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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Serie: Environmental History
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

The environmental histories of the Arctic and Antarctica are characterised by contrast and contradiction. These are places that have witnessed some of the worst environmental degradation in recent history. But they are also the locations of some of the most farsighted measures of environmental protection. They are places where people have sought to conquer nature through exploration and economic development, but in many ways they remain wild and untamed. They are the coldest places on Earth, yet have come to occupy an important role in the science and politics of global warming. Despite being located at opposite ends of the planet and being significantly different in many ways, Adrian Howkins argues that the environmental histories of the Arctic and Antarctica share much in common and have often been closely connected. This book also argues that the Polar Regions are strongly linked to the rest of the world, both through physical processes and through intellectual and political themes. As places of inherent contradiction, the Polar Regions have much to contribute to the way we think about environmental history and the environment more generally.

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Seitenzahl: 449

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

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Leseprobe

Cover

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Lands of Darkness and Light

What Are the Polar Regions?

Places for Environmental History

Lands of Darkness and Light

Notes

1. Myth and History: The Polar Regions Up to 1800

Inuit Creation Myths

An Anti-Arctic

Norse in Greenland

Terra Australis Incognita

Notes

2. Scarcity and Abundance: Marine Exploitation

Arctic Sealing

Antarctic Sealing

Arctic Whaling

Antarctic Whaling

Notes

3. Nature Conquered, Nature Unconquered: Polar Exploration

Open Polar Sea

Race for the Poles

Aerial Exploration

Notes

4. Dreams and Realities: Economic Development

The (Un-)Friendly Arctic

Little America

Spitsbergen / Svalbard

South American Antarctica

Danish Greenland

Notes

5. War and Peace: The Cold War

The Nuclear Arctic

Nuclear-Free Antarctica

Cold War Whaling

Notes

6. Exploitation and Preservation: Environmental Conflict

Environmental Conflict in the Arctic

Environmental Agreement in Antarctica

Climate Change

Polar Tourism

Notes

Conclusion: Geographies of Despair and Hope

Geographies of Despair

Geographies of Hope

Darkness and Light

Notes

Bibliography

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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For Alison

THE POLAR REGIONS

AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

ADRIAN HOWKINS

polity

The right of Adrian Howkins to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2016 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0201-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Howkins, Adrian.The polar regions : an environmental history / Adrian Howkins.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-7456-7080-5 (hardback)1. Human ecology--Polar regions--History. 2. Polar regions--Environmental conditions. 3. Polar regions--Climate. I. Title.G587.H69 2015333.70911--dc232015013026

The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My academic interest in the Polar Regions began as a graduate student at the University of Texas. I would like to thank my doctoral supervisor Roger Louis, and my committee members Diana Davis, Bruce Hunt, Jonathan Brown, and Tony Hopkins, for their teaching, support, and for their willingness to supervise a dissertation on the history of Antarctica. In Austin it was a great pleasure to be part of an intellectually stimulating graduate student cohort that included Pablo Mijangos, Cory Conover, Chris Albi, Heather Peterson, José Barragán, Brandon Marsh, Mike Anderson, and many other wonderful friends and colleagues. Texas might not be the most obvious place to start writing about the history of the Polar Regions, but I like to think that there are a number of overlaps with the “it ain’t braggin’ if it’s true” mentality of America’s second largest state.

At Colorado State University my interest in the environmental history of extreme environments has developed in a vibrant intellectual atmosphere. I am particularly grateful to my friends and colleagues at the Public Lands History Center, who have encouraged me to think about history in a way that is fundamentally collaborative and engaged with wider publics. Mark Fiege has taught me more than he can know about being an environmental historian, and has offered constant support and encouragement with this project. Jared Orsi has been extremely generous in reading my work, offering insights with an uncanny ability to say the right thing at the right time. Ruth Alexander, Janet Ore, Sarah Payne, and Maren Bzdek have each done much to broaden my appreciation and understanding of the field of history. I would also like to thank the other members of the CSU History Department, especially my two departmental chairs, Doug Yarrington and Diane Margolf, who have been patient and supportive of my frequent requests to travel to distant places. The CSU History Department and College of Liberal Arts have both been generous in providing financial support for my research. In my classes I have learned as much from my students as they have learned from me, and I would like to thank them all for tolerating my idiosyncratic interests and laughing at my attempted jokes.

In summer 2013 I received a McColl Fellowship from the American Geographical Society Library in Milwaukee to conduct research for this project. Marcy Bidney, Jovanka Ristic, Susan Peschel, and Robert Jaeger made this one of the most productive and enjoyable research experiences of my career. I have also benefitted from the assistance of many other archivists and librarians at institutions around the world, including the University of Alaska Anchorage; the University of Alaska Fairbanks; the Byrd Polar Research Center; the US National Archives at College Park, Maryland; the Denver Public Library; the British Antarctic Survey; the Scott Polar Research Institute; the British National Archives; the Argentine Foreign Ministry Archive; the Argentine Antarctic Institute; the Chilean Foreign Ministry Archive; the National Library of Australia; the Australian Antarctic Division; the University of Waikato; the Victoria University of Wellington; Gateway Antarctica at the University of Canterbury; and the New Zealand National Archives in Wellington and Christchurch.

