After the Ice
Page 5
Nunavut’s politicians are already struggling with budgets. Climate change adds to the problems of housing, unemployment, and education. Despite the great hope that greeted the birth of the new territory in 1999, it remains painfully dependent on the wealth of the south. In 2007–2008, federal payments of over C$1 billion provided around 90 percent of the Nunavut budget. Financial dependence is a bitter pill for Inuit. In Greenland the situation is similar: the population of 57,000 relies on an annual transfer from Denmark of over $500 million. Although large subsidies to less-developed peripheral regions are common in nations throughout the world, it is galling for a people that pride themselves on self-sufficiency to be dependent on others. Both Greenland and Nunavut believe their main chance of ending this dependence lies in driving development of mineral, oil, gas, and marine resources to the point where they can pay their own way.
Greenland has advanced further. In 1978, Greenlanders took responsibility only for education, church, social services, and taxation; fisheries were added later, then housing and infrastructure and, in 1992, health. In 2008 came the next big step when, in a referendum, Greenlanders voted to move toward greater independence from Denmark. The new deal recognizes Greenlandic as the official language and passes more power to Greenland. But its real importance is that it gives Greenland greater control over its natural resources and provides a formula for it to reduce its financial dependence on Denmark, step by step, as and when local revenues grow, until the point when Greenland can go it alone.
Mary Simon was one of the first to go on Canadian television to congratulate Greenlanders on voting for greater autonomy. Nunavut politicians want more control and revenues from future mining, oil, and gas operations on public land too. Currently the federal government is in charge, except for the lands specifically ceded to Inuit in the land claim agreement. The big question, of course, for both Greenland and Nunavut, is whether the natural wealth of their lands can be profitably exploited so far from southern markets in such harsh conditions. Mines have operated successfully in the past in the high Canadian Arctic at Nanisivik on Baffin Island and on Little Cornwallis Island, but they brought little benefit to the wider Nunavut economy. Still, confidence remains and whenever I asked about the future, I kept hearing one enthusiastic answer, “Mary River.” That, I was told, was the kind of giant Arctic mine project that could provide wealth to Nunavut.
The very first time I heard those words I was up at Pond Inlet, in the far north of Baffin Island. Some of the locals pointed east and told me of hills of “solid iron” at Mary River that would one day make the town rich. A little later I heard another story: that one man had been pursuing the wealth of these hills for more than thirty years. It began to sound a little like a folk tale, but it wasn’t.
Gord McCreary is a plain-speaking mining engineer—originally specializing in “drilling and blasting,” he said, at Queens University in Ontario—who wrote an MBA thesis about Mary River some thirty years ago. It is a real place, a hundred miles inland from the north shore of Baffin Island, where there are several hills containing vast amounts of exceptionally high-quality iron ore. McCreary has not been “sitting there for thirty years waiting for my MBA topic to come around,” he explained when I caught up with him by phone at his offices in Toronto, but has led a successful mining career. Still, he always believed the deposits in Baffin Island were so remarkable that one day they would be mined. The hills had been spotted from the air by the legendary exploration geologist Murray Watts. He was on his way to Iqaluit to drop off a passenger, but what he saw so excited him that he flew the 600 miles back, landed on a nearby lake, and trekked to the hill. Watts was there on July 31, 1962, says McCreary, who found a signed note to that effect inside a jar buried in a cairn on top of the hill.
When I chatted with McCreary, in September 2008, he had acquired rights for Mary River and his company, Baffinland, had already spent $400 million doing everything necessary to show it was a great proposition. “We have drilled close to forty-five kilometers of cores to be sure that the ore is really there. We have had the ores tested, and we built a road to ship out a hundred-thousand-ton bulk sample to run through blast furnaces in Europe.”
The ore is in four deposits spread out over a couple of kilometers. McCreary thinks that there is enough iron to keep the mine active for twenty-five or perhaps even forty years. The plan is for an open cast mine at the site of “hill number one.” That is not so difficult, explains McCreary, “it’s just drilling and blasting, crushing and screening.”
