Becoming a Meta-Geographical Space
The transformation into the bellwether Arctic Ocean came through an interplay between the growing oceanographic knowledge and the changes in global understanding of environmental issues.
It was especially the understanding of anthropogenic climate change, established in the two last decades of the twentieth century that provided a new rationale for an Arctic dimension. The result was a ‘new north’ or ‘future Arctic’ narratives in which concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation and sustainability became paramount.[823] The transformation was fundamental. Up until World War II the central Arctic Ocean was seen as largely frozen and potentially next to lifeless and with no significance for the rest of the world (which is not to say that near-terrestrial parts of the ocean were not of high interest for Arctic countries including the Nordic countries). It was not a dead zone, but not far from it. Yet in just a brief period the Arctic Ocean became precisely the opposite: full of life, with a sensitive environment and the world’s most drastically changing climate.It is necessary to acknowledge here the co-existence of the history of the Arctic Ocean as a physical entity and the history of the images and readings of it. These histories should be understood as co-evolving, but there is also a reason to see an independent logic in each of them. The natural history of the Arctic Ocean has provided a geophysical underpinning of future narratives that serve certain geopolitical interests. Business and industrial interests, and many states, from the US and Russia to China and India - leading powers of the world - share an interest in the accessibility of resources following from reduction of sea ice, opening of seaways and a historical framing that glosses over the permanent presence of, albeit small, Arctic populations and presents the Arctic Ocean as a blank, white slate, open for adventure and resource exploitation.
This narrative relies heavily on natural knowledge since it seems as if it is through a climate intervention that the change happens. The modern history of the Arctic Ocean is hence presented through climate as ‘a driver’. This is a history with very little agency and most of it located outside of the region itself.A history which brings the narrative closer to experiences inside the region needs to take a more selective and integrative view of outside ‘drivers’. One thing to consider, then, is to balance the natural history (or ‘species history’, to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s thought-provoking concept),[824] with the political histories of the Arctic Ocean. These have yet to be fully analysed, but one part of them is clearly the growth of legislation and institutions. The recent reframing of the history of the Arctic Ocean, its geophysical and environmental turn, has offered a rationale to institutions such as the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and the Arctic Council, both founded in the mid-1990s. The Arctic Council works to establish evidence for action but has no political decision-making power. It works through assessments and other knowledge-based documents on issues that the eight member states have been able to agree on. It could be argued that this is in practice a post-political turn of Arctic affairs, pushing back issues of power, human rights and environmental concern.[825]
The notion that local people are impacted by the reduction of sea ice was not much in circulation until the anthropogenic climate change narrative was established on a broad basis.[826] This should come as no surprise. In the Western perspective sea ice has for hundreds of years, and not just since the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 (a year of unusual southern spread of sea ice in the Newfoundland area),[827] been regarded as a risk and an obstacle to the economic value of the Arctic, which lay in whaling, sealing, shipping and mineral and fossil-fuel extraction.[828] This is the opposite of the value ice represents to Arctic populations like the Inuit, for whom the sea ice - hunting ground, livelihood, medium of travel, play and wayfaring - is awaited with expectation, and where November, the usual first month of sea ice, is called Tusaqtuut, ‘the news season’.
But equally important is to write local populations and cultures into the history of the Arctic Ocean. Interestingly this work has for a long time been done mostly by geographers, anthropologists and scholars of religion, who have felt compelled to navigate the past as they have made sense of the present.[829] Perhaps this is a natural effect of the unconventional history that unfolds for those who wish to unpack the Arctic Ocean; the histories and narratives produced are often insightful and impressive. However, as the Arctic Ocean is now, finally, becoming a meta-geographical project and drawn into global environmental, human rights and geo-politics, we can see how, correspondingly, a professional historiography is gradually emerging. It is timely and is, in and of itself, evidence of the silent patience of history as an enterprise: slowly but surely covering every space of the globe with some kind of meaningful narrative, which will surely be immediately contested.