The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

complain too loudly or too often.⁴⁸²

This does not mean that the Russian government, or Russians more generally, care nothing for their aboriginal people. My student and I were sternly admonished to respect the Nenets family’s privacy by not photographing them, and thirteen of the aforementioned Kamchatka commercial salmon leases were, in fact, retracted to protect traditional aboriginal fishing rights. Under old Soviet law, aboriginals had no legal claim to land or its resources, but that has changed somewhat under the Russian Federation. Its 1993 Constitution now mandates that both be protected “as the basis of life and activities of the peoples” who live on them, and holds central and regional governments responsible for protecting “traditional ways of life.” To flesh out these general constitutional requirements, three meatier federal laws specifically addressing aboriginal land rights were adopted in Moscow by 2001.⁴⁸³ Chief among the new reforms is a revival of obshchiny, small group-owned plots of land to which families, clans, or villages can request exclusive use for traditional subsistence.

It is a well-known adage in Russia that obedience to federal laws is inversely proportional to geographic distance from Moscow. However, these new ones, at least on paper, are a significant advance for aboriginal Russians. While Russia has not yet ratified ILO Convention 169, it is clear that these new laws were written to conform with many of its guidelines. Interestingly, the country’s recent recentralization of power, begun under Vladimir Putin and reviled by the western press, is good news for Russia’s forty-five officially recognized aboriginal groups: If Moscow demands that the far-off regional governments implement and enforce the new federal laws, these people will be better protected.

Imagining 2050

A final and keenly important distinction must be drawn between the emerging new aboriginal policies of North America and Greenland versus those of northern Europe and Russia. While the former do accord value and protections to the traditional cultures of the past, they also seat chairs at the table of the future by devolving political power, land management decisions, and natural resource revenues including oil and gas royalties. But in the Nordic countries and Russia, emerging policies seek to preserve “traditional” cultures and ways of life above all else. Indeed in Russia, demonstrable proof of such activity—raising reindeer, for example, or subsisting by hunting and fishing—is a key requirement for winning aboriginal protections and privileges, including obshchiny. Also, the old Soviet tradition of limiting legal recognition of aboriginal status to populations having fifty thousand or fewer persons has been retained, such that small, scattered aboriginal groups can win these privileges but not large ones. At first blush, such policies sound noble—what’s wrong with trying to protect vanishing ancestral cultures from going extinct? But, as put by the recent Arctic Human Development Report, “one must question the tendency to consider change as a threat to some immemorial ‘tradition’ in discussing indigenous societies, when it is called progress in western societies.”⁴⁸⁴

Put bluntly, the Nordic and Russian aboriginal policies encourage the mummification of aboriginal people and their historical practices into bits of living folklore. By not going far enough, the new legal protections—well intentioned and keenly desired by their subjects as they may be—lapse into paternalism, pure and simple. Aboriginals win permission to carry on their ancient ways—to the gratitude of village elders and future anthropologists—but are denied forms of empowerment that matter most for the future: political power, a say over land use and development, a say over environmental protection, and the right to receive royalties from all the natural gas, oil, and minerals that will be plucked from beneath their feet. Their cultures are denied the right to evolve. Instead, they are pickled under a glass bell jar.

When I try to imagine the role of NORC aboriginals in 2050, I sense two very different scenes unfolding. In the eastern hemisphere, I see fascinating historical enclaves, where people can still carry out ancestral subsistence traditions on the land. Their lives are not so different from today except they have become living museum displays, beset by anthropologists and a global tourist trade. In the western hemisphere, I imagine unprecedented new societies taking hold. They are a unique blend of the old and the new, choosing some parts of traditional culture to retain and others to abandon. People run their business corporations in the morning and go hunting in the afternoon (the ringed seals and polar bears are now protected but harbor seals and salmon are moving in). Pipelines and ports are spreading, natural gas is flowing south, and royalties are flowing north. In Canada, the first university above the sixtieth parallel has been founded.⁴⁸⁵ The global fleet bristles offshore but the land belongs to them. I see the original stewards of this land taking it back again.

Part Three ALTERNATE ENDINGS

CHAPTER 9 The Pentagon Report

Our thought experiment so far has been propelled by big drivers, the four global forces of demography, natural resource demand, globalization, and climate change. A fifth—enduring legal frameworks— cropped up in discussions of sovereignty over the Arctic seafloor and the political power of aboriginal peoples. Throughout the book we have stayed within the confines of the following ground rules as stated in the opening chapter:

No Silver Bullets (incremental and foreseeable advances in technology),

No World War III (no radical reshuffling of our geopolitics and laws),

No Hidden Genies (like a global depression, a killer pandemic, a sudden climate change), 

and 

The Models Are Good Enough.

These overarching drivers and ground rules have served the 2050 thought experiment well to this point. I hope it has kept the book from being shelved in the science fiction sections of bookstores and libraries. The described outcomes are deduced from big trends and tangible evidence already apparent today, rather than political ideology or my wonderful imagination. They favor the likely over the unlikely. I honestly expect, should I live long enough, to see many or all of them materialize within my lifetime.

In this chapter and the next, let’s step out of the comfort zone a bit. What are some other outcomes these trends could provoke? Are the four forces robust, our ground rules reasonable? If not, how might they surprise us? This chapter explores six less assured, but plausible, developments that could affect some of the big trends presented thus far. Five of them originate in the North, but have global or far-reaching consequences. Let’s begin with climate change, by breaking the ground rules on hidden genies and computer models.

The Evolution of Climate Models

The motivation for running climate models is nothing like the motivation for making weather forecasts on the nightly news. Those seek to identify specific events, like a storm front, and are meaningful only a few days into the future. But climate models forecast average climate variables, like mean January