Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Barents Studies: Past, Present, and Future - Takeaways

 New Wrinkles

Yesterday I attended the Barents Studies Symposium at the Arctic Centre and learned some new perspectives and new angles on the Arctic that I hadn't thought of before. It's interesting when you think of something like the Arctic, and I'm the perfect tabula rasa for this because I grew up in a geographical desert paradoxically constantly abuzz with the activities of people, and could only imagine the Arctic as a big white empty place. Then, to have a conference like this which focused on a pretty small corner of the Arctic for an entire day that left me with the feeling that we had only really scratched the surface in terms of complexity made me happy. Nothing like finding a rich and novel lode of knowledge to delve into. I also have some more reasons to be positive after the conference than before, which is good because too much pessimism about our capabilities to right our ship won't help.

Cause to be Positive

I've developed something of a gloomy outlook on the world's and the Arctic's state of affairs, with the feeling that we have these huge, possibly insurmountable challenges in the way of adopting the right strategies and cooperating effectively. Normally I'm a very positive person in my daily life, and I'm very much not a perfectionist, preferring to just move ahead even when things aren't perfect. Why then /am was I so pessimistic about Arctic affairs and the current system's approach to complex problems? Because most literature is a litany of negatives! So out of this conference I heard some encouraging things from Aileen Espiritu, Pekka Huhtala, and Greg Poelzer.

Aileen's presentation was about futures of the Arctic, and man is this generally kind of a downer of a topic. She didn't present it that way, and in fact flipped something I had held as more less true and made it a bit more nuanced. I love nuance. I had become convinced, based off of some readings from various foreign policy think tanks and the general atmosphere of worry over Russia, that our increased interconnectedness would lead to the potential for spill-over tensions in the Arctic. She reminded me that northern Norway was liberated by the Soviets in WWII and that this has had a long-standing effect on their relationship to this day, and that the relationship remains very strong there. The people up there are aghast at the current unpleasantness and in fact are so interconnected economically that they stand to lose a lot if it continues. In her estimation, the peoples of the north have been able to compartmentalize themselves to some extent from the Ukrainian crisis, and people have continued to cooperate in spite of it. Peter Sköld from the University of Umeå backed this idea up and also said that research cooperation and most of the other long-standing forms of cooperation have continued more of less unabated. There's been no Cold War in the Arctic because of the Ukrainian crisis so far. I asked Aileen straight up if the increased interconnectedness is more a barrier to conflict than a potential flashpoint and she confirmed that.

Though I still tend to think it goes both ways. Pekka Huhtala talked about the town of Salla and its project to become a tourism gateway from Russia to bring it back from its flagging economic weariness. It all sounded very good and hopeful but he himself mentioned that the town they are partnering with could at any time be reopened to Russian military activities and become a prohibited place again, putting the kabosh on those plans. So yes overlapping cooperative commitments and long-standing enmeshed business interests that span ever increasingly impermeable borders have to a large degree deflected major conflict, but it can ALSO serve to bring distant problems to roost. Yes the peoples of the Arctic have mitigated and ignored the tensions of the Ukrainian conflict to a large degree, but not totally, and the fact it's even an issue people are discussing and worrying about suggests that it's a two way street. But it seems to be mostly a positive thing, this interconnectedness.

Another real positive takeaway that I noticed was just how active local authorities are in participating to a degree that gives their small areas some agency, and overall how local communities have positioned themselves in the Barents Region to benefit. That's one of the big worries for the future, that behemoths will descend and squash local communities. But from hearing Peter Sköld talk about how active Swedish municipalities and communities were in participating in research and policy fields, and from Pekka about how his local community and some neighboring ones in Russia are working to establish some industry for themselves is encouraging. In fact, many of the presentations were about local initiatives, or initiatives formed by local groups and municipalities in the Barents region that are actively participating in policy formation. As Aileen mentioned in her presentation, civil society has become very active in pursuing agency in the Barents, and is trending towards more and more activity.

Greg Poelzer from the University of Luleå even had some positives to say about the mining industry and its relations with local communities, which is generally not a sentence formulated by humans on Earth. Apparently in a couple of cases they went beyond the token consultations required and took it upon themselves to actively engage with the community and connect their well-being with the well-being of the company, in reality. Now ok, this is based off of two (2) cases in Sweden, a place where things that are usually bad are sometimes ok anyways, but it's an interesting case study.

Lastly, and this isn't really related to the conference except that it was pointed out to me there, but the United States has recently gone on something of a media campaign showing its new found respect for the weightiness of Arctic issues. Their priorities for the Arctic Council chairmanship don't even contain the words "economic development," instead focusing on environmental issues, stewardship (though I know from the US strategy that this is a more obtuse formulation of "sustainable development"), and the well being of Arctic peoples. Our new envoy delivered a great speech hitting the right points about how the Arctic is populated and that constitutes the most important considerations and the like. So the US appears to now be taking the Arctic quite seriously, although in a Q&A session Admiral Papp (the new envoy) mentioned that worldwide crises sometimes push the Arctic aside for those making the decisions. Take that for what you will.

But a Sobering Context

With all of those positives aside, staunch commitment to cooperation, extremely active participation at all levels, and increased and positive US engagement, they still need to be put in context, which proves to be a bit sobering.