Then comes the hard part: transporting vast quantities of the ore to the blast furnaces of Europe.
McCreary’s solution is a hundred miles of the most northerly rail line in the world, along with a couple of tunnels and several bridges. “Well, no, I don’t characterize it as being super difficult,” says McCreary, registering my astonishment. “It means that you have to know what you are building on. To mitigate the risk for rail construction you must know what your foundation materials are. So that’s why we are drilling like crazy. We have as many as five drill rigs out this year, totally helicopter supported.” At the end of the line, there’ll be a new port. Then Baffinland will need massive icebreaking ships to shuttle the ore, summer and winter, through the Arctic ice (without disturbing marine mammals and hunters) and across the Atlantic. To achieve all this, McCreary must find big, deep-pocketed “strategic partners” with the right skills as well as sign up long-term contracts for the ore.
How much to complete the mine and to get it into production by his target date of 2013? “$4.1 billion,” he told me. Baffinland is an enormous and ambitious project, but Gord McCreary, I learned, is a very serious gentleman. “I hope you appreciate,” he said to me, “we are very methodical, we do this as engineers do this kind of stuff. You plan it, you work on the various components, and ultimately you get to the goal.”
The potential income from the mine is enormous, McCreary believes. When I spoke to him in 2008, McCreary reckoned the value of the “proven and probable reserves” at $18 billion pretax and $11 billion posttax. “Subtract those two numbers, that’s $7 billion going into the public purse,” said McCreary. “And that’s just for our 365 million tonnes of proven and probable reserves; we have another 500 million tonnes of resources behind that. This is bigger than a bread box, that’s the way I describe it.”
He might well be right—in the long run. Not so long after I spoke to him, the world economic meltdown began, iron demand slumped, and I saw his share price crash from over three dollars to fifteen cents. When I spoke to him again in 2009, he was fighting on. “We were on the point of getting our strategic partners when the world blew up. We were in discussions with some of the largest corporations in the world, and that is what it takes to move a project like this forward,” he explained. “I can’t put it on my American Express card.”
What was it like to face an economic meltdown? “I was looking over the edge at the abyss and it was a very scary place to be,” McCreary said. “But once we had made hard decisions, picked up some financing, and focused on what is important, family and things like that, over Christmas, we were feeling much more upbeat.” The corporation gained that financing at a share price that made McCreary groan, but it is enough to continue work at a much reduced pace so as to be ready to roll when the recession starts to end. “I’m hopeful that we are going to get there,” he says.
There are still a great many people in the High North who see the project as the way forward for the region. I found McCreary had a supporter in none other than John Amagoalik. As the Director of Land and Resources for the region, Amagoalik is negotiating the necessary Inuit Impact and Benefits Agreement (a right gained in the land claims agreement) with a view to ensuring local jobs, contracts, and the use of Inuit language in the workplace. “We’ve been making good progress,” he says.
Nunavut’s politicians worry that even these big mines, if they are built on “crown land” (federal government land) rather than Inuit-ow
ned land, may not provide the budgets they need to develop the region. Fights between the provinces and territories and the central government over allocation of revenues are a constant theme in Canadian politics. “Right now it is not exactly fair in terms of power sharing in the resource development area,” says Mary Simon. “We need to figure out a way that some of these resources can go into territorial government to improve education and health services, that the revenue sharing is done in such a way that it does not just benefit companies and businesses and southerners instead of the north.”
Ottawa officials don’t necessarily believe that the inhabitants of Nunavut are ready to take on extra power and responsibilities, especially the greater powers that go to a province, rather than a territory, when educational levels are low and so many Nunavut jobs are left unfilled because of lack of qualified applicants. For some in Nunavut this is a catch-22 situation: without trained people they can’t get access to resources to transform the economy and train people.20 The logic of NTI’s billion-dollar lawsuit against the government for its supposed failure to honor education, training, and employment obligations becomes clear. Inuit have to find a way to break that circle.
