Along the corridors of the cultural hall, the Soviet Union has not yet ended. Black-and-white photographs line its walls, some with explanatory titles: “Visit of Norway Ambassador,” says one, beneath a picture of a man in heavy glasses standing at a podium. There are photographs of people playing chess, doing gymnastics, parading with flags, and folk dancing. There are books on the library shelves and one of the card indexes still stands open as though the librarian had slipped away for a moment. The library closed in 1991. A piano, now slightly out of tune, stands in the music room; an old gramophone record from the “Melodiya” label lies in a corner covered in dust.
Our guide is one of a small party of Russian historians who spend the summer here and dream that Pyramiden may be reborn as a tourist destination. He carries an old rifle slung across his back, muzzle down, in case we run into a bear, and addresses our small group of visitors as “dear friends.” He explains that one of the big apartment blocks was for single women and nicknamed Paris, one for single men was called London. Another, the Crazy House, was for families with young children. There are no children here now, but the building is still noisy, alive with the sound of kittiwakes that have built their nests on the high window ledges.
At the heart of Pyramiden is a large stone bust of Lenin. In front of him lies a field of Soviet grass, then a long wall of tall apartment buildings above which hover the glaciers and snow-covered mountains of Spitsbergen as though they were a mural painted in the sky.
Despite everything the Soviet Union did, the cold reality of the Arctic intruded. It proved impossible to maintain the town once the new Russia arrived with “market forces.” The miners had been well paid, much respected, and totally cared for by the State. One day in 1991 the last of them were told that they had to leave very quickly. The town was abandoned. “I read some of their letters,” says our guide. “They were asking, ‘What is to become of us, where are we to go?’ It brought tears to my eyes.”
Greenland has a mining ghost town, too, at Qullissat. Hundreds of Inuit were encouraged to leave their tiny communities and move to the coal mines here. By the mid-1960s the town had 1,400 inhabitants, an urban lifestyle, and a big store selling imported goods. But the mine proved too expensive. In 1966 the decision was made to close it down and move all the people out. No one lives here now, but it is a beautiful spot. You can rent one of the old houses and sit here in the silence, watching the icebergs sail by.
There is a sadness to these empty places that I felt again when I talked to Charlie Lyall, president and CEO of the economic development arm of the Inuit Association of Kitikmeot, the most westerly region of Nunavut. I called him in Taloyoak, one of its small communities, as I had heard that Nunavut’s first diamond mine, opened in 2005 with a commitment from Tiffany to buy its diamonds and a ribbon cutting by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, had abruptly closed down. The mine had been a bright hope for Nunavut’s development as diamond mines a little farther south had been very successful, but it had not been as productive as hoped. Lyall explained that people from all six communities in the region had been working at the mine. It had meant jobs and something more. “When Inuit are making a meaningful living, it’s a lot better,” Lyall explained. “You see the community being much more vibrant, everybody feels much better about themselves, and life is good.”
Lyall does not let the closure get him down. “I’m optimistic about the future for this region,” he says. “In the long term, mining is going to be the way to get the economy to grow here. The potential is also there for oil and gas.” There are gold, copper, zinc, and silver mines being planned in the Kitikmeot area that have the potential to bring local jobs. The really big chance for an economic transformation for Nunavut and Greenland remains with oil and gas, though, a transformation that Alaska has already made. Environmentalists may not much like to hear that, but development and protection of the environment have to go together if the people of the north are to prosper.
Whether oil or gas development goes ahead, and how quickly, depends on the cost of developing new, safe Arctic technology, the cost of building, installing, and maintaining the technology, the size of the reservoir (only a giant long-term payoff can justify a big capital cost), the cost of taking the oil to market, and the degree of political support and stability. And, of course, the price of oil.