A few years ago, I wrote a short essay in the journal Environmental History titled “Have You Been There? Some Thoughts On (Not) Visiting Antarctica” in which I considered the importance environmental historians place on visiting the places we study. Since writing that essay I have had several opportunities to visit the Polar Regions. I would like to thank Diana Galimberti and Mariano Curiel for giving me my first opportunity to travel to Antarctica as a history lecturer, guide, and Zodiac driver with the tourist company Antarctica XXI. I am extremely grateful to Diana Wall, for introducing me to the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research project in Antarctica. Visiting the Dry Valleys has been one of the highlights of my life, and I would like to thank Diane McKnight and everyone associated with the project for making me feel so welcome, as well as the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs for making this research possible (Grant ANT-1115245). In Alaska—the one state bigger than Texas—Dave Shaw was a fantastic guide on a trip I made to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with the Arctic Wild Company. My friends Sam and Tasha Caughey, Lars Mjaerfoss, and Pia Veldt Larsen have accompanied me on trips to Arctic Norway. It has been a tremendous privilege to be able to visit some of the places I write about in this book, but I try to keep reminding myself of the many issues raised by the nagging question, “Have you been there?”

I made my first venture into comparative polar history with Brandon Luedkte, and I would like to thank him for encouraging me to start looking to the north as well as to the south. Klaus Dodds, Peder Roberts, Lize Marié van Der Watt, Mark Carey, Alessandro Antonello, Ron Doel, Jim Fleming, Anita Guerrini, Cornelia Lüdecke, Daniela Liggett, Consuelo León, Mauricio Jara, Andrés Zarankin, Ximena Senatore, Tom Griffiths, Graeme Wynn, Ryan Jones, Brett Bennett, Paul Sutter, Tina Adcock, and Nigel Milius have all been especially helpful in helping to lay the intellectual foundations for this book. At Polity Press I would like to thank Andrea Drugan and Elliott Karstadt for encouraging this project and being fantastic editors. The anonymous reviewers provided many useful ideas and suggestions. It is impossible to thank everyone by name for the conversations, shared ideas, research support, and general assistance that has been given to me as part of writing this book, but I am truly grateful to you all. Any errors of fact or interpretation are my responsibility alone.

Finally, and most important, I would like to thank my family for the love, support, and patience that have made this book possible. I like to think that the real origins of this project began with family walks with my mum, dad, and sister across Dartmoor National Park in southwest England. Whether by accident or design, these walks instilled in me a passion for extreme environments that has never gone away. I met my wife Alison Hicks while we were students at the University of St. Andrews. Alison shares my love of wild landscapes, and we spent many happy weekends climbing mountains in the Scottish Highlands. Since then we have continued to explore the world together, visiting places as far away as Nuuk in Greenland and Hobart in Tasmania. Alison has been a true inspiration for my work, and I dedicate this book to her.

INTRODUCTION

LANDS OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT

Sailing across Prince William Sound in southern Alaska early in the summer of 2014, it is difficult to imagine that twenty-five years earlier this was the site of one of the world’s high-profile environmental disasters. Sea otters bob up and down, seabirds fly around, and the presence of fishing boats suggests healthy fish populations beneath the surface of the waters. The forests that cover the surrounding mountain slopes appear to be flourishing and the beaches along the shoreline look pristine. Mixed in with the locals and seasonal workers, a handful of tourists seem to be enjoying the crossing, sipping coffee and taking pictures. Even on a rainy day, this is one of the most beautiful places in the world. From the ferry there is no visible sign of the eleven million gallons or more of crude oil that spilled from the gashed hull of the Exxon Valdez after it ran aground shortly after midnight on March 24, 1989—Good Friday—polluting the waters and killing wildlife in one of the cruelest imaginable fashions.1

Following the oil spill, attempts at containment were largely ineffective, and cleanup efforts after the disaster often exacerbated the contamination. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, thousands of oily corpses were collected and put into freezers, creating a grisly archive of the disaster. Dead seals, otters, and seabirds were the most visible victims; entire ecosystems were smothered in toxic crude oil. The oil spill divided local communities. Recriminations focused on the alcohol consumption of the captain and the willful disregard for the environment shown by the oil companies. Members of local communities launched multimillion–dollar lawsuits against Exxon Corporation, and substantial payouts were made. But few people were truly satisfied with the outcome. Alaskan Native artist Mark Webber carved a totem of shame to condemn the disaster and mock those held responsible. Particularly grating for Webber was the chairman of Exxon’s promise that “we will make you whole again.”2

Scraping beneath the surface, it is still possible to find evidence of the lasting environmental impact of the Exxon Valdez disaster twenty-five years after the event. The museum in the nearby fishing town of Cordova—where the fishing industry was severely affected by the spill—contains a jar of oily sand collected from Eleanor Island in February 2014. The contents of the jar and the accompanying pictures serve as a reminder of the long-term consequences of the spill. It is difficult to attribute causation in complex ecosystems, but according to the museum’s display, loons, harbor seals, sockeye salmon, and a number of other species have returned to prespill numbers, while AT1 (or transient-type) killer whales, Pacific herring, and pigeon guillemots have shown no sign of recovery.3 The museum in Valdez confirms the decline of herring and guillemots, but has no mention of killer whales.