The challenges faced by Nunavut, and Inuit all around the Arctic, are great and it would be easy to be despondent. But as Mary Simon puts it: “We always say that if other people keep making mistakes for us, as they have done, we will not succeed. If we are allowed to make our own mistakes we will learn from them.” Just look at that map of the circumpolar Arctic again. The rim of one half of the entire Arctic is under some form of Inuit control now. Compare that to the situation fifty years ago, when Inuit were shuffled around the Arctic by the government. So much has been achieved. Perhaps that is the truest guide to the future.
Chapter Three
NOMADS OF THE YAMAL
Five hours after leaving London by plane for Tokyo, you have passed Helsinki, sailed over Archangel, and sneaked around the very northern edge of the Ural Mountains, where Europe ends and Asia begins. You are now above the Yamal, a vast, low-lying tongue of land stretching 400 miles out into the Kara Sea. At its far end, like the dot at the top of an i, is a distinctive round island called Ostrov Belyy.
In summer, when the sun shines, the whole Yamal Peninsula sparkles with light. Everywhere braided rivers meander across its flat surface. Lakes, ponds, and streams glitter amid the green-brown of tundra. There are said to be 50,000 lakes in Yamal, but only two of them are large and even in July you can see from the air that they are still covered with ice. Passing overhead in winter, the entire peninsula is white and the sea is frozen; land and water merge and their boundary is marked only by crack lines in the shore-fast ice. Outside the plane, 30,000 feet up in the sky, the air temperature is-70°C. Down there in winter it is scarcely different: temperatures of-40°C to-50°C are made more brutal by the fierce winds blowing from the Kara Sea.
I have flown this route many times, but it is only on my most recent trip, in 2009, that I had a real appreciation of the land beneath me. The plane was routed over the southern part of Yamal and, map in hand, I could see the Yuribei River where it makes its last meandering turn on the flat tundra before flowing into the bay alongside a pointed spit of land, speckled with ponds. So that is where the pipeline is going to cross the bay, I thought. I could see no sign of life down there, but I knew that was deceptive.
Down on the Yamal are 600,000 reindeer and around 6,000 or 7,000 nomadic Nenets people who migrate with them in a yearly cycle. Their ancestors first moved to the region a thousand years ago. On their way up to join them are a railway line that will shift vast quantities of heavy equipment and the pipeline that will cross that bay and stretch 3,000 miles from the “end of the earth,” as “Yamal” means in Nenets, all the way back to Germany. The enormous Bovanenkovo gas field is right in the middle of the Yamal Peninsula, and the Russian energy giant Gazprom has arrived among the reindeer.
In my earlier travels over the Yamal, I had no idea that down there were anthropologists and biologists from Russia, Germany, and America who I would one day meet. When our paths crossed at the Arctic Frontiers Conference in Tromsø in 2008, I learned of the challenge that the Nenets people of the Yamal were facing as they continued their older way of life while the largest gas development in the Arctic was taking place on the same land. I heard from them also that across the north of Russia, from the Kola Peninsula to Chukotka, other indigenous reindeer-herding groups are emerging from a turbulent past to an uncertain future. Reindeer herding is the only sustainable form of agriculture in the Russian Arctic (supplemented by fishing, berry picking, and hunting) so the fate of the herders is of special significance for the future of the Arctic.
I’d like to put my feet on the Yamal’s soil too. But I don’t think that is going to happen any time soon. Thanks to those gas developments, it is very hard to get a visa to fly as far as Salekhard, the nearest town to Yamal. Regular visitors include just a handful of anthropologists and biologists, and I turned to them to learn the story of the reindeer people, along with the books and papers that have been written about the Nenets. Especially I listened to two people who have been traveling to the Yamal for decades: Florian Stammler, an anthropologist from Germany, and Bruce Forbes, a biogeographer from the United States. Both now live in Finland and work at the Arctic Center of the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, and both have a certain relaxed calm that is probably essential if you are going to live out on the tundra, sharing a chum (the tepeelike tent of the herders) and traveling with reindeer herders on reindeer-pulled sleds for many months. Forbes was drawn to work on the Yamal because his specialty is the impact humans have on ecosystems, while Stammler says, “I was always fascinated by nomadism.”
