What questions still linger when mining turns silent? What persistent issues will remain in the wake of bulldozers, rock deposits, and obsolete construction roads leading nowhere?

I drive south across Varanger mountain plateau along the road that connects north-facing fishing harbors on the Barents Sea with the bridge across the river Deatnu (Deanušaldi), which is also a junction for traffic from the Finnish border to the south, the Russian border to the east, and larger towns, like Hammerfest, Alta, and Tromsø to the west. I leave behind a coastal Arctic farmstead turned into a second home, near the Syltefjord nature reserve, where the limits of a cultivated field are still visible as a straight line painted with autumn colors, inscriptions of a state-launched agricultural program bound to falter (see Lien, Reference Lien2020). I leave behind wind turbines towering on mountaintops, majestic monuments of a carbon neutral future, eating into reindeer pasture as giant scarecrows. I head toward yet another site where expansive mining operations scar an entire mountain and divide a local community, cutting friendship and kinship ties with surgical precision.

The steep and rocky mountain ridge ahead is greyish white, and rich in quartzite (Figure 12.1). It contains “proven resources for more than fifty years production” according to Elkem, operators of the quartzite mine since 1983 (Mining in the Nordics, 2021). It is one of the world’s largest quartzite operations but still not large enough for the company, which is now Chinese owned. The global demand for quartzite is insatiable, they say, as quartzite is necessary for the green shift to happen. Without a six-fold expansion the current quarry will run empty fairly soon, operations will no longer be profitable, and a handful of local people will lose their jobs. Such is the rhetoric of extractive expansion.

Figure 12.1 Varanger peninsula: Meahcci or ripe for quartzite extraction? Foreground: Sámi tent. Background: the scarred side of the mountain where company Elkem plans to extend quartzite mine.

Photo by Marianne E. Lien

The softer landscape behind me is rusty red and soft orange, and rich in nutrients. Reindeer, owned by the Rákkonjárga siida – the local reindeer herding community – pass through here twice on their annual migration from winter pastures inland to summer pastures on the coast. The landscapes contain nutrients to sustain such webs of life infinitely, animals and landscapes mutually sustaining each other through centuries. For an outsider, the landscape appears untouched, an obvious candidate for protection. But its siida leader is tired of being its warrior; tired of defending the age-old reindeer herding tradition left, right, and center, and tired of endless meetings with lawyers, local politicians, impact analysts, and Elkem representatives (Österlin & Raitio, Reference Österlin and Raitio2020).

Each mining operation has its due date. Resource extraction thus comes to an end again and again, leaving rubble and ruination behind. Monuments of short-lived prosperity and signs of environmental destruction mark landscapes long after machinery has turned quiet (Flyen et al., Reference Flyen, Avango, Fischer, Winqvist and Sörlin2023, see Chapter 9). Each new prospect of Arctic resource extraction marks the beginning of another turn of boom and bust. Profound local transformations blend into a repetitive pattern, in which hope and hype are short-lived assets. While each single instance presents itself as unique, the necessary sacrifice that must be made for something else to improve, we see a recurrent pattern that leaves the impression that in spite of claims to novelty it’s all the same; plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.¹

This chapter draws the attention to consistent tensions of extractivism. As several previous chapters show, the massive transformations of sheer landmass that mineral extraction entails are deeply implicated in the planetary era now referred to as the Anthropocene. Resource extraction is, however, not only a driving force in the Anthropocene; it is also promoted as one of the solutions to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is urgently needed as the global demand for energy shows no signs of decline. Current mining operations in the Arctic and elsewhere are part of the global competition for rare minerals for battery components needed for energy storage in a post-carbon future. Arctic landscapes are scarred by wind-turbines too, their noise disturbing reindeer, thus causing a much larger zone of pasture dispossession than the space they physically occupy. Hence, the ongoing and necessary shift away from fossil fuels and carbon dependency continues to intrude on those who dwell in the Arctic, humans and non-humans. Below the ocean surface, industrial trawlers continue to scrape the seafloor, affecting the density and diversity of deep-sea megafauna in ways that are likely to have negative feedback effects on fish populations (Buhl-Mortensen et al., Reference Buhl-Mortensen, Ellingsen, Buhl-Mortensen, Skaar and Gonzalez-Mirelis2015), thereby also posing a threat to marine food chains that have defined lifeways in the Arctic.

Adaptations to a carbon-free future may therefore cause dispossessions and disruptions that are just as detrimental to local livelihoods as the rampant destruction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ colonial endeavors. How then, can we avoid colonial forms of dispossessions to repeat themselves? What can be learned from the resource extractivism associated with mining in the Arctic? Which tensions remain? To ask such questions is to pay attention to colonial asymmetries, and to ask about different modes of knowing, and different modes of caring for land. This implies that we also need to challenge extractivism as a hegemonic paradigm. What does it take to recognize that rather than being predetermined along a set trajectory of development from afar, Arctic futures are indeed multiple and open-ended (Wormbs, Reference Wormbs2018)? How might we contribute to decolonization in a region where scars run much more deeply than those immediately visible on the surface of fragile landscape formations.