The oil that spilled into Prince William Sound came from Prudhoe Bay, above the Arctic Circle on Alaska’s North Slope. It had traveled 800 miles to the south through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, one of the most expensive and environmentally controversial feats of civil engineering ever conducted in the United States.4 Completed in 1977, the pipeline created a physical connection between the Arctic North and the town of Valdez, the most northerly ice-free port in the United States. For a while, legal challenges issued by environmentalist organizations had been successful in delaying the construction of the pipeline. But too many economic and political forces were lined up in favor of Arctic oil production to hold up the construction for long. For the Federal government in Washington D.C., Arctic oil brought down gas prices and reduced reliance on Middle Eastern oil in the wake of the oil crisis of the mid 1970s. For the state of Alaska, oil revenues offered a panacea to the economic struggles that had befallen it since statehood in 1959.5 For Alaskan indigenous communities, the need for the pipeline had helped facilitate the passage of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which granted land and money in partial compensation for losses suffered following the arrival of Europeans.6 For oil companies and the oil workers who flocked to Alaska, this was a financial bonanza unprecedented in recent U.S. history.7 In contrast, environmentalists viewed the exploitation of Arctic oil as epitomizing the unthinking greed of modern economic growth and its blatant disregard for the natural environment.8 The Exxon Valdez disaster proved that their worst fears could come true.

For all the debates and recriminations caused by the 1989 oil spill in Prince William Sound, a case could be made that the most important legacy of the disaster occurred not in the Arctic but rather on the opposite side of the world, in Antarctica. Although regulations for transporting crude oil were tightened in the aftermath of the event, oil continued to flow through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and onward across the ocean. In Antarctica, in contrast, the Exxon Valdez disaster made a significant contribution to agreement on a long-lasting prohibition of mineral exploitation of any sort. Members of the Antarctic Treaty System had spent most of the 1980s negotiating a minerals regime for Antarctica that sought to facilitate and regulate extractive activities along the lines of those taking place at Prudhoe Bay.9 The environmental disaster that occurred in Prince William Sound contributed to the decisions made by the delegations of several countries to rethink this position. Instead of ratifying the Convention for the Regulation of Antarctic Minerals Activities (CRAMRA), members of the Antarctic Treaty instead signed the 1991 Madrid Environmental Protocol, which prohibited any form of economic mineral extraction throughout Antarctica for a period of at least fifty years. As a result of this agreement, the entire southern continent became, by many measures, one of the most protected environments anywhere on the planet.

It is impossible to say whether the Madrid Protocol would have been signed if crude oil had not spilled from the hull of the Exxon Valdez into Prince William Sound. Antarctic politics during the 1980s were fraught and unpredictable. Inside the Antarctic Treaty System, the seven states that claimed sovereignty over parts of the southern continent clashed repeatedly with other member states that refused to recognize these claims; at the same time, Britain, Argentina, and Chile continued to dispute the ownership of the Antarctic Peninsula region. Outside the Treaty System, an alliance of nonaligned countries led by Malaysia derided member states as an “imperial club” and called for Antarctica to be handed over to the United Nations.10 Their argument was based on the “common heritage of mankind” principle, in which every country had a stake in the world’s shared natural resources. Environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC) were campaigning vociferously against a minerals regime on the basis that Antarctica was the world’s last remaining wilderness and it should not be put at risk for short-term economic gain. It is perfectly possible to imagine a scenario whereby the member states of the Antarctic Treaty abandoned the minerals negotiations in favor of an environmental protocol simply to keep the peace and keep themselves in control. But the Exxon Valdez disaster certainly contributed to the decision to abandon the minerals negotiations and sign the Madrid Protocol, and the chronological coincidence is compelling. In giving his testimony to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing on legislation relating to the protection of the Antarctic environment in July 1990, Senator Al Gore directly referred to the events in Prince William Sound: “Last year, the Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound provided vivid, heartbreaking illustrations of the devastating consequences of an environmental disaster in a pristine wilderness.”11

Writing about the Exxon Valdez oil spill in in an essay titled “Landscapes of Abundance and Scarcity,” the environmental historian William Cronon notes:

Remote as it may have seemed from the day-to-day lives of most Americans, the wrecked Exxon supertanker could not have been more intimately entangled with [the] central questions of western environmental history…. Not even Alaska was safe, not even Alaska was far enough away to remain an unsullied landscape of frontier freedom and wilderness escape. Even there, abundance could give way to scarcity, forcing those who had counted on the promise of plenty to confront the consequences of its loss. It was not the first such failed promise in western history, and would surely not be the last.12

An examination of the history of Antarctica alongside the history of the Arctic offers a different perspective on the already contested legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. On the one hand, the freezers full of corpses serve as a reminder of the worst that humans can do to damage the world we live in. On the other hand, the connections between the oil spill at Prince William Sound and the Madrid Protocol in Antarctica suggests that some good can come out of even the worst environmental disaster. Whether this connection can be the cause for hope very much depends on individual perspective, but it certainly complicates a one-directional declensionist narrative, in which the only story is environmental degradation.

