The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future (28 page)

Imagining 2050

Our thought experiment has gained human texture. Against a global backdrop of rising material wealth, environmental stress, and total human population, we find the likelihood of smaller, flourishing cultures growing amid the milder winters and abundant natural resources packed into the northern quarter of the planet. From all indications these resources can and will be divided peacefully between nations, and global market forces allowed to exploit them. While Russia’s population is contracting, she reigns supreme in the economic potential of her enormous northern holdings of natural gas. In all other NORC countries populations are growing, led especially by the United States and immigrant-friendly Canada, with a growth rate very near that of India.

Key settlements and physical infrastructure exist already, but their geography and quality vary widely. North America is efficient but condensed, Russia remote but far-reaching. Best developed are the Nordic countries: Perpetually warmed by the North Atlantic Current, they have extensive high-quality roads and rail, stable governance systems, and towns, ports, companies, and universities already in place, stretching from their southern capitals all the way north to the remote Arctic.

Global immigration explains most of the projected population growth around the Northern Rim. But it is flowing into the larger cities, to places like Stockholm and Toronto, Fort McMurray and Anchorage. These are urban outposts in the midst of beautiful, expansive wilderness. Who will rule the rest?

CHAPTER 8

Good-bye Harpoon, Hello Briefcase

“The foundation of our culture is on the ice, the cold, the snow.”

—Sheila Watt-Cloutier (1953-)

“Inuvialuit are a proud and adaptable people. We wouldn’t have lasted for so many generations . . . if we weren’t.”

— Nellie J. Cournoyea (1940-)

“M
EIDÄN ELÄMÄ ON AINA VAIHTUNUT,”
said my host, rapping the rustic wooden corral fence with gnarled hands for emphasis. I eagerly returned my eyes to my new Finnish translator—perhaps too eagerly. She was gorgeous and something was definitely in the air. I didn’t know it yet, but just six weeks later we would agree to get married.

“She says, ‘We’re always changing.’”

“Hm? Oh, yes. Ask her to elaborate.”

In my defense, I might have been distracted from the interview no matter who was translating. What I was hearing from my subject, a fiftyish Sámi reindeer herder in Lapland, was quickly turning into what I’d already heard in many other interviews around the Northern Rim. It was fast becoming clear to me that the perspective I’d carried into this project would need to be broadened considerably.

I had come up here—I thought—to write a book about climate change. My plan was to document not only the physical realities of thawing ice and soil, but their corresponding impacts upon traditional aboriginal societies. I’d wanted to find the faces and tragedies hiding inside the pixels of my satellite images and climate models. I’d envisioned being welcomed with gratitude, after traveling thousands of miles to record personal accounts of meatless hunts, starving wildlife, and perilously thinning ice. In my year-plus vacation from number crunching, I would become the Anna Politkovskaya of Arctic climate change.

In retrospect it’s a bit embarrassing. Instead of gratitude I got a resigned look and the tired recitation of stories told once too often. Often I was the third, fourth, or tenth outsider interrupting someone’s busy summer, demanding to know how climate change was destroying their life. In airplanes and hotels I bumped into camera crews and book authors, all asking for leads to a stricken hunter to interview, a melting lump of ice to film.

I got all of those stories of woe. My notebooks are overflowing with them. Our Sámi reindeer herder is now spending a bundle on hay, because bizarre winter rains have made her animals unable to scrape through the ice-crusted snow to eat.
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There is no question that climate change is wreaking havoc upon northern peoples, as described in earlier chapters. These problems will only get worse in the future. But to isolate climate change, and portray it as the sole concern facing northern societies is disingenuous. It is but one part of a much bigger story.

Across a vast chunk of Canada’s bitterly frozen extreme north, a place with no permanent roads and too cold even to grow wood, a remarkable political experiment is unfolding.

The new Nunavut Territory—the first redrawing of Canada’s map since 1949—has just celebrated its first decade. With 1.9 million square kilometers, approximately the size of Mexico, Nunavut is geographically large enough to be a good-sized country. But if it were, with barely thirty thousand people it would have the lowest population density on Earth.

Its residents are hard at work changing that. Nunavut has the fastest population growth rate of anywhere in Canada, and it isn’t relying on foreign immigrants to do it. It is birthing twenty-five babies per thousand people versus the national average of eleven. With a median age of just twenty-three years (Canada’s average is forty), Nunavut is extraordinarily youthful. More than a third of its population is under the age of fifteen.
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As of Canada’s last census in 2006, Nunavut’s population had leapt more than 10% in just five years. Iqaluit—its new capital sprouting from the site of an old Cold War U.S. Air Force base—jumped nearly 20%. With vacancy rates near zero, new housing can’t be built fast enough in Iqaluit to keep up with demand. Apartments go for two to three thousand dollars per month, and the city vies with Fort McMurray for the dubious distinction of being the most expensive rental market in Canada.