Although it would be good to think that the oil industry will bring long-term wealth to the Arctic, my bet is that the oil and gas boom will be short-lived and will not go far beyond the shallow seas of Russia and perhaps some of the regions close to the Alaskan shores. The reason is that the Arctic’s message is finally getting through to the wider world. The ice is melting away and it is shouting, “Your planet is in danger.” A price is going to be put on carbon emissions and that will drive the search for alternatives to oil. My bet is that changing energy use will make all but the easiest to find Arctic oil too expensive in the next few decades. I’m not predicting the end of oil at all, just the end of very expensive oil from extreme environments.
Skeptics will laugh. They will point to the growing demand from China and India and the shortage of oil and all the extrapolations that show oil demand and prices will grow far into the future. For the skeptics, the Forest of Dean is a good place to go. It is an old oak forest on the border of Wales which would not be there if one of Britain’s greatest heroes hadn’t also been stuck in believing the future would be more of the present.
In 1802, Admiral Lord Nelson toured the Forest of Dean looking for timber to refit his flagship, HMS Victory. He needed wood for new battleships, too, and each required 6,000 mature oak trees to build. The forest was in an appalling state. But he managed to find the timber he needed and went on to defeat the combined fleet of France and Spain at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Nelson died during the battle, but his concerns about the shortage of old oak weren’t forgotten. Thirty million acorns were planted across 11,000 acres of land to provide timber for the battleships that the Royal Navy thought they might need in fifty to a hundred years time. Some oaks were planted close together so they would grow straight and could be cut for planking; others so that their branches would curve upward and be right for a battleship’s massive ribs. They are still there. Iron and steel replaced wood, transformed the world, and made Nelson’s oaks redundant. The only wood taken from the forest was to repair HMS Victory, now in a dockside museum.
What might come along and make Arctic oil as archaic as wooden warships? There are many possibilities. (I should disclose that I have another job helping run a small U.S. company that brings together investors and innovators.) 2 One that’s being talked about a lot is “renewable gasoline,” that is, using genetically engineered algae to grow “green oil” that could go straight into existing refineries. Then there are electric automobiles, where China has surprised everyone by pushing to take a lead. Given the size of the prize for a successful invention, the worldwide talent, and growing pressure to cut carbon emissions, it is a reasonable bet that new technologies will appear. Oil will play a major part in a cocktail of new ways to provide energy, but very expensive oil will no longer make sense a decade or two from now. Every time the oil price goes up and the Arctic looks more attractive, alternative energy sources will also look more attractive. Oil executives won’t be unhappy if something new comes along. One said to me, “There is a saying in our industry, ‘the Stone Age didn’t end because the world was running out of stone.’ When we find something better, we’ll invest billions.”
Any Arctic oil boom may last only a few decades, although gas and shipping may run longer. Patricia Cochran, head of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, has three bullet points of wise advice from Inupiat experience of the oil industry on Alaska’s North Slope. It reads:
DO NOT ABANDON YOUR PREVIOUS LIVES.
MAINTAIN TRADITIONAL WAYS OF LIFE.
EXTRACT LOCAL BENEFITS WHILE OIL IS STILL FLOWING.
Oil, gas, and mining can provide a huge lift to a community, but the community
that thinks they will be there forever, or even worse, lets outsiders take all the benefits, is in for trouble. Of course, it could turn out that the Arctic will be the world’s next great energy province and that after its oil and gas run out, the open seas in a warmer planet will ease the mining of methane hydrates from the seabed all the way to the North Pole. It is not impossible, but it is a future that represents a complete failure of the imagination—one where we cannot find better ways to work together to conserve and create energy.
What else might bring the Arctic, with its fast-growing population of young people, a good sustainable life? “Everybody talks tourism, but it is expensive to travel up here. So tourism is not that great,” says Lyall. “There is always the hunting and trapping, but there again with everything that’s going on with the animal rights groups there is not a huge future in it either. Inuit will continue to hunt and fish for their own sustenance, but they can’t make a living out of it.” Lyall is alluding to that bitter clash between southerners and hunters over the killing of seals and hunting for fur. “You probably have a cockroach protection society in London,” he adds, in a wry tone.