This chapter suggests some persistent patterns and tensions that have enabled resource extraction in the Arctic. It draws the attention to patterns that continue to haunt and are unlikely to disappear just because another mine turns quiet. Acknowledging these is necessary for repair and reconciliation to happen. The final part of the chapter proposes some steps toward what we might think of as a post-extractive, post-colonial Arctic.

The Paradox of Distance

If you happened to set foot in a fishing village on the Norwegian Barents coast around the turn of the nineteenth century, you might find yourself at a hotspot of commercial and cultural exchange, also known as the Pomor trade. Russian vessels from Arkhangelsk would offer grain and wood in exchange for fish from Norwegian-speaking fishermen, giving rise to a now extinct pidgin language called “russenorsk,” Russian-Norwegian (Minaeva & Karlin, Reference Minaeva and Karelin2020). Danish-speaking state servants would ensure some sort of colonial law and order as well as taxation. Sámi speaking siida groups would arrive with reindeer for summer pasture and might use the opportunity to trade in fur to acquire capital for taxes, while Finnish or Qvæn-speaking immigrants might have settled permanently to cultivate the land. Most people would be likely to take part in conversation in a language other than their mother tongue, and some would speak several languages. Each group would engage with landscapes and seascapes far beyond the village itself, reliant on sparsely populated hinterlands, and far-reaching trade networks. Comparing this village with a rural settlement further south, you might be struck by what would seem like a vibrant and dynamic microcosm, or a “melting-pot,” far from the image of distant remoteness that is so often associated with the Arctic today.

Many have suggested that distance and low population density have enabled a particularly irresponsible kind of Arctic extractivism (Sörlin et al., Reference Sörlin and Sörlin2023; see Chapter 2), and this is also one of the conclusions of this volume. If we suggest that rampant Arctic extractivism is made possible by distance, then we must also ask how and when such perceived distance became a defining feature of the Arctic, and for whom?

Distance is a relational term. It is defined through the framework of an often unspecified location elsewhere, usually in relation to somewhere else that is implicitly seen as a center. Today, distance is a ubiquitous characteristic attributed to practically all Arctic settlements that are part of nation states with territories beyond the Arctic Circle. Defined in relation to territorial and state borders, and state capitals and urban centers invariably located in the south, Arctic regions become “distant by default.” This is the case for all Scandinavian nation states, Russia, Canada, and Alaska, where most of the nations’ territories are situated north of the capital cities (which are far south of the Arctic circle). Whether these Arctic territories were included, occupied, colonized, annexed, or stolen matters less; they all came to share the feature of remoteness in relation to their respective nation states. Remoteness, or being perceived as distant, is thus a geopolitical effect of inclusion or annexation rather than a feature of the place as such.

One may argue that when state borders were drawn between Finland, Russia, Sweden, and Norway in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, borders that cut across Sápmi in ways that were detrimental to mobile Indigenous livelihoods, they effectively also enacted these Arctic regions as “peripheral.” Once the center of its own world, Sápmi became fragmented, subject to distant, contradictory, and overlapping policies of distant geopolitical entities that are now recognized as separate and legitimate nation states.² In this perspective, distance becomes a colonizing effect, solidified in various practices of appropriation that together effectively orchestrate distance as a feature of the Arctic.³ For Polar explorers, Arctic remoteness is a logistical challenge and an obstacle to conquer; for artists and naturalists, it is a romantic feature of its attraction (Ween, Reference Ween2020). But the consistent pattern of remoteness as a geopolitical effect teaches us that distance is part of a broader re-contextualization of a place, through which the power of definition is shifted from the insider’s perspective to the outsider’s gaze (Lien, Reference Lien and Eriksen2003).

The asymmetry of distance continues to haunt, even when landscapes are legally protected. When the Varanger peninsula national park (NP) (Figure 12.2) was established in 2006, local inhabitants received a brochure in their mailbox, from Norwegian national authorities, presenting these “Arctic and ancient landscapes.” Accompanied by stunning photos of landscape formations, their own immediate surroundings were introduced with a vignette, citing a geologist’s travelogue from 1831:

Rendering Varanger as “melancholic,” “ancient,” “Arctic,” and “lonely,” people in Varanger were presented with the Norwegian authorities’ rather peculiar perspective of their homeland, disconnected from their own intimate knowledge and landscape practices. The peninsula is far from untouched; it has been a site of food procurement for infinite generations, and it still is (Lien, Reference Lien2020). Silencing local practices (or rendering them irrelevant in the presentation of the national park), the Directorate of Environment indirectly paved the way for further dispossession of local livelihoods in the name of nature conservation, protection, and increased wildlife tourism in allegedly “untouched nature.” Even without extractive mining, a pattern of distancing persists, enabling and justifying local Arctic people as inconvenient occupants of landscapes that have been repurposed in the name of nature conservation.

Figure 12.2 Location map of Northern Norway.

