and reindeer meat – to global markets.
In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed me to the
U.S. Arctic Research Commission. A former Coast Guard
icebreaker captain, who holds the world record for taking the
same ship to the northernmost and southernmost points in
world oceans, joined our staff. Dr. Lawson Brigham, now at
the University of Alaska, was our deputy director and led the
eight-nation Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment. I was proud
to attend the Ministerial in Iceland when we got it started,
proud to send Lawson around the world to get the project
written, and proud when, at a Norwegian Ministerial in
Tromso in 2009, eight nations adopted the 188-page blueprint
we’d written for marine safety in the Arctic Ocean.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Mead Treadwell discuss the
proposed Rail Link from Canada to Alaska at the Washington, D.C.,
Woodrow Wilson Center. Photo courtesy Woodrow Wilson Center.
14 January 2018
Two years after that, I’d moved from serving as chair of
the presidentially appointed commission under both Pres-
idents Bush and Obama to being elected lieutenant gover-
nor of Alaska with Gov. Sean Parnell. In 2011, Senator Lisa
Murkowski and I traveled to Greenland with Hillary Clinton
– the first U.S. Secretary of State to attend an Arctic Council
meeting – as we signed a binding search and rescue agree-
ment in the Arctic, called for by our 2009 report. Two years
after that, Secretary of State John Kerry signed the first oil spill
prevention and response agreement, also one we’d advocated.
A binding polar code, another of our recommendations, was
adopted by the International Maritime Organization in 2014
and went into effect in early 2017.
Since 2014, at the invitation of Iceland’s former President
Olafur Ragnar Grimsson and Arctic Now pu blisher Alice Ro-
goff, I’ve been chairing the Arctic Circle Mission Council on
Shipping and Ports, and we’ve proposed that the nations at the
top of the world get together like the U.S. and Canada did to
establish the Saint Lawrence Seaway. We’re working with the
Alaska congressional delegation to find a way with this seaway
to pay for the new ports and icebreakers the Arctic Ocean
needs to ensure that shipping is “safe, secure, and reliable” –
three words that U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan and I worked to
insert into the U.S. Arctic policy signed by President Bush in
2009. We also envision a league of Arctic ports.
From my 40-year Arctic tromp to meet our neighbors,
I have more stories than you could stand to read. It was fun
to camp out on the Arctic ice in 2011 with three admirals as
one of the biggest, baddest nuclear attack submarines the U.S.
has (the USS Connecticut) rose through the ice next to us to
test new technologies. I never thought I’d find myself as the
only person, alone at 2 a.m., at a Russian nuclear power plant