The connections between the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the far north and the signature of the Madrid Environmental protocol in the far south exemplify the three central arguments that will be made by this book. First, it argues that the histories of the Arctic and Antarctica are deepened and enriched by studying them together. Despite being located at opposite ends of the planet and being significantly different in many ways, the environmental histories of the Polar Regions share much and have often been closely connected. Second, the environmental histories of the Arctic and Antarctica offer good opportunities for thinking about important environmental themes. In much the same way that the ugliness of the crude oil spilled from the Exxon Valdez was highlighted by the beauty of Prince William Sound, a study of the Polar Regions brings into stark relief themes such as resource exploitation, the militarization of nature, conservation, and anthropogenic climate change. This makes them good places for thinking about the theory and practice of environmental history. Third, a careful study of the environmental histories of the Polar Regions reveals these histories to be characterized by contrast and contradiction. These are not histories with a simple message of good and bad, but rather a messy enmeshing of geographies of hope and geographies of despair. As places of inherent contradiction, the Polar Regions have much to contribute to the way we think about the environment generally.

What Are the Polar Regions?

In many parts of the world the Polar Regions occupy a position at the periphery of popular imagination. The Arctic and Antarctica are places that epitomize the unknown and faraway. Many people might struggle to say which Polar Region is located to the north and which to the south; even more would probably have difficulty identifying the respective habitats of penguins and polar bears. Once in a while the Polar Regions may intrude into everyday life, as happened so dramatically with the Exxon Valdez disaster. More often, the Arctic and Antarctica exist in the background of popular culture. The success of the recent BBC documentary Frozen Planet suggests a popular interest in the natural history of the Polar Regions.13 Stories of polar exploration—now often blogged and tweeted in real time—retain much of their capacity to fascinate, however derivative they may have become.14 In recent years anthropogenic climate change and the consequent melting polar ice causing rising sea levels around the world has brought the Arctic and Antarctica a little closer to the center of popular consciousness. But for most people, most of the time, the Polar Regions remain places that they are unlikely to think much about and that they will almost certainly never visit.

For a much smaller number of people, the Polar Regions are an everyday reality. Over two million people live north of the Arctic Circle, and a total of over thirteen million live in a more broadly defined “Circumpolar North.”15 A substantial minority of these Arctic populations are indigenous peoples with their cultural roots and histories strongly connected to the northern landscape. For Inuit, Sami, Chukchi, and other ethnic groups of the far north, the Arctic is truly home, and elaborate knowledge systems have developed to make sense of the polar environment.16 In contrast, nobody lives permanently in Antarctica and there are no Antarctic citizens. Although there are multiple ways of knowing Antarctica’s environment, science is by far the dominant paradigm and there is no indigenous worldview. For a small handful of people—mostly scientists, logistics staff, members of the military, and tourism operators—the southern continent is an everyday reality. But sooner or later they all go home to somewhere else. In any given winter there are fewer than one thousand people living south of the Antarctic Circle, making its population less than one-twentieth of a percent of the Arctic.

For a third group of people, mostly living in a handful of countries fairly close to the Arctic or Antarctica, the Polar Regions are neither completely alien nor completely familiar. In Norway, for example (parts of which do lie north of the Arctic Circle), the Arctic and Antarctica occupy important places in conceptions of national identity, not least because the Norwegians Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen played such prominent roles in the history of polar exploration. In Chile and Argentina it is a legal requirement for all published maps to include inserts of their respective sovereignty claims to Antarctica, and in both countries the ownership of an overlapping pie piece of the southern continent is a recurring, if not unproblematic, cause of national pride.17 Canada has cultivated a northern identity, in part to differentiate itself from its southern neighbor.18 Over the course of the twentieth century Australians and New Zealanders have used Antarctica as a space to assert their increasing independence from Great Britain. The British themselves have a particular fascination with the Polar Regions, as demonstrated by Francis Spufford’s I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (1996).19 A similar cultural affinity for one or both Polar Regions—sometimes with unsavory racial connotations—might be found at different times in the histories of Russia, Germany, Japan, the United States, and South Africa.20 But even in the countries that have shown a special interest in the Polar Regions, the majority of people have little direct connection with either the Arctic or Antarctica.

This diversity of perspectives raises important questions about insider and outsider status in the research and writing of history. The contrast between the lived-in Arctic and the almost entirely uninhabited Antarctic presents this dichotomy in a particularly stark form. But within the Arctic itself (and to a much lesser extent Antarctica as well), there are important gradations. A number of excellent “insider” histories of the Arctic exist, and have been excellent resources.21 But this book is a history of the Polar Regions written from the outside looking in.