Drawn by Christian Fohringer

The attribution of distance (or remoteness) to sparsely populated territories within contemporary nation states seems, then, to place them at risk of becoming rampant zones of extractivism, out of sight for the majority of the state population and electorate. Locals who have carved out a living in these territories, practicing livelihoods that predate the nation-state, risk being sacrificed as well, removed or dispossessed from their subsistence livelihoods, or forced to remake themselves into persons compatible with the ambitions of progressive nation states. Being (re-)defined as remote within a modern nation state, as Arctic communities invariably are, means being locked into an asymmetrical relation in which your homeland is quite likely to become a future sacrifice zone (Reinert, Reference Reinert2018).

Shifting Scales and Future Commons

Most of the Varanger territory was never privately owned. Property relations in East Finnmark were not legally formalized⁵ by the state until 1775, and even then, only a fraction of the territory was titled as property, partly because public servants were only sporadically present (Ravna, Reference Ravna2020). This lack of formally legalized ownership is the most important reason why Finnmark, like many other Arctic territories, became by default property of the Danish-Norwegian nation state, and later of independent Norway.⁶ But the fact that property relations were not legally recognized by the state does not mean that the territory was not subject to ownership. Arctic ownership takes many forms but is often fluid, shifting with seasons, relational, shared, and subtle (e.g., Kramvig, Guttorm, & Kantonen, Reference Kramvig, Guttorm and Kantonen2019; Ravna, Reference Ravna2020). Hence, ownership in the Arctic is not immediately legible to the apparatus of state governance. As a result, such relations of ownership are also often ignored, or perhaps it leaves local claims conveniently “out of sight” for central authorities, facilitating continued dispossession through soft colonial power. In any case, this makes Arctic (and Antarctic) territories particularly vulnerable to extractivist projects, and easily appropriated by “the logic of frontier world making” (Ogden, Reference Ogden2018: 68). Most importantly, fluid practices of ownership tend to leave Arctic peoples’ out of the equation when revenue is distributed and decisions are being made. To the extent they are represented, their position is as “stakeholders” rather than as legal owners.⁷

To exemplify how Arctic ownership differs from private property, considering the Sámi term meahcci is instructive. Often mistranslated to the Norwegian term for outfields (utmark) which derives its meaning through a contrast to cultivated agricultural “infields”, meahcci denotes an area of multiple affordances. It is a place where things get done and could be referred to as a “taskscape” (Ingold, Reference Ingold1993), but it is also more than that. As Joks, Østmo, and Law (Reference Joks, Østmo and Law2020) note, meahcci is multiple, shifting with seasons and used for different purposes. Hence, “muorrameahcci is where you collect firewood, luomemeahcci is where you go cloudberry picking” (Joks et al., Reference Joks, Østmo and Law2020: 309). While meahcci is crucial for survival, it is rarely subject to individual control. Rather, it is shared in a way that is partly captured by the English term “commons.” But meahcci is also about unpredictable encounters with lively and powerful beings (Joks et al., Reference Joks, Østmo and Law2020). In this way, meahcci is more than a unit of shared governance that centers humans as the subject owners (Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1990); rather, it refuses a sharp a-priori distinction between human and non-humans, or nature and culture. Finally, while meahcci can sometimes involve exclusivity based on internal distribution of rights, such rights are rarely absolute, and they are associated with seasonal resources rather than the territorial land as such.

Consequently, when the siida unit on the Varanger peninsula is pushed to recede land to wind turbines or mining operations, they cannot claim that the land “belongs” exclusively to them. It never did. All they can do is to argue that their reindeer needs the pasture at specific times of the year, and all they can hope for, if the traditional ways of using the land are sacrificed by governing authorities and the project is realized, is some form of monetary compensation for the loss of future income.

This makes meahcci, or the “commons-like” land Arctic inhabitants rely on not only up for grabs, a kind of “terra-nullius” that is underexploited according to the state. It also rhetorically replaces local notions of sharing in meahcci by notions of commons that derive their meaning from a national or planetary scale. The siida unit’s reluctance to give up pasture may, for example, be countered by a moral imperative that Sámi too should take responsibility for the planetary “common good,” such as mitigating climate change through renewable energy. Thus, the inherent reciprocity and long-term commitment between Arctic people and their specific landscapes is replaced by a different kind of reciprocal commitment, at a different scale. While sacrifices implied in twentieth-century mining projects were rhetorically justified in relation to the welfare state in the name of economic progress (Hastrup & Lien, Reference Hastrup and Lien2020),⁸ the sacrifices of the twenty-first century are legitimized at a global or planetary scale. Mineral extraction is now justified by future demand for minerals for battery components, while wind-turbines are replacing fossil fuels and mitigating climate change. In this way, meahcci is a sacrifice that Arctic peoples are expected to make to secure our “future commons” or the shared resources that societies require to sustain human life on earth.