I first met Elisapee Sheutiapik, Iqaluit’s mayor, in 2007. She bubbles with enthusiasm about Nunavut’s potential. It is a very exciting time for northern aboriginal people, she explains. We are regaining control of our homeland. There are more jobs and new opportunities. The whole world is watching.

She’ll also describe its problems—soaring food prices, the housing shortage, substance abuse, and climate change. Nunavut’s main travel platform—sea ice—is becoming unreliable. Various other problems commence if temperatures go above 21°C in summer. With a contagious laugh she explains that Iqaluit’s new buildings are being built with air-conditioning, something never seen before by the Inuit. Then, getting serious, she’ll talk about plans to convince the Canadian government to build a deepwater port for its newest capital city.
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She just might get one. With two giant military neighbors and virtually no presence in the region, Canada suffers deep insecurities about Arctic sovereignty and knows that her aboriginal settlements are key to shoring it up—even to the point of past abuses like relocating Inuit families to bleak High Arctic outposts in the 1950s. While Canada’s Inuit are a tiny people—only fifty thousand in 2006 (up from forty thousand in 1996), mostly in isolated villages scattered across the Arctic coast—they are the dominant human presence in such a vast empty place. In the Arctic, small numbers of people gain outsized importance. A village of two hundred becomes a major destination, two thousand a metropolis.

From all current appearances Canada’s sovereignty anxiety is sharper than ever. The world is staring hard at the Arctic in general and the Northwest Passage—which actually contains several possible routes—in particular. Like everywhere else Canada’s rural areas are depopulating; her fast population growth is fueled mainly by foreign migrants flocking to southern cities. Canada knows that the remote Inuit towns are her essential outposts, and that without them her entire northern front would be empty. But after decades of ham-fisted treatment, like discouraging native languages and yanking kids off to residency schools to be assimilated, the relationship between Canada’s central government and her northern aboriginal citizens is finally on the mend, an improvement that seems unlikely to reverse course.

One big example is Nunavut. With a population that is 85% Inuit, its creation marks the first time in history that an aboriginal minority has formed a standard governance unit—in this case a territory
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—within a modern western country. Imagine creating a new U.S. state seven times bigger than Nevada, with the small aboriginal population of Nevada building its entire new state government from scratch. That is the scope of Nunavut.

It is a process wracked with false starts and growing pains. The Inuit people have milled across this tundra for millennia, but today’s permanent towns and institutions are very new. Nunavut’s evolving government is being invented and used at the same time, rather like assembling a truck while driving it. It is challenged by far-flung settlements unconnected by roads, high suicide rates, not enough educated workers to fill the new jobs, and an increasingly risky winter travel platform. But optimism abounds. A brand-new northern society is being built from scratch, and the Inuit are in charge. They know this is a grand opportunity—not simply to re-create the old ways, but to build the new.

Aboriginal Demographics

The NORCs hold between 6 and 20 million aboriginal people, depending on how the Russian population is counted.
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The Russian Federation probably has about 20 million, but only about 250,000 are legally recognized as such, so officially that’s 0.2% of Russia’s total population (unofficially 14%). The United States has 4.9 million (1.6% of total population), Canada 1.2 million (3.8%), Denmark 50,000 (0.9%), Norway 40,000 (0.9%), Sweden maybe 20,000 (0.2%), and Finland 7,500 (0.1%).
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Iceland, discovered empty by the Vikings in the ninth century A.D., has none.

Clearly, aboriginal population percentages in the NORC countries are small. Why, then, an entire chapter dedicated to their status and trajectories? Because aboriginal people are a key component of our northern future.

First, the national statistics above mask the importance of geographic distribution. In the coldest, most remote territories of the NORC countries—the same places where many of the more extreme phenomena described in this book are happening—aboriginal populations are disproportionately large, capturing
large minorities or even a majority
of the population. Alaska is 16% aboriginal. In Canada, aboriginal people capture 15% of the populations of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, 25% of Yukon Territory, 50% of NWT, and a whopping 85% of Nunavut. In certain northern areas of Sweden, Norway, and Finland, they have 11%, 34%, and 40% population shares, respectively. Denmark’s Greenland is 88% aboriginal. In northern Russia, even the officially recognized population share is 2%—ten times the national average—and that number ignores almost four hundred thousand aboriginal Yakut people comprising one-third of the population in Sakha Republic.
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Second, in North America aboriginal populations are growing very quickly. As of Canada’s last census it had ballooned 45% in just ten years—a growth rate nearly six times faster than the country’s population as a whole. U.S. aboriginals, currently totaling 4.9 million, are projected to rise to 8.6 million by 2050.
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So we see that the fast population growth of Iqaluit is not unusual but simply reflects a much broader demographic trend. Yet, a serious attitude contrast exists between the people of Iqaluit and the far larger numbers of aboriginal groups scattered in hundreds of impoverished reservations throughout southern Canada and the conterminous United States. Why are the people of Iqaluit bustling while those living on reservations are depressed? What are the implications for the future of the Northern Rim? The answers start across the border to the west and invoke a theme that is by now, I hope, familiar.