The fact that the Arctic and Antarctica mean such different things to different people also exacerbates the problem of definition: what exactly are the Polar Regions and where are they located? When most people do think about extreme northerly and southerly latitudes, it is likely that the first image that comes to mind is a vast expanse of ice and snow. For much of the Arctic and Antarctica, such an image is entirely appropriate. “To enter Greater Antarctica,” writes the environmental historian Stephen Pyne, “is to be drawn into a maelstrom of ice. Ice is the beginning of Antarctica and ice is its end.”22 Even in the Arctic, where there is a lot less continental ice, images of ice and snow work well as a definition for much of the year. The use of snow and ice to define the Polar Regions has even led some people to talk about the glaciated regions of the Himalayas as a “Third Pole.”23 Defining the Polar Regions as places with large quantities of frozen water, however, quickly breaks down. If the Himalayas can be referred to as a Third Pole, why not refer to every significant glaciated part of the world as polar? Within many parts of the Arctic, snow and ice cover are seasonal: areas that are covered in snow for most of the year can become flower-strewn meadows for a brief summer season, and many maritime regions of both the Arctic and Antarctica freeze in the winter and thaw in the summer. Some degree of stability is required for any definition of a place to have utility, and snow and ice are fundamentally—and increasingly—unstable.

Another way of defining the Arctic and Antarctica might take an ecosystems approach. As a result of the low angle of the sun, the terrestrial parts of the Polar Regions are generally low-energy ecosystems, characterized by relatively slow growth and low biomass. In the north, the tree line is often seen as the most useful definition of the Arctic: the cold, dry conditions north of this line do not support the growth of trees. The tree line works as a definition for Antarctica, but is a little absurd since there are no trees of any sort, and only two species of vascular plant exist anywhere on the continent. It might also extend Antarctica northwards into parts of Patagonia and various sub-Antarctic islands. In the Southern Ocean the Antarctic Convergence is used as a political boundary by the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).24 The convergence is the point in the ocean where the cold waters of the Southern Ocean meet the warmer waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. The Antarctic Convergence is marked by a dramatic shift in temperature of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius accompanied by a significant change in ecology, with the nutrient-rich waters of the Southern Ocean supporting abundant ecosystems of a quite different character than those found further north. The Arctic Ocean is similarly colder than the neighboring bodies of water, but the situation is complicated by it being a largely closed basin. While an ecosystem approach to defining the Polar Regions has some utility, it suffers from several of the same flaws as a climatic definition. Ecosystems are inherently unstable, and both the tree line and the Antarctic Convergence are fluctuating boundaries. “Polar” ecosystems may be found in other parts of the world, especially in high mountain regions. Most significant, the largely lifeless polar ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica differ as much from many parts of the seasonally abundant Arctic tundra as the Arctic tundra differs from a tropical forest. This diversity makes a mockery of a coherent definition of the Polar Regions as a whole based on a shared ecology.

A somewhat more satisfactory definition of the Polar Regions focuses on latitude. In both north and south, the Polar Regions are the places where the sun never rises for at least one day in winter and never sets for at least one day in summer. Maps locate these lines at approximately 66.33°N (the Arctic Circle) and 66.33°S (the Antarctic Circle).25 Although these lines have a somewhat imaginary quality, they do mark a physical reality. In this definition, the Polar Regions are characterized by extreme seasonality. In wintertime, the Arctic and Antarctica are dark, frozen, vitamin-deficient places and there is no escape from the unrelenting cold. In the summertime solar energy radiates through polar landscapes, bringing a semblance of warmth and life. A definition based on latitude explicitly excludes “The Third Pole” of the Himalayas and other glaciated regions of the world. It also has the advantage of being largely stable, changing only slightly over the course of geological time. This is important for historians, since it allows for significant changes to take place within the Polar Regions without the definition of the places themselves changing. A definition based on latitude also allows for a great deal of variation both within and between the Arctic and Antarctica, both in terms of the environment and the human history.

Even a definition based on latitude, however, is problematic. In Antarctica, a large part of the Peninsula region juts north of the Antarctic Circle toward South America; in the Arctic large parts of Greenland, including its capital city Nuuk, are located south of the Arctic Circle. While 66.33°N and 66.33°S form convenient lines for thinking about what comprises the Polar Regions, these boundaries are not absolute. Anywhere located in high northern or southern latitudes and consequently characterized by extreme seasonality might be considered “polar,” especially if that is how people think about it. This flexibility inevitably creates some fuzzy areas at the edges, as demonstrated by the concept of a “Circumpolar North.”26 Should Alaska’s Prince William Sound, for example, be considered part of the Arctic? What about northern Scotland? If the island of South Georgia is included in discussions of Antarctica, then why not Patagonia or Tierra del Fuego, parts of which are located at similar latitudes? Boundary issues such as these can be opportunities for exploring the interactions of culture and environment that come together to create place. The Arctic and Antarctica have never simply been points on a map, but rather cultural constructions that have changed and developed over time. Engaging with the historical complexity of the interactions between nature and culture is arguably the best approach to the problem of defining the Polar Regions.