Colonial Dispossession

When the Norwegian parliament agreed on initiating and supporting inner colonization (indre kolonisasjon) in the early 1900s, they were not thinking of overseas migration. On the contrary, in an effort to curb the wave of Norwegian citizens seeking a future in the United States, the term “inner colonization” alluded to places like Finnmark, that is, remote and northern regions of the country. These were regions where national borders with neighboring Russia and Finland had only recently been established, multiethnic regions where people were as likely to speak Finnish and Sámi (Lappish) as they were to speak Norwegian. These were “distant” places inhabited by folks who were increasingly identified as belonging to an inferior “race” (Kyllingstad, Reference Kyllingstad2012). Lapps were seen as less developed in relation to human evolution, and many assumed they would naturally be overtaken by the allegedly more advanced Norwegian “race.” The term “inner colonization” was soon replaced by bureising,⁹ which denotes the establishment of a farm (farmland) where there was none before. State support for bureising was granted through agricultural societies to cultivate both soil and marshes, especially in the north. Hence, Norwegian speaking farmers who intended to relocate and settle in the north could apply for a loan with favorable conditions, and state subsidies for bureising continued several decades after the Second World War.

Colonial dispossession across the Arctic goes far beyond the realm of industrial mining. “Inner colonization” is not just an archaic term discussed in the Norwegian parliament more than a hundred years ago. As pointed out in various ways across the present volume, it is a specific frame of mind, preceding the extractivist paradigm (Sörlin, Reference Sörlin and Sörlin2023, see Chapter 1) but still visible today (Lien, Reference Lien2021). It is a premise for policies that continuously seek “development” of a region seen as “lacking,” and crucial in the making of Arctic minerals as resources ripe for extraction. The option of not fully considering the sacrifices entailed in resource extractivism rests, I suggest, on this colonial disposition, which, in turn, facilitates further dispossession (Sörlin et al., Reference Sörlin and Sörlin2023, see Chapter 2).

The discovery in 2021 of unmarked graves from Canadian boarding schools is a particularly stark example of the shattering atrocities bestowed on Indigenous peoples whose suffering persists (e.g., Simpson, Reference Simpson2014; Stevenson, Reference Stevenson2014). In Scandinavian Sápmi, the aftermath of national borders led to forced migration and broken kinship ties that still haunt (e.g., Labba, Reference Labba2021). Dispossession concerns not only land as such, or the specific area that the mining operation claims for extraction. Modes of knowing, of language, and of identity have been undermined simultaneously, often justified by racial paradigms.

Such paradigms informed not only early twentieth century parliamentary debates in Arctic nation states (as exemplified above) but also national policies concerning schooling, health (Stevenson, Reference Stevenson2014), language policy, hunting regulations (Blaser, Reference Blaser2009), property regulations (Helander, Reference Helander2004), and museums and cultural heritage (Finbog, Reference Finbog2021) to mention but a few areas of colonial dispossession. Caring for worlds beyond the human cannot be disentangled from the words in which such worlds are spoken. To dwell in the Arctic is to engage what Mikkel Nils Sara (Reference Sara2009) calls the co-existence of predictability and unpredictability, often overlooked in nature management policy, which is nearly always framed in the hegemonic language of the nation state.

What is the basis for social and environmental justice in the aftermath of these circumstances? If the Arctic is deeply transformed by colonial dispossession, scarred by loss at multiple levels, how then can it become a sovereign region? A common political response is to hand over responsibilities for difficult decisions to local governments, at the municipal or county level. This is the situation in current controversies over mining in Finnmark. A major factor in reopening a contested coppermine in Repparfjord, for example, was a decision in favor by a narrow majority in the municipal council. In Varanger, the planned expansion of the Elkem quartzite mine has divided the small village of Austertana, pitting kin and neighbors against one another, just as it divided the council of the “Finnmark Property,” which opposed the plan by the double vote of its chairman.

While the expansion remains unsettled, local divisions grow deeper. In this way, current modes of “post-colonial” governance that seek to hand over jurisdiction to the local level may inadvertently result in a “divide and rule” situation, with conflicts nearly as destructive for local livelihoods as the mining project itself. The problem is one of scale but also concerns modes of knowing. For the siida leaders negotiating with a Chinese-owned company and their professional consultants and impact analyses is nearly an impossible task. Representing only their own siida unit, and with practically no support from any institutional level other than their own lawyers, the unfolding battle echoes the story of David against Goliath.

Österlin and Raitio (Reference Österlin and Raitio2020) have proposed the term “double pressure” to capture such inter-related processes of fragmented landscapes and what they call fragmented “planscapes,” and the pressures that these multiple battles represent for affected communities of reindeer owners. Several chapters in this volume (e.g., Österlin et al., Reference Österlin, Heikkinen, Fohringer, Lépy, Rosqvist and Sörlin2023, see Chapter 5; Rosqvist et al., Reference Rosqvist, Heikkinen, Suopajärvi, Österlin and Sörlin2023, see Chapter 6) suggest that reindeer owners are not the only ones affected by extractive operations, hence the term double or multiple pressures has a broader application. The stark discrepancies of sheer power and scale between multinational extractive industries on the one hand and local Arctic communities on the other exacerbates the situation even more. How then, can local communities and Indigenous peoples attain the empowerment needed to withstand the overwhelming strength of multinational mining companies? Wounded by a policy pattern of “divide and rule,” what sort of hope exists for what we might tentatively think of as a post-colonial Arctic?