Fishing is a very important part of the Greenland economy, and it is likely to grow further as seas warm.3 It could be bigger across the other side of Baffin Bay, too, but that requires investment in harbors, which is only just beginning. “We are still only getting a small percentage of the fish quota from our waters,” says John Amagoalik, the Inuit leader from Iqaluit. “A lot of southern Canadian interests have been given fish allotments in Baffin Bay and our surrounding waters. We are hoping that the government of Canada will start giving us more of those quotas.” Inuit art, too, will “always be a part of our economy.”
Several Arctic commentators have looked ahead and laid out scenarios for how the future may develop, most notably Lawson Brigham, a former U.S. icebreaker captain and lead author of the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment, and Bjørn Brunstad at the Oslo-based consultancy Econ.4 Putting aside dark scenarios of world conflict, all reach the same broad conclusions.
The key issue is whether or not there will be a high value placed on Arctic oil, gas, and mineral resources, along with easier access to them by sea. If that comes true, then the question becomes whether or not the people who live in the Arctic will benefit from the wealth that surrounds them and can ensure that their environment is protected as development proceeds. One route leads to an Arctic that is a part of the global community, with living standards to match. The other leaves Arctic people living among transient workers from the south in a ruined landscape. If the world places a low value on Arctic resources, then the people of the Arctic will have to find new ways to live from the wildlife of their rapidly changing environment, or face a tough life on welfare. We will see either a sustainable Arctic or an abandoned Arctic.
The greatest issue of all is time. We don’t know how fast the changes in the Arctic are coming. They may come too fast to allow people and animals to adapt and too fast for governments to react and protect what remains. The worst of all possible worlds is an abandoned, ruined Arctic. If we are lucky, the Arctic may give us more time. If the world could then work together, vigorously cutting air pollution that warms the Arctic, and if that buys more time to follow up with aggressive actions on greenhouse gases, then some of the summer ice might yet be saved. But with every year of delay, we need ever stronger action, and the chances of success grow less.
One day in Tasiilaq, Greenland, I sat and chatted with a few teenagers from the local soccer teams (I had been watching their games; they had both a boys team and a girls team and a crowd of vociferous supporters). I asked what would happen as the weather warmed and the ice in the bay melted away. “We don’t mind, we’ll find oil and we’ll be as rich as Saudi Arabia,” I was told. “What will you do then?” I asked. “I’ll buy a boat and go hunting with my Granddad,” said one. “I’ll have my own helicopter,” said a second, who was already planning to train as a pilot. “I’ll go shopping in New York,” added the one girl who had joined us, who I’d earlier seen score a particularly lethal goal. They left me with a bouquet of white Arctic cotton grass that their smaller brothers and sisters had gathered.
I hope their dreams come true. They’ll have to navigate a tricky route to a new sustainable future if that wealth does not flow quite as freely as they hope. Looking beyond their soccer field ground to the harbor at Tasiilaq and its little store selling “country foods,” I don’t think that narwhal and polar bear will be on sale there much longer. Great change is coming.
SOURCES
Interviews with scientists, engineers, and policy makers provided the key source material for this book. Over one hundred people kindly agreed to be interviewed, answer my questions, or help me with research material (approximately 40 percent of them from the United States, 20 percent from Canada, and 25 percent from Norway, Denmark-Greenland, Finland, and Russia). Many of them are quoted in the text. Their names are all given below to register my profound gratitude (my only regret is that I cannot include the names of officials from the Foreign Offices or State Departments of four nations who provided off-the-record briefings on sensitive border or military issues). Any errors anywhere in this book are, of course, entirely my own.
In contacting these many individuals it was always very helpful that this book was chosen to be a part of the International Polar Year (IPY) Polar Books project of the United Nations Environment Program (see www.unep.org/publications/polarbooks).
