marine operator, whose vice president, John Marshall, so kindly showed me around the shipyard in Chapter 6, was bought by two such corporations in 1985 and is now 100% aboriginal-owned.537
Put simply, the Arctic is not an easy place for fresh arrivals and business start-ups outside of a narrow range of activities. Add to all this the infernal cold and darkness of the polar winter, followed by the steaming heat and billions of mosquitoes of the polar summer, and we see the Arctic is not and will never be a big draw for southern settlers. Even the sub-Arctic boom cities of Fort McMurray, Noyabr’sk, and Novy Urengoy must recruit heavily to attract enough foreign workers. While Arctic settlements will grow with the region’s rising energy, mining, and shipping base, its fast-growing aboriginal population (in North America), and the ongoing urbanization trend, it’s hard to imagine big new cities spreading across it by 2050 or even 2100.
Instead, a better envisioning of the New North today might be something like America in 1803, just after the Louisiana Purchase from France. It, too, possessed major cities fueled by foreign immigration, with a vast, inhospitable frontier distant from the major urban cores. Its deserts, like Arctic tundra, were harsh, dangerous, and ecologically fragile. It, too, had rich resource endowments of metals and hydrocarbons. It, too, was not really an empty frontier but already occupied by aboriginal peoples who had been living there for millennia.
Like the New North, the American West presented a strong geographic gradient in terms of attractiveness for settlement, varying roughly with longitude instead of latitude. East of the Rocky Mountains, across the Great Plains and into Texas (then part of Mexico), there was sufficient rain to have a go at dryland farming, but not farther west in the harsher landscapes of what are now Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and California. What drew settlers there were gold and silver, culminating in rushes to California in 1849 and to Nevada a decade later. These metal rushes populated the American West just as tar sands and natural gas are doing today in Alberta and West Siberia, and as offshore finds might one day populate port towns along the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
Just as Mexico once ceded what is now all or partly Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, perhaps one day the Russian Federation will cede its Far East to the People’s Republic of China. One shining difference is that we are unlikely to reexperience brutality toward northern aboriginals, unlike the forced displacement and genocide of American Indians throughout the settlement and expansion of the United States. Indeed, in Alaska, northern Canada, and Greenland, aboriginals are poised to lead the way.
Flying over the American West today, one still sees landscapes that are barren and sparsely populated, looking not much different now than they did then. Its towns and cities are relatively few, scattered across miles of empty desert. Yet its population is growing, its cities like Phoenix and Salt Lake and Las Vegas humming economic forces with cultural and political significance. This is how I imagine the coming human expansion in the New North. We’re not all going to move there, but it will become integrated into our world in some very important ways.
I imagine the high Arctic, in particular, will be rather like Nevada—a landscape nearly empty but with fast- growing towns fueled by a narrow range of industries. Its prime socioeconomic role in the twenty-first century will not be homestead haven but economic engine, shoveling gas, oil, minerals, and fish into the gaping global maw. These resources will help to supply and grow cities around the world, as described in Chapter 2. Its second important role is innovative social experimenter with aboriginal home rule, through still-evolving power devolutions in northern North America and Greenland. These new societies will inspire other marginalized groups around the world, even as their ecosystems and traditions are decimated by some of the most extreme climate changes on Earth.
Many of the transformations I’ve presented in this book are negative, and most that are positive exact a toll someplace else. And as painfully demonstrated by the 2008-09 economic contraction, in a globally integrated world, even “winners” suffer pain from the losers. More hydrocarbon development risks not just local damages to northern ecosystems, but global damages through still more greenhouse gases released. For most NORC residents, the downside of milder winters is more rain instead of snow, making them dark, wet, and depressing; while farther north it means conversion of land that is barely livable to land that is hardly livable. The 23.5° tilt in the Earth’s axis of rotation commands that there will always be darkness and cold at high latitudes, even if climate warming causes Februaries in Churchill to warm up to Februaries in Minneapolis.
The identified trends have strong inertia, but none are inevitable. The projections of computer models are not edicts, but bent by social choices. Africa’s violent cities can be changed. Even the four global forces of demographics, resource demand, globalization, and climate change, being human-generated, must—by definition— lie within human control. And through personal choices, everyone has the ability to shape the perceptions and choices of others. Recent studies, using public data posted on Facebook, have shown that individual actions disseminate unexpected influence over strangers by blazing quickly and deeply through extended social networks. Put simply, a surprising number of one’s personal decisions are swayed not deliberately by an advertising billboard, but unintentionally by an unknown friend of a friend of a friend. So each day, by choosing the red pill or blue, we also shape the actions of others. And in turn, the course of history.
To me, the old debates of Malthus and Marx, of Ehrlich and Simon, miss the point. The question is not how many people there are versus barrels of oil remaining, or acres of arable land, or drops of water churning through the hydrologic cycle. The question is not how much resource consumption the global ecosystem can or cannot absorb. It’s moot to wonder whether the world should optimally hold nine billion people or nine million, colonize the sea, or all move to Yakutsk. No doubt we humans will survive anything, even if polar bears and Arctic cod do not. Perhaps we could support nine hundred billion if we choose a world with no large animals, pod apartments, genetically engineered algae to eat, and desalinized toilet water to drink. Or perhaps nine hundred million if we choose a wilder planet, generously restocked with the creatures of our design. To me, the more important question is not of capacity, but of desire:
NOTES
1 The October 2008 median home price in Los Angeles County, California, was $355,000.
2 Personal communication with Marsha Branigan, Manager, Wildlife Management Environment and Natural Resources, Inuvik, NWT, December 4, 2007.
3 “Hairy Hybrid: Half Grizzly, Half Polar Bear,”
4 Of particular relevance to the pizzly story is the recent discovery that transient grizzly bears are now regular visitors to Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, and a small but viable population may be establishing itself in or around Melville Island. See J. P. Doupe, J. H. England, M. Furze, D. Paetkau, “Most Northerly Observation of a Grizzly Bear
5 6.1 km/yr average range shift from a quantitative assessment examining historical data for >1,046 species. C. Parmesan, G. Yohe, “A Globally Coherent Fingerprint of Climate Change Impacts across Natural Systems,”
6 In February 2010 successive blizzards buried Washington, D.C., and were followed by snowstorms that closed schools from Texas to the Florida Panhandle to the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, whitening places that hadn’t seen snow in a decade or more. Classes were canceled in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. M. Nelson, “Rare snowflakes start falling from Miss. to Fla.,” Associated Press, February 12, 2010,