To ask such questions is to move beyond mining, and slightly beyond the scope of the present volume. Much work is already done, and especially by Indigenous scholars (Sara, Reference Sara2009; Simpson, Reference Simpson2014; Joks et al., Reference Joks, Østmo and Law2020; Finbog, Reference Finbog2021) to define a post-colonial future in the Arctic.

Evidentiary Practices in the Face of Loss and Disruption

Struggling to capture the continuities of successive epidemics among Canadian Inuits (tuberculosis in the 1940s, suicide since the 1980s), Lisa Stevenson embraces uncertainty as the only way of paying attention to the “moments when the facts falter” (Stevenson, Reference Stevenson2014: 2). The suffering and loss, which is still unfolding, calls for an epistemological approach that transcends the evidentiary practices of conventional science. Stevenson (Reference Stevenson2014: 2) proposes:

Searching for a way to talk about life that is, as she phrases it “constitutively beside itself,” Stevenson’s intervention has relevance beyond the atrocities of Inuit epidemics. Loss is inevitable in colonial encounters, and some forms of loss can hardly be articulated. How can we even begin to address the loss of the ability to speak the language that was denied to you by your parents, in their well-meaning attempt to protect their child from the destined discrimination bestowed on speakers of an Indigenous language. Such is the loss of those who grew up in post-war Finnmark, for example (Lien, Reference Lien2020). How can we address the loss of land, of meahcci among people of the siida that happened to cross the Norwegian-Swedish border on their way to summer pastures, when their access to the coast was denied by the state? Such is the loss of Sámi of Swedish citizenship during the decades that followed Norway’s independence from Sweden in 1905, as the members of the now fragmented siida group were forcibly relocated to unfamiliar terrains much further South (Labba, Reference Labba2021). And how can we address the loss of an entire siida group of East Sámi (also known as Skolt Sámi), who in the aftermath of the establishment of the border with Russia in 1826 chose to be Russian citizens and were forced to regroup on the Eastern side of the Pasvik river (Andersen, Reference Andersen1989)? Their subsequent loss as “collateral damage” in several wars and political upheavals is beyond the scope of this chapter, but serves here as a reminder of what colonial relocation and loss may entail.

Similar reflections are articulated by anthropologist Yael Navaro’s more recent article (2020) proposing what she calls “a negative methodology” as an epistemological approach in the aftermath of mass violence. Navaro is concerned with conditions of possibility for anthropological and historical work in relation to prolonged mass violence, and is critical of conventional anthropology’s “positive outlook for evidentiary practices in the field” (Navaro, Reference Navaro2020: 161). More precisely, she draws on how the scholars working in the aftermath of mass atrocity have developed ethnographic methods that seek to address the gaps and hollows in such sites, summarized by what she calls “a negative methodology.” This approach may be appropriate when the accessibility of evidence cannot be assumed, when no archive is available, witnesses are missing, or forcibly relocated, or perhaps “refashioned” into another way of inhabiting the world. Navaro has mass violence in mind and focuses on people. In relation to extractivism in the Arctic, we may also ask what a negative epistemology might look like in the aftermath of rampant landscape transformation. How can we grasp the triple undoing of peoples or livelihoods and of landscapes that is a feature of ruination in the North?

One way to approach this is to be attentive to subtle materials, traces in the landscape, and in the people who remain, which might inadvertently open up spaces for posing questions differently. What stories linger between the lines, and what remains unspoken? What sort of absences are produced in the assembling of archival material? And what might a rust-covered plough tell us about projects that failed? Such questions may stitch together fragments of lives that may contribute to an acknowledgment of loss, intervening into persistent patterns, and possibly also be helpful as a first step toward reconciliation.

There is nowadays no shortage of books on the Arctic – and this is the last chapter of yet another one. What is different at the end of the read? To answer that question, let me start with a reflection on the understanding we had when we embarked upon writing this book. Despite the rich diversity of publications on the topic, it is possible to discern a few major lines of analysis in the growing body of literature on contemporary Arctic change. One such approach consists of attempts to map and take stock of state-of-the-art knowledge on multiple dimensions of environment, climate, and social conditions in the region. In this category we find the rising genre of “assessments,” many issued by the Arctic Council, of for example: biodiversity, pollution, human health, snow and ice, climate adaptation, impacts of climate change, and a range of other topics. The Arctic Human Development Reports (Einarsson et al., Reference Einarsson, Larsen, Nilsson and Young2004; Fondahl & Larsen, Reference Fondahl and Larsen2014) also belong here, typically broad, multi-authored, anchored in new research, and accessible for wider policy and professional audiences. An attempt to synthesize this broad strand of knowledge was the Arctic Resilience Report (Carson & Peterson, Reference Carson and Peterson2016). It compiled an impressive amount of data from many knowledge areas and established better understanding of complex relationships but had less to say about how to interpret this new knowledge and how to use it to address the challenges.