John Amagoalik, Qikiqtani Inuit Association, Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada; Steven Amstrup, U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center, Anchorage, Alaska, United States; Elena Andreeva, Institute for System Analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia; Kevin Arrigo, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States; Carin Ashjian, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, United States; Natalie Asselin, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; Douglas Bancroft, Canadian Ice Service, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; John Baglow, Ottawa, Canada; David Barber, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; Søren Basbøll, Tasiilaq, Greenland;
Benoît Beauchamp, The Arctic Institute of North America, Calgary, Alberta, Canada; David Beerling, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom; David Benton, Marine Conservation Alliance, Juneau, Alaska, United States; Jørgen Berge, The University Centre in Svalbard, Longyearbyen, Norway; Bjørn Brunstad, Econ, Oslo, Norway; Ian Buist, SL Ross Environmental Research, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; Patricia Cochran, Chair, Inuit Circumpolar Council, Anchorage, Alaska, United States; Ruth Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, United States; Jan Inge Dalane, StatoilHydro, Stavanger, Norway; Jack Dibb, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, United States; George Divoky, Friends of Cooper Island, Seattle, Washington, United States; George Edwardson, President, Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, Barrow, Alaska, United States; Steven Ferguson, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; Hans Christian Florian, Tasiilaq Hospital, Greenland; Bruce Forbes, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland; James Ford, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Louis Fortier, Université Laval, Quebec, Quebec, Canada; Tim Garrett, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States; Jean Claude Gascard, Laboratoire d’Océanographie et du Climat, Paris, France; Rudiger Gerdes, Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven, Germany; Katherine Giles, University College London, London, United Kingdom; Rolf Gradinger, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska, United States; Patty Gray, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland; Ove Gudmestad, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway; Christian Haas, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Otto Habeck, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany; Edward Hanna, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom; Ailsa Henderson, University of Toronto at Mississagua, Ontario, Canada; Rod Hobbs, National Marine Mammal Laboratory, Seattle, Washington, United States; Ian Howat, Ohio State University, Co
lumbus, Ohio, United States; Toke Høye, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark; Rob Huebert, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Mark Jacobson, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States; Chadwick Jay, U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center, Anchorage, Alaska, United States; Martin Jeffries,
National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C, United States; Philip Jones, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom; Nancy Kinner, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, United States; Kit Kovacs, Norwegian Polar Institute, Tromsø, Norway; Rick Krishfield, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, United States; David Lawrence, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, United States; Seymour Laxon, University College London, London, United Kingdom; Jonathan Lindsay, J P Kenny Caledonia Ltd., Aberdeen, United Kingdom; Ron Lindsay, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States; Brian Lumsden, Stena Drilling, Aberdeen, United Kingdom; Charlie Lyall, Kitikmeot Cooperation, Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada; Ron Macnab, Canadian Polar Commission, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada; James Maslanik, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States; Wieslaw Maslowski, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, United States; Svein Mathiesen, International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry, Kautokeino, Norway; Larry Mayer, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, United States; Louis McComber, Serpentine Communications, Sutton, Quebec, Canada; Gordon McCreary, Baffinland, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Jacqueline McGlade, European Environment Agency, Copenhagen, Denmark; Amy Merten, Office of Response and Restoration, NOAA, Seattle, Washington, United States; Dines Mikaelsen, hunter, Tasiilaq, Greenland; CJ Mundy, University of Quebec at Rimouski, Rimouski, Quebec, Canada; Tavi Murray, University of Wales Swansea, Swansea, United Kingdom; Rebecca Noblin, Center for Biological Diversity, Anchorage, Alaska, United States; Erik Olsen, Institute of Marine Research, Bergen, Norway; Olav Orheim, Executive Secretary, Research Council of Norway, Oslo, Norway; Anders Oskal, International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry, Kautokeino, Norway; Michael Paulin, IMV Projects Atlantic, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada; Pam Pearson, Clean Air-Cool Planet, Sweden; Tad Pfeffer, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States; Rafe Pomerance, Clean Air-Cool Planet, Climate Policy Center, Washington, DC, United States; Patricia Quinn, Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, NOAA, Seattle, Washington, United States; Jackie Richter-Menge,
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