The Future History of the Arctic

Charles Emmerson

The second point of interest is the oxymoron in the title: The Future History of The Arctic. It is a deliberate contradiction in terms. The reality is that the author calls on many disciplines to explain what to many of us is still a distant and barren part of this planet. As well as history, we have geography, geology, ecology, economics, politics and no small amount of philosophy.

The author is described as an expert on geopolitics and his book has been endorsed by several significant figures such as former EU commissioner and chancellor of Oxford University Chris Patten and Nicholas Stern, author of an important report on the economic implications of climate change. Although born in Australia and brought up in Britain, the name Emmerson also reveals a Swedish family connection. This connection is developed by the author as he opens the book with an account of a family holiday in Sweden when he was seven years old.

This explains his fascination with the Arctic and helps to develop a running theme through the book. Of particular interest to him was when exactly the family would be crossing the Arctic Circle. As it was a lengthy journey that required overnight travel, the family crossed The circle without anyone informing the young boy – his mother didn’t think it was particularly important. And so began a life-long interest in wanting to define and understand the Arctic.

This interest is contrasted with how the Arctic has been treated by philosophers since the Middle Ages, when it was believed to be a point of no return and not fit for human habitation. The temperate zone, ideal for human activity, was believed to be that area north of the Tropic of Cancer and south of the Arctic Circle – which of course happens to coincide with western Europe where many of these philosophers lived.

The book is well written although its style is more academic than everyday. A reader doesn’t have to come to this book with any large degree of previous knowledge, but an interest in the subject would be required, as that is something the author seems to presume.

General historic points are referred to, such as the race to the North Pole between Amundsen and Peary or the sale of Alaska by Russia to the US. Where the book is most successful is in revealing some of the broader history of the region and some of the intriguing figures who have helped shape in its present.

There are 16 pages of photographs and some map illustrations dotted throughout the book give an impression of a sense of history of the region that hasn’t been widely understood. A map included of the countries above the Arctic Circle shows this point well – Canada, the US (through Alaska), a large section of the northern Russian coast, as well as the Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden and Norway and the vast, largely frozen land mass of Greenland shows the political importance of the Arctic. Surprisingly, all of Iceland is south of the circle.

The opening part of the book is an actual history, or at least a modern history of the Arctic. The author quite rightly points out that we lack the source materials to properly record the full history of the region, especially the thousands of years of the Inuit people living in such a forbidding climate.

So this history is largely one of those from the “temperate zone” seeking, exploring and, sadly, extracting from the Arctic. Knowledge of it was obscure and sullied by willful ignorance during the golden age of exploration, from the 16th century onwards, as routes to the east were sought by going south, sometimes west, but never north. It was only from the mid-19th century onwards that expeditions occurred for a variety of reasons ranging from personal advancement to national pride.

The individuals who led and inspired these expeditions were also a curious mixture. National politics was often as much a motivating factor as scientific interest. Two of the pioneers who most epitomised this dichotomy were Fridtjof Nansen and Vilhjalmur Stefanssonn. Nansen had progressed further towards the North Pole than anyone before him. On returning to Oslo, then called Christiania and part of the Kingdom of Sweden, he awakened a sense of nationalism in that country and became the pre-eminent political figure in the its new nationhood, even once being considered for the kingship of Norway. He spent the rest of his years raising awareness of the ecological importance of the Arctic.

Stefanssonn, an Icelander turned Canadian turned American, could better be described as an Arctic Henry Kissinger. It was his ideas that inspired the policies for countries to acquire and extract from the Arctic and these have produced the impending environmental disasters we are seeking to check.

The second part of this book, where the author seeks to second guess the future of the region, is even more interesting. Melting ice caps, endangered species, an independent Greenland – a country with a population less than that of the city of Limerick – are questions that are examined in detail here.

And still the exploration – and with that the exploitation – of the Arctic continues with the attendant political consequences. In recent years Russia has successfully conducted an expedition by submarine that saw the planting of a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole. This book makes it clear that in the immediate future, as well as being an environmental barometer for the planet, the Arctic could also be a source of future political and military conflict. For pointing out these possibilities, this book deserves to be read.

- Senator Dan Boyle is deputy leader of the Seanad and chairman of the Green Party