Another line of research in the last two decades has been on the “new Arctic” in the post-Cold War era. It is represented by several books and reports on the melting of sea ice, opening of sea routes, globalizing tourism, and more generally a release of economic opportunities, including a boom in mineral and energy resources. This literature – itself an old tradition of resource myth and lore in Arctic affairs – saw a peak in the early 2010s with titles such as Charles Emmerson’s, The Future History of the Arctic (2010) and Lawrence C. Smith’s, The New North: Our World in 2050 (2011). For a period, this perspective of a Glasnost plus end of Cold War 1989 “rupture” was predominant, and the “new” kept creeping into the very language of Arctic reporting, conferencing, and books, such as The New Arctic (Evengård, Larsen, & Paasche, Reference Evengård, Larsen and Paasche2015), or Brave New Arctic (Serreze, Reference Serreze2018). The titles themselves could be quite different, and not all books shared in the hype. The language and the framings were often common, however, and the political significance of this, for some time almost paradigmatic, understanding of the Arctic future cannot be overestimated.

Well into the Agenda 2030 decade, and after dramatic swings of both mineral and oil and gas markets, this already seems a long time ago. Much of what the speculations were based on, such as massive extraction of fossil fuel resources, is now surrounded by deep uncertainty related to the decarbonizing agenda that followed the 2015 Paris agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the same year, the former reinforced by the Glasgow COP meeting in 2021. Nor do the previous chapters of this book really offer much cause to support the rosier futures that were in circulation. It seems that the expansionist, resource hype version of the twenty-first century Arctic is losing some of its relevance as world and regional developments have taken new turns.

Path Dependency: The Extractivist Curse?

What has come instead? It is hard to say. Plans to continue and grow resource extraction remain for sure, but the hype is no longer there. The Arctic is certainly heating, but it is no longer as “hot.” The scholarly and policy-related literature in recent years reflects a mood of concern and critical reflection. We could go back to Oran Young’s foundational book on Arctic Politics (1992). He predicted, as it turned out quite correctly, that the Arctic after the Cold War would gravitate into a more significant role in world affairs and occupy a position as a region with its own brand and agenda. The reasons he gave were several, including interesting experimentation in multi-level governance and the testing of international cooperation regimes. Another important reason was the extraction of natural resources:

While innovative, this way of looking at the region had an in-built ambivalence. The Arctic was an emerging policy subject, thawing out after the long Cold War freeze, with a voice of its own and seeking new ways forward. At the same time, it remained an object of security and resource politics from southern states, for which an endogenous development of the Far North was, literally, a peripheral issue, especially for the emerging Arctic wannabes, such as India, China, South Korea, and Japan. As an effect of this dual outlook, the energy and vibrancy in the Arctic literature was directed both on the commercial growth of resource extraction and on policy innovation in international relations, markedly the Arctic Council, which started in 1996 as a genuinely new post-Cold War institution for governance in the north (Burke, Reference Burke2020).

At first, this growing literature endorsed the post-1989 development, but with time, it also marked the shifting conjunctures for the Arctic in the international arena. Carina Keskitalo’s analysis of the post-Cold War regionalization, Negotiating the Arctic: The Construction of an International Region (2004) is a case in point, and can be juxtaposed with her own edited collection, The Politics of Arctic Resources (2019) less than two decades later. While the first presented the birth of a modern transnational Arctic as subject, the latter volume took a distinctly different view, looking at continuities and patterns over the long term and articulating a more complex, diverse, and ambiguous set of Arctic relations.

Other synthetic approaches in recent years have presented similar perceptions of an Arctic region where less has changed than anticipated, either in the real-life conditions of communities or in the stature of the Arctic in the wider scheme of world affairs. On most public health, educational, and other social and welfare indicators, the Arctic region lags behind compared to the southern parts of Arctic states. To this pattern, the Nordic countries are an exception, linked to the integrative policies of these countries going all the way back to Christian mission and national policies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on the principle of equality within the national territory (Sörlin, Reference Sörlin and Keskitalo2019).

Entering the Agenda 2030 decade, the deep Cold War past still casts long shadows on the Arctic (Bocking & Heidt, Reference Bocking and Heidt2019). Whatever innovative policy solutions may come up, the Arctic seems set on a resource-oriented path dependency where “history matters” (Tilly, Reference Tilly1988). The Eurasian Arctic remains closely tied to Russian security and economic interests (Josephson, Reference Josephson2014). In Sweden, the far north is embarking on a massive “new industrialization,” taking a “lead position in the new industrial revolution, shifting to technologies aimed to slow climate change” (Nilsen, Reference Nilsen2021). The shift is propelled by the availability in the region of many forms of minerals, “green” electric energy, and the potential to produce fossil-free steel in just a few years, repeating the natural resource hype of ca. 1900, when the north was the “Land of the Future” (Sörlin, Reference Sörlin1989). Norway has abandoned coal in Svalbard, but on the other hand moves prospecting for oil and gas further north into the Barents Sea, actually not far from the Svalbard coast. It also takes a forward-leaning position in the UNCLOS process, arguing that all islands in the Svalbard archipelago be surrounded by the 200 nautical mile boundary, wanting to secure vast areas of the Arctic Ocean for domestic offshore extraction.

