The Arctic: last frontier for energy and mineral exploitation?

Abstract

Historically, the Arctic has been imagined as the last frontier to conquer, tightly connected to ideas of manhood, adventure, and survival of the fittest. In the last decades, the Arctic has caught new interest as a resource frontier for tourism, trade, energy, and minerals. Climate change has both opened new waterways in the Arctic Ocean and altered living conditions drastically for Arctic communities. On the one hand the Arctic is a region undergoing rapid and dramatic changes and in need of climate adaptation strategies, on the other the Arctic thaw is seen as providing business opportunities for states and multinational companies alike. Imaginaries of undiscovered reserves of hydrocarbons, minerals to satisfy increased global demand and consumption of electronic gadgets and electric vehicles, and renewable or “green” energy such as wind and hydropower compete and simultaneously complement romantic notions of the Arctic as a place of untouched nature and vanishing yet still preserved traditional Indigenous lifestyles. Consequently, the Arctic is imagined as an unexplored, spacious, and undeveloped frontier. Multinational companies that come to explore for oil, gas, minerals, and wind power, tend to receive the blessing of the nation on which territory the resources are located. Indigenous peoples who have occupied these lands since before the existence of these nation-states are yet again exoticised, displaced, or see their land appropriated for industrial purposes. Infrastructure associated with “development” often displaces current land use that utilises the region’s resources in a non-invasive manner. Ideas of a “win–win” situation for development and the environment, then, are as contested today as in the aftermath of the Stockholm Conference in 1972. This chapter focuses on the impacts of such expansions and expropriations in one area of the Indigenous Arctic, in the Western part of Sápmi, and calls for attention both to what a sustainable land use in Arctic regions is, and who should set the terms of development decisions. In a region heavily marked by assimilation policies of Indigenous and ethnic minorities, such questions are both complex and important to discuss.