Tracks across the Tundra: Making a Living from Nature in the Borderland of the Russian Northwest

Abstract

By drawing on our experiences from living in this part of the world and by comparing developments on each side of the Norwegian-Russian border, we apply a broad contextual and place-oriented approach to study this subarctic borderland. We ask what characterizes the differences found when comparing Soviet industrialization and contemporary developments to akin or related processes elsewhere in the world? Traveling slowly across the tundra makes seeing the tracks of different humans possible. Environmental traces of human activity viewed over longer periods of time mirror diverse worldviews, value systems, and economic goals. Scaling out in a geographical sense is necessary to explain the impact of geo-economic power vectors up north. Southern events can hamper vital cross-border trade at the local level, and sometimes they have brought war up north. Centralist policies have often spurred northern in-migration by creating favorable opportunities for new waves of settlers.