The story of the Arctic is the story of our world. The land has been grabbed, the resources plundered, the native people treated as little more than an irritation, and now the effects of climate change threaten its very survival. Richard Sale details our history of raiding this icy region, and looks ahead to a future that seems set to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Here is where the native hunter-gatherers gave way to the trappers and whalers, desperate men on months-long missions, who ended up owing money if they couldn’t kill enough. And still we come – the Russian planting of a flag on the seabed in 2007 and US-Canadian rumblings resurfacing over the long-disputed North-West Passage are evidence of a new era of exploitation. Pelts, whales and gold rushes have given way to oil, gas and shipping routes once deemed too dangerous to contemplate.
The Arctic is a sensitive area, not just politically but environmentally, as Sale grimly documents; pollution stays around longer, without sunlight to break it down – the Inuits’ bodies are so full of pollutants they could not be disposed of as waste. The ice is retreating, too, which is disastrous, not just for the iconic polar bear but also because it would open up routes for even more polluting ships to take a shortcut from North America to Asia.
If the future seems bleak, that’s because it is. There was a time when it seemed foolish to bother with shale oil or extracting methane from ice when a much cheaper source of fossil fuel was available in the Middle East, but those days are coming to an end. Sale’s argument is that we have not learned sufficiently from the first wave of exploitation, when animals were the target, and that the treaties and agreements which are in place may not be enough to save the region from a second wave.
It’s a dark outlook, but not without colour in its telling. Sale’s stories from the pioneer days when everything was up for grabs are evocative. You can’t help having a sliver of sympathy for the hardy souls who ventured off to their freezing deaths in search of that North-West Passage; not as much, though, as you have for the native people who were forcibly ejected or had their land bought for trinkets and now find themselves selling trinkets to rich tourists on cruise-ships.