Despite obvious differences between the histories of the Polar Regions, considering the Arctic and Antarctica together can be productive. While the early human histories of the regions are very different, both raise questions about the interaction between myth and history and the cultural construction of place. Histories of sealing and whaling in the Polar Regions cannot be fully understood without thinking about interconnections between the two regions in terms of shared markets, technology transfer, and the development of a global resource frontier. From the late eighteenth century explorers often traveled to both Polar Regions in pursuit of knowledge and the common goal of “conquering nature” in its most extreme form, and they took their experiences of one place with them into the other. From the late nineteenth century the Arctic and Antarctica became sites for economic development projects at various levels of viability and often with imperial connotations; once again experiences in the far north shaped activities in the far south and vice versa. The politics of the twentieth-century Cold War encompassed both ends of the planet, with two economic systems vying with each other to demonstrate a strategic and rhetorical mastery of polar nature. In the second half of the twentieth century—as demonstrated by the connections between the Exxon Valdez disaster and the signing of the Madrid Environmental Protocol—environmental organizations have often thought about the Polar Regions together, at the same time as oil and mining companies have looked toward both the Arctic and Antarctica as largely untapped resources. Most recently, the Polar Regions have become central to the science and politics of global climate change as research conducted in the Arctic and Antarctica has played an important role in identifying the reality of anthropogenic climate change. In turn, the Polar Regions have come to be seen as intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures, and melting polar ice could have dire consequences for the entire planet. These connections, and many others, make a combined approach a useful way to think about the history of the Polar Regions.

Pairing the histories of the Polar Regions is not unproblematic. Politically, it is important to acknowledge that an emphasis on “bipolarity” might privilege the countries with political and scientific interests in both Polar Regions (for example the United States, Russia, Norway, and Britain). Culturally, there has been a general tendency to privilege the north over the south, perhaps reflecting something of a broader Northern Hemisphere literary and artistic dominance.27 The nature writer Barry Lopez, who was captivated by the far north, for example, found himself “informed by indifference” by the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica.28 In conflating the Polar Regions, certain environmental characteristics are privileged above others. Shared images of snow, ice, and cold trump major differences in geography, such as the fact that the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by continents and Antarctica a continent surrounded by oceans. This raises interesting questions about why different people and cultures tend to focus on certain environmental characteristics over others, but also creates a problem: environmental similarity may be assumed where it does not exist.29

From a social perspective there are clearly major difficulties raised by comparing the populated Arctic with the unpopulated Antarctic. As in many other parts of the world, narratives of “empty lands” and “wilderness” have frequently been used in the north rhetorically to depopulate territories and claim them for imperial powers. Care needs to be taken that a connection with unpopulated Antarctica does not simply perpetuate these strategies.30 It is easy to label the aboriginal peoples of the Arctic as “traditional communities” or a “people without history.”31 This creates a static version of the Arctic past that a comparison with Antarctica may seem to support. In order to overcome these categories the Arctic scholars David Anderson and Mark Nuttell have suggested that the notion of “cultivated places” offers one of the best ways to think about the history of the far north.32 This idea creates an obvious contrast with Antarctica, parts of which have never been visited by people.

These problems of juxtaposition might usefully be seen as opportunities. By recognizing that there is little inherently “natural” about studying the Polar Regions together, a comparative approach encourages connections to be made between the Arctic and Antarctica and other parts of the world. The history of indigenous peoples in the Arctic North has much in common with the history of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, and their experiences of colonialism can usefully be thought about within the framework of settler colonial studies.33 It is interesting, for example, to think of the Polar Regions in relation to other “frontier spaces” such as the U.S. West, Patagonia, the Russian steppe, or the Australian outback.34 The history of science in the Polar Regions can be studied alongside the history of science in other extreme environments such as deserts, oceans, and outer space. In many cases, connections with other parts of the world make more sense than direct connections between the Arctic and Antarctica. But without starting with some form of comparative perspective, these global connections may also get overlooked.

Places for Environmental History

In the introduction to Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments (2013) Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin write: “In the circumpolar north, environmental history has co-evolved with economic, diplomatic, and geo-political history to an extent that is true of few other regions in the world.”35 While the explicit exceptionalism of this argument can be challenged, Jørgensen and Sörlin make a good point that these connections are more obvious in the history of the Arctic than in many other locations. Both the Arctic and Antarctica are excellent places for “doing environmental history” for three connected reasons.36 First, the strangeness of the Polar Regions offers new perspectives from which to view familiar subjects. Second, the role of the environment in the human history of the Arctic and Antarctica cannot be ignored. Third, as a consequence of the obvious role of the environment, the Polar Regions offer useful places for expanding our understanding of the field of environmental history beyond subjects traditionally considered “environmental.” It is not only economic history, diplomatic history, or geopolitics that have “co-evolved” with environmental history, but also social history, the history of exploration, the history of science, and arguably every other historical subfield. While these connections are often difficult to notice in places where the environment is taken for granted, in the Arctic and Antarctica the polar environment intrudes quite obviously on almost every facet of human behavior. An environmental history of the Arctic and Antarctica thus has much to contribute to the theory and practice of the field more broadly.

In a classic essay on literary history, the philosopher Carlo Ginzburg discusses the intellectual strategy of “making things strange.”37 The Polar Regions offer the estrangement that Ginzburg describes. For example, while the morality of imperial claims to sovereignty over productive territory in the tropics or temperate regions is often challenged, the economic motivations for claiming land that could be used for sugar plantations or sheep stations can seem so obvious that they might be taken for granted. A similar claim to an apparently worthless swathe of territory in the Polar Regions, however, immediately raises fundamental questions about the nature of imperialism: why bother with making sovereignty claims to an unproductive expanse of ice? Similarly, the idea of “wilderness” has been extensively challenged by environmental historians in recent years, in part for its rhetorical depopulating of inhabited regions. But the fact that Antarctica and some parts of the Arctic have no permanent populations offers an opportunity to rethink some of these criticisms, and to ask whether there might be some parts of the world where genuine wilderness does in fact exist.38 On a superficial level, the act of making things strange may appear to reinforce the idea that the Arctic and Antarctica are “Poles apart” as historian Phillip Quigg termed Antarctica.39 But it is a strategy that relies for its utility on connections and similarities with the rest of the world, thereby undermining any notion of exceptionalism.

