At Arctic Circle assembly, history recedes from view as new frontiers and alignments emerge

Every October in Reykjavik, over 2,000 people gather to discuss the current and future state of the Arctic. The past is typically low on the agenda of the Arctic Circle conference, whose attendees are generally looking ahead for new opportunities — and new risks, too. To most of the political heavyweights who grace the stage of the Escheresque Harpa concert hall and conference center each autumn at the invitation of former Icelandic President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, the biggest threat in the Arctic at present is Russia. In the words of Prime Minister of Iceland Bjarni Benediktsson, who was born in 1970, “We are standing at an acute crossroads — possibly the most important of my generation.” The Gen-Xer, of course, was referring to the inflection point that so many speakers emphasized the West is facing. Staring down the other end of the barrel is Russia and increasingly, China, too.

At Arctic Circle, Russia is the “polar bear in the room,” to quote U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who addressed the delegates today. The vast majority of Russians who participated in Arctic Circle in its initial years after the event first kicked off in 2014 no longer attend unless they are based at an institution outside of Russia.

But China still sends a delegation. This year, Liu Zhenmin, Special Envoy for Climate Change, took to the stage. He was the only plenary speaker who stressed that climate change was the biggest problem facing the Arctic. For everyone else, fear of radiative forcing has fallen to the wayside as militarization comes marching in. China, of course, isn’t terribly concerned about the Russia threat: in fact, it is closely partnering with its military and border guard in the North Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea to carry out military drills and patrols that are veering ever closer to the United States’ difficult-to-defend Alaskan edges.

The growing number of interceptions by the U.S. Air Force and Coast Guard of Chinese and Russian vessels and bombers close to Alaska has caught the country off guard. One woman in the audience from Atka, a small settlement in the far-flung Aleutian Islands, stated, “A few weeks ago, we had boats in our waters from Russia and the PRC.” She wanted to know what the Department of Defense is doing to counter this threat.

Iris Ferguson, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Arctic and Global Resilience, U.S. Department of Defense, admitted, “It’s not necessarily something we would have expected five years ago. We didn’t expect that level of alignment in a military capacity. So it’s causing some increased awakening within the Department about how we effectively respond and show presence and deterrence in the region.” The Department of Defense repeatedly referred to Russia and “the PRC” rather than “China” – likely an intentional choice, for representing the enemy with an acronym makes it easier to dehumanize it.

While the Chinese Special Envoy for Climate Change made no mention of Russia, he also dodged a question from the audience on how to cooperate with Indigenous Peoples and promote their causes. Liu claimed the query was intended for former Icelandic President Grímsson, who took the bait. He made the case that the Arctic Circle is the only conference in the world where young Indigenous Peoples can organize a session – “And we’ll probably accept it,” he quipped – and have full authority over it. The claim seems dubious since there are countless Indigenous fora and gatherings around the world where youth can organize panels and sessions. Nevertheless, the efforts of the Arctic Circle to increase representation of Indigenous voices at the conference since it first started a decade ago should be lauded.

Emerging frontiers: The Central Arctic Ocean, deep seabed, and outer space

One interesting session I stuck my head into this morning organized by Ocean Conservation, Oceans North, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and the Korea Polar Research Institute examined “Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge about the Central Arctic Ocean”. This nascent maritime space opening in the center of the Arctic as a result of sea ice melt would not have been on most people’s radars a decade ago. Neither would the possibility of bringing together Indigenous Peoples and scientists to co-produce knowledge about such a remote area have generated nearly as much interest, either.

Another new frontier cracking open in the Arctic is the deep sea bed. Last year, the Norwegian Parliament approved plans to begin exploratory mining in its exclusive economic zone. A conference session this morning on “New Frontiers of Speculation, Extractivism, and Justice” critiqued the government’s plans. Berit Kristoffersen, Associate Professor at the Arctic University of Norway, and Alexander Arroyo, Associate Director of the Urban Theory Lab at the University of Chicago, explained how the legal regulations set up for oil and gas are literally laying the foundation for deep sea mining regulations, showing how one frontier literally paves the way for the next.

A second frontier that is opening in the Arctic lies at its intersection with outer space. The two “cold, dark, and dangerous” regions, in the words of Michael Byers, Professor at the University of British Columbia, were discussed together in a session organized by Bifrost University in Iceland and the Outer Space Institute in Canada. Across the Arctic from Norway to Canada and Alaska, more ground stations are being built to downlink data from polar-orbiting satellites. The world’s largest civilian Earth observation ground station lies atop a glacial plateau outside Longyearbyen, where Kongsberg Satellite Services operates its Svalbard Satellite Station. When I visited last month, as reindeer grazed between giant white radomes, my host explained that the company is erecting almost one new satellite dish a week.

At the same time, in northern locales like Kiruna (Sweden), Andøya (Norway), and Shetland (United Kingdom), spaceports are being built to launch satellites into orbit. Kodiak, Alaska has the United States’ oldest commercial spaceport, which opened in 1994. New space infrastructure in the Arctic is often situated in the same sites where the military sunk its teeth into the tundra during the Cold War and first Space Age. As I illustrated in my presentation, though, the ruins of the Space Age dot the landscape in places like Siberia. In the quiet of the snow, mothballed Orbita stations that once supported satellite broadcasts of Soviet TV lie silently rusting, their transmitters turned off for good.

With all eyes on new alignments and future frontiers, lessons from the past were in short shrift as they often are at Arctic conferences. But when asked by an Alaskan student how the U.S. would rebuild trust with Native communities, U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski provided a remarkably candid and somber reminder of the atrocities that Arctic Indigenous Peoples have endured for centuries at the hands of colonizing powers.

In 1869, after an American sentry killed two Lingít (Tlingit) men, the U.S. government bombarded and torched the village of Kake. This needless destruction occurred just two years after the U.S. had purchased Alaska from Imperial Russia. A similar bombardment over another relatively minor dispute brought the Lingít village of Angoon to its knees in 1882. Last month, as Murkowski recounted, she attended a ceremony in Kake where the feds finally apologized for the horrors they cast on Kake. An apology ceremony will take place in Angoon soon, too, that she will attend.

Former U.S. Secretary of State William Seward, who pushed the nineteenth-century purchase of Alaska, later claimed, “The purchase of Alaska [was my greatest achievement], but it will take the people of the United States a generation before they realize it.” Little did the people whose lands were both stolen and torched realize that it would take seven generations for the U.S. to admit to their gross wrongdoings, as Murkowski stressed. While the Icelandic Prime Minister spoke of the urgency facing the West in the timescale of a single generation, that pales in comparison to the traumas Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic have faced for many, many more.

Arctic boosters will always be looking to the future in their hunt to curry favor and investment, whether for a new icebreaker to crack open the frozen ocean, a new mine to bore through the seafloor, or a new spaceport to pierce the heavens. But the people who have lived in the region for millennia hold the keys to a multigenerational understanding of the Arctic. This may provide a more tempered view of the current ecological and geopolitical crises facing the planet, however concerning they may seem. After all, those who say the apocalypse is nigh have the privilege of not having lived through one before.