There seems to be little movement on the front of climate change. Scientists from the IPCC and elsewhere have only gotten more shrill and more bleak up to their latest report. That's something that's going to happen outside of the Arctic and the Barents Region for the most part. It's great that local communities have some agency in parts of the Arctic on Arctic issues, but what influence do they have on the high politics and drama that is the upcoming climate talks? Not a lot. They are directly faced by the coming changes and they are happening now, to politicians in the centers of power it is still something to be hemmed and hawed about, though that seems to be slowly changing.

The Obama administration is more focused on climate change than any other US administration, and Secretary of State Kerry has worked tirelessly to advance that agenda, but that rings hollow in the face of the just resolved midterm elections that has seen the elevation of what will in all likelihood be a legislative body, at best, apathetic to climate issues and the Arctic (aside from resources). They have stretched what the executive branch can do more than most administrations, and beyond that there won't be a lot of legal movement it seems. As for their commitment to the Arctic, Admiral Papp has unveiled some exciting stuff, but it still smacks more of a media campaign than a herald for serious change, for the reasons already articulated. He wants to put the Arctic Council on "steroids" which is quite promising, but what teeth does that promise have after Obama's presidency?

What's more, even in the Arctic, the trends seem to be, as said by Aileen Espiritu, towards increased industry and urbanization. This might be very good for the local populace but what does it mean for the environment?

Overall yes, positives to take away from this Barents seminar. People are paying attention to the region, people in the region are being incredibly active in trying to make the changing situations benefit them, and the US is taking things more seriously, at least for the moment. 

Monday, November 3, 2014

The Problems Go Deep

The Problems Go Deep

I wrote previously about the possible governance structures for the future that would be needed to deal with the complex problems coming to both the Arctic and the wider world. Truly this is important in a nuts and bolts kind of way, important like a beam is important to a building's structural integrity, but I have to also think about things more fundamentally. Policy and the like is ultimately something of a reflection of what people want, at least in democracies. People put that beam there. Corruption and the like aside, governments cater to us, or try to anyways. But people want what is easy and what is comfortable, and generally we think about things in the short term and the near.

There's a sense in the US that voting and citizenship is just picking from an established menu, and for that reason politics seemed like something very far away. If people are conditioned this way, and think largely in the short term and selfishly, and governments reflect this kind of thinking, how will it be possible to address complex problems like those in the Arctic? I've been researching strategy but it seems that along this line of thinking it's going to reflect and cater to the same thin, short term thinking that has gotten us into this jackpot. 

 A New Way to Frame the Mindset

Recently I came across Jon Alexander's talk on Citizenship and Consumerism on the BBC, which you can check out here if you'd like, that inspired this line of thought. In it, he described the deep-set nature of how we have been drilled to think as consumers in all things, which he describes as being about passive choosers of the "best of these [options] for ourselves, measured in material standards of living, as narrowly defined individiuals, in the short term." And he does a good job putting into words something I had thought of in a nebulous way, which is that everything is measured against this mentality. Our success is measured in how much money we earn, what objects we have, and, especially growing up in southern California, it seemed that most people were content working simply to fill up their houses with accumulated bricabrac and fetishes (as in, objects of attributed worship) like a magpie or an infintely less useful accretion disk.

Mr. Alexander relates this seemingly unconnected way of living to politics, in that peoples' desires to be satisfied in material means in the short term over thinking to the long term and towards the collective good is reflected in politics, where politicians are elected to satisfy the same desires. You can relate this to Arctic strategy in that every one of the documents seems to hold economic performance and development as a high priority. I think back to the public relations element of these documents and have to wonder if all of that language about environmentalism is just to keep up appearances while countries continue to delve right into the paradox of Arctic development. It has seemed as though the bonanza won't be realised quite as fast as people thought, but that's perhaps more a function of global economic factors like lowering oil prices more than a conscious choice to leave the Arctic unspoiled, despite the more or less known long term benefits of doing so.

What to Do?

In terms of actual positive trends, Mr. Alexander sees some serious cause for hope in the Internet as a medium, in that it's very participatory and is a great tool to get involved and to become more of a Citizen than a Consumer, which he distinguishes as someone actively trying to take some agency over the menu rather than just picking from a set of options. Of course, I've been on the Internet enough to know that it can just be another area to be barraged with consumerist propoganda, but at least it is a two way street, unlike the television. We'll see if it becomes another case of "we can't have nice things" in the future. I can see either way.

Ultimately the message you can take away is that people need to be more participatory and look beyond their short term comforts as the only thing to worry about. One thing the Arctic has going for it as a region is that, in fits and spurts, it is seeing quite a lot of high level active participation in policy making by the average citizen. You can see that reflected in the Arctic Council, with indigenous participants, NGOs, and the like. In all it's a more experimental mix of vested participants than the usual arrangement and national strategies should be encouraging more of that diversification and more participation from the average citizen. To try to break the citizen out of apathy, in other words. But maybe that's not the place of government, and more the place of the citizens themselves. I suppose that's a bit cyclical, does the government prod the citizens or the citizens the government? Perhaps both.

Though as I pump up the grass roots good of the Arctic I look at the Arctic Frontiers conference coming up, wanting to go but baulking a little at the pricing just to attend. I feel like I'm trying to buy some Super Bowl tickets. Is this Doha or what? It's expensive to be a Citizen!