The Polar Regions make evident that the role of the environment in human history cannot be ignored. Writing about Antarctica, the Australian environmental historian Tom Griffiths notes: “This is a place where ‘the environment’ is so dominant and overwhelming that it can never be tamed or taken for granted.”40 The simple fact that people cannot survive unsupported for long in these places focuses attention on the environment. The intense seasonality of the Polar Regions imposes an obvious chronology onto the human history: in the darkness of winter, human activity has tended to be extremely limited, while summertime can bring short bursts of activity. The most interesting parts of many adventure narratives from the Arctic and Antarctica are often not the adrenaline-filled descriptions of falling into a crevasse or surviving a shipwreck, but the seemingly mundane accounts of everyday life. In these circumstances, the material environment is an ever-present reality, and the constant struggle to stay warm, get enough food, and perform basic tasks in environmental conditions that are extremely hostile to human survival provide the narrative. The material environment plays an important role in all human history, but in many places this role gets ignored and taken for granted.41 In contrast, it is difficult to find any book written about the history of the Arctic or Antarctica that does not put some emphasis on the extreme environment and the consequences of this hostility for the people living, working, and traveling in these places.

The Polar Regions have much to contribute to ongoing debates within environmental history about the scope and definition of the field. As a consequence of the fact that the environment cannot be ignored, environmental history in the Arctic and Antarctica goes far beyond subjects that have traditionally been considered “environmental,” and encompass almost every facet of human activity. For geographers and philosophers speculating about the existence of lands in the far north and the far south in a time before systematic exploration, the hostility of polar environments and their spatial locations functioned as a barrier to knowledge and allowed for an obvious blurring of myth and history. In the histories of sealing and whaling it is easy to focus attention on the environmental destruction wreaked by these often rapacious industries, but historical studies of the Arctic and Antarctica can also ask how and why environmental perceptions of the Polar Regions changed at particular points in time to help bring about the rise and fall of natural resource extraction activities. Histories of exploration are rarely presented as environmental histories, but the expeditions that traveled to the Arctic and Antarctica from the late eighteenth century provide excellent case studies of the interactions among human activity, human ideas, and the material environment, which are at the heart of the field of environmental history. Economic histories of the Polar Regions are often so obviously connected to the material environment that this fact often goes unstated: successful development projects almost always require the production of some sort of tradable commodity. The Arctic and Antarctica offer useful locations for thinking about an environmental history of the Cold War that goes beyond how conflict between communist and capitalist powers changed and damaged the environment to think about how a competition for control of the environment was at the very center of this ideological conflict.42 Disputes between developers and environmentalists are often the subjects of what might be defined as “traditional” environmental history, but a broader definition of the field encourages a political analysis that goes much further than who is for or against the protection of the environment.

A recurrent theme in an expanded definition of environmental history is how the material environment as well as environmental perceptions fit into contests for political power. The Polar Regions offer useful locations for thinking about this question, especially in their histories of imperialism and resistance to imperialism. Since at least the late eighteenth century, imperial powers have used the idea of “improvement” to legitimate policies of occupation and control in many parts of the world.43 The underlying assumption that the production of useful knowledge about the material environment can justify and facilitate political claims might be thought of as an assertion of “environmental authority.”44 In the Arctic, imperial powers have repeatedly sought to improve the lives of indigenous peoples through highly problematic policies of forced settlement, nontraditional education, and—at least sometimes—integration into a market economy. In Antarctica, assertions of environmental authority have focused on understanding and regulating the environment “for the good of humanity,” in forms such as attempts to control the whaling industry or the production of scientific knowledge about anthropogenic climate change. In the history of the Polar Regions, resistance to environmental authority has taken many forms. In the Arctic the championing of Indigenous culture or “Traditional Ecological Knowledge,” often has an explicitly antiimperial intent. In the history of Antarctica it is possible to identify an “environmental nationalism” that rejected the notion that the production of scientific knowledge can justify political claims, and instead made use of the environment in other ways to help legitimate their own assertions of sovereignty. However, in both Polar Regions science remains the dominant paradigm, and states continue to assert their environmental authority. Thinking about connections between the material environment, environmental perceptions, and political power not only expands a definition of the field of environmental history but also provides a powerful tool for understanding contemporary power dynamics, both in the Polar Regions and beyond.