I soon learned that for thousands of years the reindeer have meant life not just for the Nenets people of this and the neighboring regions to the east and west, but also for the Saami, Evenki, Eveny, Chukchi, and other peoples who live across the vast stretch of the Arctic from Scandinavia to the Bering Sea.1 Including the Saami people of Fennoscandia, nearly 100,000 people from twenty indigenous groups are involved in herding 2.5 million reindeer in the circumpolar world.2 Just as seals and whales mean life for the Inuit peoples on the other side of the Arctic, here in Siberia it is the reindeer which allow humans to survive. Only because of the reindeer’s superb adaptations to extreme cold can humans live in the Russian Arctic: without the gift of this animal’s meat for food, furs for warm clothing and tents, and its ability to carry people and loads across the land, there would be only a few fishers and trappers living in Siberia’s river valleys and no people of the tundra. In the cold brief summers no crops can be grown, nor can any other large animal prosper.
Reindeer herding is unique to the Eurasian Arctic.3 In North America, hunting wild caribou (as the reindeer are called there) is important to many first peoples and even vital to some, including the Gwich’in nation of the Yukon. But the people of North America never moved from hunting wild reindeer to herding them.4 The “reindeer revolution” happened around 400 years ago and spread across Siberia with great speed. Before then, reindeer were hunted and some were tamed to carry loads and act as hunting decoys. Afterwards, people managed the herds and migrated with them, protecting them from wolves and steering them away from danger. Enormous herds of reindeer still live throughout Siberia, perhaps as many as 4 million animals in total. But many that were once herded now run wild.
Everyone agrees that the Yamal occupies center stage when considering the future of reindeer herding in the Arctic. “All the other reindeer herders in Russia defer to Yamal Nenets as the real reindeer herders who have the ultimate skills,” explains Forbes. “They have retained their skills through tsarist times, through Soviet times, through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they are still doing it, they are still sewing their own reindeer clothes.” And so far, it has been a success story, with the number of reindeer doubling to about 600,000 from its low point of 300,000 in 1945.
; I asked Forbes to sketch the life of a nomad reindeer herder for me and he ran through a year in the life of the Yarsalinsky, one of the groups that follow a seasonal cycle of migration along the Yamal.5 In winter, they are found in small gatherings south of the river Ob in the area where the tundra meets the forest. They and the reindeer take shelter here from the bitter winds. In the winter cold, the chums will be covered in thick reindeer skins. There may be a meter or so of snow on the ground, through which the reindeer will dig to find lichen. Winter is a relaxed time for repairing and building sleds, sewing clothing, and fixing tents. In April, the 400-mile migration to the north begins. The herders must drive their herds across the enormous expanse of the river Ob while it is still frozen, with their tents and belongings packed on sleds pulled by specially trained draft reindeer. As many as 550 families (almost half of all the nomadic people of the Yamal), each with their own chum, may be on the move from the Yarsalinsky. They are divided into twenty or so “brigades,” often made up of family and relations, each of which will head for different summer pastures.
Once safely across the river, they travel up the Yamal to their small base at Yar Sale. Here they switch from winter to summer gear and leave behind the heavy reindeer skin coverings for their tents. In the past, their summer tents would have been covered in birch bark, but these days a type of canvas, bartered from oil and gas workers, has become more common. Now they travel light and fast.
The Nenets sled is tall—a little over a foot off the ground—and designed to run over both winter snow and summer tundra when knee-high shrubs may block the way. In summer, of course, the drag without the snow is much greater, so extra reindeer will be needed. The herd is in constant motion now as it races north. Every twenty-four hours or so, the herders will set up camp, sleep, wake, then break camp and quickly move on. Somewhere along the way, usually north of the Yuribei River which cuts across south-central Yamal, the pregnant does will bear their calves. The goal is to get to the coast of the Kara Sea near Kharasavei where there are onshore winds to help blow away the blackflies and mosquitoes that particularly bother the newborn. Some of the brigades will pass right through the Bovanenkovo gas field and see reindeer pastures that are now home to drill rigs.