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

advocates today. Its idea is to build a dike across James Bay (the large cove at the southern end of Hudson Bay, see map on p. ix), thus retaining runoff from this lowland’s many north-flowing rivers prior to their entering the ocean. The enclosed part of James Bay would become a giant freshwater lake, and its water then pumped back south again toward Lake Huron.

The GRAND Canal plan’s inventor, Tom Kierans, now in his nineties, remains its tireless proponent. He points out that the only place the project would deprive of water is Hudson Bay, a brackish sea overwhelmed by jellyfish. Every now and then the plan is resurrected by Canadian politicians.⁵²³ But with a current estimated cost of USD $175 billion—not to mention many environmental impacts and a local climate change over the region⁵²⁴—its revival seems distant, at least for now.

Smaller projects in the same area, like the very recently proposed “Northern Waters Complex” concept⁵²⁵ (see maps on pp. viii-xi), could realistically win support sooner. This particular plan is to impound seasonal floodwater from three north-flowing rivers, temporarily inundating about eleven hundred square kilometers of land before pumping it south again. According to its proponents, the Northern Waters Complex would cost only USD $15 billion, could be finished by 2022, and would generate $2 billion annually in hydropower and perhaps another $20 billion annually in water sales. With economic incentives like these, the great sucking sound from the United States could start sounding better to many Canadians.

Giant water projects cause significant environmental damage and are no longer popular in either the United States or Canada. In fact, the American trend today is to remove dams, not build them. But smaller-scale water exports can happen with pipelines, tanker ships, and bottling plants. The Great Lakes, fronted and shared by both countries, can be replenished at one end and decanted from another, for example at the Chicago Diversion. In his book The Great Lakes Water Wars, author Peter Annin describes how Great Lakes governors and premiers—fearing the specter of long, greedy straws coming at them from the American Southwest —are engaged in a flurry of cooperative lawmaking, hoping to barricade themselves against future water diversions out of the region.

An open question—one feared by many environmentalists—is whether Canada could in fact become obligated to sell bulk water to the United States and Mexico under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Unlike oil, the much more controversial issue of water was deliberately left unaddressed during the writing and ratification of this treaty. Legal scholars point out that if even one province, say Quebec, were to start selling bulk water to the United States, it could establish legal precedent, thus committing Canadian water providers to sell to U.S. or Mexican customers as well as their own. In such a world, North America would grow accustomed to buying not only oil, but also water, from its northernmost country.

Most Canadians oppose the idea of becoming water purveyors to the United States, although their provincial governments are generally more open to the idea. Alongside environmental concerns, Canada suffers water shortages of its own. A water-rich country on paper, most of its uncommitted surplus lies in the far north, flowing over thinly populated permafrost to the Arctic Ocean or Hudson Bay. The south-central prairies are prone to drought, with spotty rainfall and heavy reliance on a few long, oversubscribed rivers fed by distant melting snow and glaciers. If any future megaprojects arise to divert water from northern Canada to the United States, a cut will likely go to southern Canada.

One place where we could well see the resurrection of a massive twentieth-century water-transfer idea by 2050 is in Russia. Siberia’s mighty rivers, flowing untouched to the Arctic Ocean, have long been contemplated as a potential water source for the dry steppes and deserts of central Asia. In the 1870s, tsarist engineers noted the favorable, if long, topographic gateway linking wet western Siberia with the Aral-Caspian lowland, in what is now Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. By the 1940s the Soviet engineer M. M. Davydov had drawn up a grand plan for north- south water transfers out of western Siberia, complete with canals, pumping stations, and the creation of a giant inland lake that would have inundated the same area that is plastered in oil and gas wells today.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s the USSR studied, revised, and finalized a scaled-down version of Davydov’s plan. The idea was to tap Siberia’s mighty Ob’, Irtysh, and Yenisei rivers using a 2,544-kilometer-long canal to irrigate cotton fields around the Aral Sea (see map on page xii). Diversion of the Aral’s feeder rivers was already careening the region toward the desiccated disaster it is today. By 1985 the canal’s route had been surveyed and the first work crews arrived in Siberia to commence the “project of the century,” known by then as “Sibaral” (short for Siberia to Aral Sea Canal).⁵²⁶ But then, the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, abruptly halted the project in 1986, citing a need for further study of Sibaral’s environmental and economic impacts. Nothing further happened and when the Soviet Union collapsed, the project, after decades of planning, was abandoned.

Today, Sibaral continues to rear up from the grave with surprising regularity. The megaproject is more politically awkward than before because six sovereign countries—Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—are now involved instead of one. However, all five former Soviet republics want Sibaral to happen and continue to clamor for it.

Support for this in Russia is mixed. In 2002 Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, wrote a letter to President Vladimir Putin urging the plan’s revival, citing destabilization of Central Asia over water shortages and the specter of refugees pouring across the Russian border. Russia’s deputy minister of natural resources also wrote support for the plan.⁵²⁷ By 2004 Luzhkov was stumping the project in Kazakhstan; and the director of Soyuzvodproject, a government water agency, said they were assembling archived project materials from more than three hundred institutes in order to revisit and revise the old plans. Most Russian scientists are opposed to Sibaral but some note that reducing river runoff to the Arctic Ocean could slightly mitigate the anticipated weakening of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation described earlier in this chapter.⁵²⁸ Modeling studies are needed to confirm or disprove this hypothesis, but if correct, Sibaral could conceivably win the support of environmental groups worried more about global climate change than ecological damages in Siberia.

It remains to be seen if China’s ongoing South-to-North Water Diversion will rekindle humanity’s past passion for massive water projects. Given the enormous obstacles—financial, environmental, and political—I am skeptical that any of these north-to-south water transfer megaprojects will materialize by 2050. But of the ones described here, Sibaral is the most developed. Central Asia is getting very, very dry, and its population is growing. Unlike the North American schemes, something about this project refuses to die. Despite serious likely environmental damages, it really could happen one day.

Regardless of whatever water engineering schemes are or are not undertaken by 2050, one thing remains clear. When it comes to water, the NORCs will be the envy of the world.

CHAPTER 10 The New North

Within hours after the CCGS Amundsen docked at Churchill, my life had changed completely. After months of railroads through desolate boreal forest, long empty coastlines, and the cold salt air of Hudson Bay, I sank back into the smog-choked din of my sweating desert megacity. It was familiar but surreal, exhilarating but perturbing, all at once—in short, the typical reaction most Arctic scientists have at summer’s end when they migrate from north to south, like overeducated birds, to reintroduce themselves to society.

What makes coming home so jarring, compared to other returns from other exotic places—isn’t simply culture shock. It’s human shock, seeing so many people again after dwelling in a place so empty of them. Even Iowa farmlands seem crowded after one has steamed for days along the Labrador coast or flown hundreds of miles overland, seeing virtually no trace of humans. To experience true northern solitude is both spooky and thrilling, like being time-warped to another planet without us. The question is how many more years things will remain like this.

The number of people wishing to visit, exploit, or simply become informed about the Arctic grows larger every year. The count of prospective students contacting me to pursue graduate degrees has leapt from none to dozens per year. At annual conventions of the American Geophysical Union, research presentations about the Arctic