Lands of Darkness and Light

The Arctic and Antarctica are places where myth and history merge, where environmental preservation and exploitation coexist, and where repeated attempts to conquer nature have resulted in an environment that remains largely unconquered. The Polar Regions offer extreme examples of human fallibility in the exploitation and abuse of nonhuman nature, but at the same time there are episodes in the histories of the Arctic and Antarctica that offer cause for environmental optimism and hope. High latitudes have generally been peripheral to global wars and conflicts, but both the Arctic and Antarctica played important roles in the Cold War, the most threatening conflict in global history. The Arctic and Antarctica are the coldest places in the world, but in recent years they have become strongly associated with global warming through images of melting icebergs, stranded polar bears, and overheating penguins. In these and many other ways, the human histories of both the Arctic and Antarctica can be thought of as exemplifying darkness and light; these histories have been as “polarized” as their physical environments.

Contrast and contradiction are magnified by studying the two Polar Regions together. In the case of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the environmental disaster in Prince William Sound led to relatively little change in the Arctic, but contributed to a radical shift in the politics and economics of the entire Antarctic continent. Similar contrasts can be identified in many other aspects of the environmental history of the Polar Regions. In the historiography of polar exploration, for example, heroic narratives from Antarctica often contradict starkly the more debased stories from the Arctic, where a lot more people died and where honesty often appeared in short supply. In the Arctic, a number of scientific research projects—especially those dealing with indigenous health—have left a deeply troubling legacy, while scientific research in Antarctica has generally been accepted as being conducted “for the good of mankind.” What has proved to be the case in the Arctic has not always been true in Antarctica.

Contrast and contradiction provide a frame for this environmental history of the Polar Regions. By setting up each chapter as a dichotomy of contradicting ideas, the inherent tensions within these histories can be explored. The first chapter, “Myth and History,” examines the environmental histories of the Arctic and Antarctica from prehistory roughly up to 1800. It thinks about how myths can become part of history, and how historical events and people can assume mythical status. Such blurring posits the importance of culture in the construction of place, as well as demonstrating how environmental perceptions can have powerful political significance. Chapter Two, “Scarcity and Abundance,” studies diverse histories of marine resource extraction in the Polar Regions from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century. Histories of marine resource extraction connect the Polar Regions to wider global markets, informing wider debates about resource frontiers and the tragedy of the commons.45 These histories of sealing and whaling and other kinds of harvest in the Arctic and Antarctica also highlight the important role played by the material environment in shaping the historical development of the two Polar Regions.

Chapter Three, “Nature Conquered, Nature Unconquered,” examines the history of the exploration of the Polar Regions from the mid-nineteenth century up to the early twentieth century. The history of polar exploration helps to interpret how exploration fits into the field of environmental history, by highlighting the interactions between the material environment, environmental perceptions and human activities. Constant themes in the history of exploration in both north and south during this period were nation-building and imperialism, through the idea of “conquering nature.” Very often, the same people and institutions were involved in the exploration of both the Arctic and Antarctica. The histories of economic development in the Arctic and Antarctica, which are examined in Chapter Four, “Dreams and Realities,” were often motivated by shared assumptions. In much the same way that histories of polar exploration were connected to the politics of imperialism, there were racialized and gendered dimensions to all of these schemes. The economic development of the Arctic and Antarctic history should be included more fully in environmental histories of imperialism.

From the mid 1940s into the 1990s, the Polar Regions played important roles in the Cold War. Chapter Five, “War and Peace,” holds that the Arctic and Antarctica are informative to thinking about an environmental history of this era. At both ends of the planet, communism competed with capitalism to demonstrate a superior ability to conquer nature and assert environmental authority, and this competition had both rhetorical and geopolitical dimensions. Despite these similarities, the Cold War histories of the two Polar Regions were in other ways very different. The Arctic was the front line in the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, and consequently became a highly militarized region with significant consequent environmental change. In Antarctica, in contrast, the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–58 helped lead to the signing of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which created a “continent dedicated to peace and science,” and which offers a rare example of Soviet-American détente. These differences serve to undermine any lingering sense of political or environmental determinism associated with the environmental history of the Cold War. Chapter Six, “Preservation and Exploitation,” lays out how the diplomatic and political histories of the Polar Regions have become increasingly entangled with explicitly environmental issues, taking up questions of preservation and exploitation. Resource extraction, environmentalism, climate change, and even tourism in the Polar Regions all have political implications that go beyond the question of whether you are for or against the preservation of the polar environment. Once again, the recent histories of the Arctic and Antarctica have often been quite different. But in both Polar Regions, studies of subjects that might be considered “traditional” environmental history rapidly led into other questions that reveal the expansive nature of the field and the futility of trying to put limits on what constitutes environmental history.

The conclusion, “Geographies of Despair and Hope,” emphasizes contrasts and contradictions to create a space for constructive discussion. The Arctic and Antarctica have always been dynamic rather than static places; their futures abound in possibilities. The field of environmental history is rightfully proud of its activist origins, even as it moves away from many of its more dogmatic tendencies.46 In the face of ongoing environmental crises, environmental historians continue to engage with the world and seek relevance in their work. Moving away from a good or bad approach to the history of the Polar Regions toward an approach that considers both the good and the bad together brings additional nuance and complexity to these histories. In its treatment of the Lands of Darkness and Light, this environmental history of the Polar Regions encourages a humble approach to an ongoing engagement with contemporary issues facing the Arctic and Antarctica.