Harnessing Innovation in an Accessible Arctic
By Mead Treadwell
We need an owner ’ s manual for a new ocean : the Arctic .
The owner ’ s manual is necessary and timely because this is an ocean like no other . It is becoming more accessible to shipping and exploitation ( in both the good and bad sense of the word ) due to a changing climate – but not changing climate alone . Rapidly advancing technology has added to the Arctic ’ s accessibility . Global demand for Arctic resources – be those resources oil , gas , fish , minerals , new places for tourists to visit , or shortcuts for ships and airplanes – is bringing new human activity to this region , and quickly . This is not your grandfather ’ s Arctic .
We all own the ocean , though five nations will ultimately control most of the Arctic Ocean bottom . Countries as far away as India , Singapore , Japan , Korea , and China have joined the eight-nation Arctic Council as “ observers ,” but I think of them as partners because goods to and from their nations will be shipped through the Arctic . Somehow , as the world comes to this place , we need to ensure the needs of the people who live here – people who rely on Arctic Ocean species for food , and who currently pay large amounts for groceries , construction materials , and energy – are also met .
As an Alaskan , I became fascinated with the Arctic and its opportunities early in my career . The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen rapid advances in political and technical innovation , as well as geographic exploration . But these advances didn ’ t just happen . I , other Alaskans with similar vision and curiosity , and Arctic residents had to push for them , usually in distant capitals like Washington , DC , Oslo , Helsinki , and Moscow , where Arctic opportunities were out of sight , out of mind .
I have lived in Alaska since the 1970s , and have watched the building of America ’ s largest oilfield on the Arctic Ocean shore of Alaska ’ s North Slope , resupplied by annual barge lifts , careful not to interrupt indigenous whalers and sealers who have used this ocean to feed their families for thousands of years .
In the early 1980s , I accompanied my mentor Wally Hickel – between stints as Alaska ’ s Governor , after his time as Secretary of the Interior – across Arctic Russia , when the Soviet government had closed this huge area to foreigners . Shortly thereafter , I traveled across Canada ’ s Arctic with famed Alaskan Arctic aviator and geologist Ron Sheardown , whose investigations have helped bring billion-dollar mining prospects to production in Russia , Alaska , and Arctic Canada .
Late in the 1980s , I helped convene leaders in the United States and Russia to open the border between our nations at the Bering Strait , and was there in Provideniya , Russia , in 1988 when we brought Alaskan and Russian Yupik families together for the first time after decades of a so-called ice curtain that kept them apart . We followed up that visit with many more . I led two expeditions to Wrangel Island in 1990 and , flying in old Russian bucket-of-bolts helicopters , mapped sites on Wrangel and the Chukchi coast to pioneer ecotourism in this “ new ” part of the world . It never became as fashionable as , say , trekking in Tibet or climbing Machu Picchu , but I ’ m proud to say that the firm I helped start – run by my friend Roman Bratslavsky , who emigrated from Russia in the late 1970s – brought close to 5,000 people to this part of the world to visit reindeer herders , walrus haul-outs , ancient archeological sites , and the bird rookeries and whale lagoons of the ice edge that can ’ t be seen anywhere else . For a time , we also shipped our Russian neighbors lots of groceries .
Serving in Governor Hickel ’ s cabinet as deputy commissioner of environmental conservation in the early 1990s , I represented our state in the first delegations to bring about eight-nation cooperation on environmental protection in the Arctic . At that time , climate change was not our main concern
12 January 2018