The state of Alaska was barely eight years old—even younger than Nunavut is now—when the largest oil field in North America was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on its northern coast. What followed was land-grab pandemonium.

It was 1968 and the fledgling state hadn’t even finished negotiating its land transfers from the U.S. federal government yet. Oil companies grasped immediately that the strike was huge but the waters too icy to reach by tanker ship. Instead, a very long pipeline over public lands was needed to decant it to southern markets, either to a year-round port in the Gulf of Alaska, or through Canada. Modern environmentalists, freshly inspired by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book
Silent Spring,
readied themselves for an epic battle.

Meanwhile, another group had also galvanized to win closure of a long-suffering wound: Who owns the land upon which aboriginal people have always lived? Even before the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, aboriginal Alaskans had long asked when and how the tsar had come to acquire title to their homelands.
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But no one seemed to care much about this issue. It had simmered, neglected and out of public consciousness, for over a century.

By the time oil was found in Prudhoe Bay, times had changed. America’s civil rights movement had taught a new generation the power of organized protests and lawsuits. The Alaska Federation of Natives and other groups had been litigating Washington to block transfers of federal land to the new state of Alaska until their ancestral claims were adjudicated. Many of the claims overlapped and, when added up, covered a total land area larger than that of the new state. It was a mess, and in 1966, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (father of the current senator from New Mexico Tom Udall) declared a “land freeze,” effectively stopping all transfers of land to the new state until the mess was cleaned up. When oil was struck and talk of a pipeline began, the legal implications of the aboriginal claims blew sky-high. Who, exactly, owned this land? Suddenly, Alaska—a place that was about as conspicuous as Nunavut is today—mattered to everyone. No pipeline could be built until the issue was resolved.

State legislators and oil companies began lobbying for quick congressional action on an arcane issue ignored since the Alaska Purchase of 1867. After three years of lively politics on Capitol Hill, the final result was the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1971.
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ANCSA’s grand bargain was this: Aboriginal Alaskans would forever relinquish all of their ancestral claims to land within the state of Alaska, as well as their traditional rights to hunt and fish without regulation. Also, their old reservation treaties would be nullified. In return, they won fee simple property title and mineral rights to forty million acres of land—about one-ninth of the state of Alaska—nearly $1 billion in cash, and a business plan.

The U.S. government had just made Alaska Natives (aboriginals) the largest private landowners in the state of Alaska.
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The land was geographically divided among twelve “Regional Corporations” to manage the new property and cash holdings, and oversee further incorporation of more than two hundred village corporations within their boundaries. All of the new companies were then free to pursue whatever profits they could from their new assets, which were then returned as dividends to their shareholders. To become a shareholder, one had to possess one-quarter Alaska Native blood, be a U.S. citizen, and enroll with a regional or village corporation. A special landless corporation was even set up for eligible shareholders living outside of the state.
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ANCSA differed from all previous aboriginal treaties in at least two important ways. First, an enormous amount of land was granted, more than the area of all historical Indian reservations in the United States combined. Some grumbled that even forty million acres was a pittance compared to what had been stolen in the first place, but there is no questioning it was colossal compared with past treaties. Second, ANCSA did not create permanent sanctuaries for an everlasting traditional subsistence life. Instead, it incentivized use of the granted land not simply for hunting and fishing but for capitalist enterprise, with aboriginal-owned companies and shareholders running the show, to spur development and economic growth. ANCSA had blown up the traditional model of Aboriginal Reservation and replaced it with a new one of Aboriginal Business.

Today, Alaska’s aboriginal-owned regional corporations and their subsidiaries are worth billions. They’ve spawned hundreds of companies in construction, oil and gas field support, transportation, engineering, facilities management, land development, telecommunications, and tourism, to name a few. They publish shareholder reports, elect boards, and write five-year management plans. In common with other corporations some have done well and others not. Some have been mismanaged into bankruptcy. Others have squandered their cash endowments, clear-cut their forests, and sold off land or deeded it to their shareholders. But the successful ones, especially in remote areas, have become a dominating force in Alaskan politics and society. They create jobs and attract other businesses by offering logistics services. They pay thousands of dollars per year to their shareholders.

ANCSA was really just the beginning of aboriginal empowerment in Alaska. It also set the stage for home rule governments like the North Slope Borough, an enormous success story, which has built schools, sewer systems, and water treatment facilities, and brought many other quality-of-life improvements to the North Slope by taxing oil field activities. Much of its success can be traced back to the ANCSA model. Not surprisingly, aboriginal Alaskans today are far more supportive of oil and gas exploration, of land development, and of business in general, than any prior generation.