable mechanism for determining who owns what in the Arctic, sovereignty was not an issue. The Arctic pie had been divvied up, with some small areas still being negotiated. Big business and big money were there to talk about what might be done collectively, collaboratively, capitalistically, to make Arctic ventures work for all concerned—well, almost all concerned. There stood Josefina Skerk. For her, and four hundred thousand indigenous people around the circumpolar world, sovereignty is an issue.
It seems to me that this juncture in history is our last chance to put things right with indigenous peoples and with the environment, while there are still indigenous peoples and still parts of the natural environment that remain more or less pristine. And for all intents and purposes, both of these interests were absent or systematically excluded from the conversation in Reykjavik.
Johan van de Gronden, chief executive officer of the World Wildlife Fund Netherlands, had the courage to stand up and say, “The Arctic should be a zone of peace. I ask you humbly to bring [the issue of the jailed environmentalists to] a peaceful resolution so that these people might go free.” But then he went on to say what had not been said—and he was the only one to do so: “The proclaimed oil and gas bonanza is a chimera. You cannot safely mine for oil and gas in the Arctic. Full stop.”
The final plenary voice at the Arctic Circle was that of a university student from Greenland, a young, female, indigenous voice that filtered through the suits like a cool breeze. Her name was Naja Carina Steenholdt, and she was as aware as anyone that Greenland was really at the vanguard, among northern indigenous peoples, of emerging power through devolution. She acknowledged those who would say that taking power back from Denmark, only to have that hierarchical relationship replaced by massive inflows of cash from China or other major market players, was tantamount to cultural suicide.
But unlike so many who had spoken before her during the three-day “Arctic marathon” (so described by President Grímsson as the conference entered
its final day), and like the Nenets elder in Salekhard who said he was looking forward to the day that the oil runs out, Naja Steenholdt had her young eyes up, looking over the horizon. She had been thinking about Greenland’s long game, in particular what would happen after the cold rush, how Greenlanders might navigate through those newly ice-free waters and what kind of priorities should guide them on the way. Before they could fully embrace self-rule, she said, “we need to educate ourselves.” In a voice that belied her young age and slight stature, tucked behind Harpa’s ponderous podium, she continued, “In order to carry out future responsibilities in our pursuit for independence, we need to empower our people with knowledge and competence.”
As her brief speech wound to a close, she asked questions that brought winter tundra silence to the room. “Do we want independence? Do we want to export uranium? Do we want to drill for oil? Can we comprehend the risks? Do we know the consequences? And if the answer is yes, will we then be ready to pay the price?”
Naja was listed on the program as “Student from the University of Greenland.” The panel, entitled “Greenland’s Perspective on the Arctic,” included a professor from the University of Greenland, the deputy manager of the Greenlandic Association of Fishermen, and an executive from the Royal Arctic Line. And it had been business as usual until Naja stepped forward and said her piece. Now far from anonymous, she concluded by saying, “These questions cannot be answered in the present; however, the future of Greenland is created by initially addressing the challenges we face today. We as a people have to acknowledge that each and every one of us shares a responsibility to carry out this difficult task.”
Although by this last session in the conference, many seats in the auditorium were vacant, I was among many who stood to applaud this remarkable young Greenlander who dared to ask questions that went beyond expedient resource extraction and corporate politics, and who acknowledged that none of her peers would join the conversation until they were empowered through education to shape their own destiny. In thanking her for this remarkable speech, former Greenlandic prime minister Kuupik Kleist—obviously delighted with what she had said—turned to the audience and said, in his distinctive gravelly voice, “If I had to put the future of Greenland in one word, it would be ‘education.’”