Sustainabilities: A Plural?

The much-desired state of sustainability has also been the topic of lively discussions, which does not seem to diminish its phantom-like characteristic, hard to grasp and even harder to realize (Fondahl & Wilson, Reference Fondahl and Wilson2017). Nor do the geopolitical framings of the Arctic seem to establish any convergence, and the Arctic Council, however innovative and functional, remains an exclusive club-like vessel for a rather limited set of issues (Dodds & Powell, Reference Dodds and Powell2014; Burke, Reference Burke2020). The fate of individual communities is unpredictable and diverse, as many of the cases in this volume suggest. Forced migrations are sadly a common phenomenon around the circumpolar Arctic (Bronen, Reference Bronen2014; Labba, Reference Labba2020). Qaanaaq in North Western Greenland is one example. Its 650 inhabitants are the descendants of villagers who were moved a hundred kilometers north in the 1950s to enable the expansion of the United States Thule Air Base. Today they adapt as best they can to disintegrating ice and shorter hunting seasons due to climate change, demonstrating resilience and a capacity for survival but not necessarily enjoying a state of sustainability (Hastrup, Reference Hastrup, Brightman and Lewis2017, Reference Hastrup2020).

In many studies, the innate political character of sustainability has become both articulated and critiqued. It is oriented toward the future, but the normative function that this word signals remains weak, which also makes assessing the past and the present hard, and Arctic scientists often shy away from drawing the gloomier conclusions for fear of having overstated their case (Wormbs, Reference Wormbs, Evengård, Larsen and Paasche2015). Even a broad circumpolar review of sustainable development gives little reason for genuine satisfaction about the progress of sustainability “on the ground” (Gad & Strandsbjerg, Reference Gad and Strandsbjerg2018), although the rich diversity of resources in a multiplicity of Arctics could also give rise to an idea of “sustainabilities” in the plural and therefore some optimism (Tennberg, Lempinen, & Pirnes, Reference Tennberg, Lempinen and Pirnes2020). In the last decade the mood has shifted from a unidirectional trajectory toward a rising Arctic to an understanding that futures are also in the plural, hence some brighter and others far less so. What these futures will become is undetermined and ultimately the responsibility of people and the outcome of different, opposing politics, as suggested in a volume with precisely that title, Competing Arctic Futures (Wormbs, Reference Wormbs2018).

Impressive as much of this literature is, with a sizable growth in research output from the social sciences and humanities during and after the Fourth International Polar Year 2007–2008, some of its policy-oriented contributions remained for a long time predicated on unfounded expectations of future economic growth and resource-based societal transformation. More recent work, such as the literature cited previously, has already started to reflect on new and more diverse approaches. This literature suggests that there is little uniformity. In that, Oran Young’s assumptions were somewhat overstated. Clearly, there has been a regional formation, and the Arctic has gained a higher profile as a region in world affairs. However, the interests within the region are less coherently presented than could be expected, and much of the decision making takes place with interests outside of the region in mind. The Arctic may have grown as a political object, but as a subject not as much.

A possible conclusion is this: While the past couple of decades saw a proliferation of approaches united by the notion that the post-1989 Arctic was a very special and forward-looking place, in the 2020s this view is changing dramatically. The trajectories of change are less distinct and paradigmatic than previous understanding suggested. The challenges are perhaps even more profound, but not so uplifting, rather disturbing, potentially devastating. The glorious future envisioned is, in reality, much more uncertain, with some of the visions even more unlikely than they were pre-1989. Back then, détente and sustainable development were held out as an opportunity, but most of the promises came to little. The future Arctic of the 2020s is no longer as “new,” and certainly not as merry as that which was hyped for decades but not delivered.

Entering the Extractivist Paradigm

Part of this adjustment to realities has come from experiences of resource extraction. It is a crucial part of the path dependency in the Arctic. We have argued throughout this book that it is always there and that it changes only in form and intensity. We also argue that resource extraction has expanded its reach and has already been turning into resource extractivism, which is more than the extraction itself. It is a social formation and an outlook on the world. We asked: Could resource extraction co-exist in harmony with Indigenous and settler communities? Could even the Arctic become a vanguard of responsible mining and extraction? Ultimately of sustainability.

We have found some progress, explored ways of transitioning from extraction to post-mining futures and wiser forms of collaboration and consultation, and seen alliances between multiple actors find new ways forward for sustainable development. Some initiatives are very recent and can spur progress in years to come. New Arctic strategies, focusing on people and local development, were adopted by the pan-Nordic Sámi (2019) and the European Union (2021). The updated EU Arctic strategy has been welcomed by the Sámi community for its respect for Indigenous communities and its demand that fossil fuels should stay in the ground but has also been met with concern for its focus on the Arctic’s potential as a region of renewable energy production.¹

However, we have also seen political inertia and additional “multiple pressures” on local, especially Indigenous, communities. Resources, landscapes, cultures, and livelihoods are severely affected by the expanding extraction operations. In addition to these accumulated changes, the last few decades have seen the start of what most envision, and hope, will become a period of transformational change to meet the UN SDGs, and say a last goodbye to the fossil fuel regime that the modern world is increasingly suffering from. Such a farewell to the fossil fuel age would mean a great deal for Arctic futures. Without it, the Arctic as we know it would be in serious trouble for the rest of this century.

The crux, though, is that the new resources that the Arctic can offer to the world as it transitions – mines for copper, nickel, iron ore, and rare earth minerals, as well as energy from hydro and wind – at present risk making things worse. Arctic extraction does not seem to foster more sustainable and thriving local communities in any straightforward fashion. It seems, on the contrary, to cement the Arctic’s position as a predominant raw materials region with communities that are depopulating, albeit with occasional centers of growth. It is a genuine dilemma, since extraction also means advantages for some in the short term.

At present, we do see a phasing out of some mining, especially coal in the European Arctic. There is growth in alternative sources of income such as tourism, and investments in science with huge observation stations and networks collecting data about climate and environment. The flipside of that coin is that the data typically are used elsewhere. Monitoring the planet doesn’t necessarily build community in any single site. Tourism has its extractive properties, wearing and tearing on environments and cultures, and in some areas of the Arctic its sustainability is already seriously questioned (Runge, Daigle, & Hausner, Reference Runge, Daigle and Hausner2020). Extraction and harvesting come in different shapes and sizes. It is not just extraction per se, it is also institutions, policies, knowledge, and a state of mind that tend to reinvent themselves and expand into new domains.

We have called all of this this the new extractivist paradigm. It is a concept for an expanding, contemporary extractivism that encompasses ever more sectors of society and the economy. It may not be what we had wanted to find, but even undesired results are results. The pathways the Arctic is currently on will not build the sort of sustainability that aligns itself with the demands of the UN SDGs.

Radically different development models for the Arctic are urgently required. It probably means new trade-offs, if the transition to a fossil-free world is going to be a “just transition” for the Arctic. This fairly small and vulnerable part of the world, with a mere four million of the world’s soon eight billion inhabitants, cannot carry the burden of supplying large parts of the world’s needs for energy and minerals. Nor can prohibitions and restrictions be imposed on communities that have been highly dependent on such extractive activities for employment, investment, and training. As many Indigenous communities in the Arctic have complained, a heavy-handed “green colonialism” is making itself felt with new demands for mining to cease in order that the Arctic be “saved” from further privation.

This is a serious thing. After several post-1989 decades of Arctic resource hype and frenzy, it is time to face the realities of the green transition, as the fossil fuel regime will remain up and running for some time yet. A bountiful Arctic functioning as a resource frontier may seem beneficial for the world as a whole – just as outsiders often wish to ensure that the Arctic continues to be imagined and framed as a “wilderness” rather than an extractive-industrial hinterland with settler and Indigenous communities living and working within it.

This is the Arctic paradox. The Arctic already serves as the bellwether of global climate change, with melting ice, thawing permafrost, and receding snow covers. It is right now sliding ever deeper into the role of a global resource hinterland whose own future is subservient to saving smooth transitions elsewhere. Nor is it easy for Arctic communities and citizens to take their own decisions and choose when to use a resource and when not to. They are trapped in the strategies of their nation states, and in copious external resource demand.

Local populations are sometimes divided. Indigenous corporations in Alaska want oil extraction to continue, and some Inuit communities in Greenland stand behind the, now abandoned, prospect of excavating uranium. They are Arctic outliers of strong international interests, commercial and geopolitical, from around the world, who want nothing else than for extraction to continue, however problematic it may be. Others try to argue that new pathways, not yet seriously discussed, must be carved out and compromises struck. There are pan-Arctic business voices arguing for investment in infrastructure, mineral, renewable energies, and for clean, green, and sustainable use of fish and other marine life.²

Sustainable resource development will have to transcend and surpass the extractivist path dependency. The chapters of this book have shown that the time-perspective of extraction must be very long and allow for post-extractive futures that are viable and attractive to local residents and Indigenous communities. These chapters have also shown the importance of affect and of participatory deliberation that is not just symbolic. The book has demonstrated clearly that existing forms of extraction remain insensitive to values that are essential for communities. To overcome this, critical and careful navigation is necessary. It will require ingenuity, skill, endurance, and collaboration. Geopolitically, it is a massive challenge given the determination of Arctic states to assert their permanent sovereign rights over Arctic territories.

This book is about the Arctic, but the way the Arctic is changing reflects, more than ever, change going on in other parts of the world. The external forces acting on the region are strong, and the stakes are high. The Arctic has, quite recently, been presented as an opportunity, a bonanza, a future for the world. In this book’s rendering, it comes across as a moral and political test case. Not just for Arctic states but for the world.