In previous posts (here, here, and here) I've introduced the chapters in Ice Blink: Navigating Northern Environmental History, soon to be published by the University of Calgary Press. Today, I'm beginning a series of posts that will present some of the key themes that our authors considered as they discussed the environmental history of northern Canada. The first of these concerns our evolving understanding of change in the environment � a perennial concern not just in northern environmental history, but everywhere.
Our presentation below is organized into two parts. First, we present an excerpt from the Introduction, which outlines our current understanding of the history and consequences of northern environmental change. Then, we present a shorter excerpt from the Conclusion, where we outline how selected chapters in Ice Blink have contributed new insights to this understanding.
Environmental Change
Changing northern environments today are commonly interpreted in terms of human impacts on the global environment, especially climate change. The place in climate models of ice, the Arctic Ocean, and methane released from permafrost, the role of ice cores in studies of the changing atmosphere, and assessments of impacts on endangered wildlife testify to how scientific interpretations of the northern environment are contributing to our understanding of global environmental change. Its geopolitical and economic consequences�new sea routes and resource development opportunities, a �contest� for northern territory, impacts on local uses of sea ice and other features�testify to its social implications.
This novel image of an open and vulnerable north stems, in part, from the perception that the region has been insulated by its distance from industry and human populations�that it is, in effect, the last relic of a once pristine planet. However, while current global changes may be unprecedented, the north has known change across a range of scales and time periods since long before the current era. Dramatic fluctuations in animal populations�including caribou, as well as, famously, lemmings and the predators they support�are a distinctive feature of northern ecosystems, even in the absence of human activities. Environmental change itself has thus often been ambiguous, sparking debate as to whether specific instances are �natural� features of northern landscapes and wildlife or the result of human activity. In the 1950s, for example, apparent declines in caribou populations captured attention. At the time, many attributed this to hunting; yet, before and since, other explanations have been considered, including population cycles, changes in migration routes, and other human impacts, such as harassment by aircraft, fire, or mineral exploration near calving areas. Similar ambiguities have been evident in debates regarding fire: its origins as a natural phenomenon, in Indigenous firing practices, or in the intervention of outsiders�and whether fire inflicts damage on northern landscapes, or is a natural and normal aspect of northern environmental change, a distinction that has often had political implications.
Indigenous people have also accumulated a history of change: hunting caribou and other species, with potentially significant impacts, or harvesting wood and manipulating fire to create optimum habitat for wildlife, including bison and moose. Nonetheless, the arrival of newcomers provoked unprecedented change. By the early 1900s, walrus and bowhead whale populations in the western Arctic had collapsed, with serious consequences for local human populations; other species also felt the impacts of the whaling industry, including caribou, polar bears, and musk oxen. Robert Peary and other explorers, as well as hunters supplying the musk ox robe trade, also depleted populations. These impacts reflected both economic imperatives and different views of nature. While Indigenous peoples recognized ecological variability and distributed hunting activities accordingly, newcomers responding to the demands of southern markets tended to focus their harvesting in specific areas, depleting local populations. Diverse views of nature were also expressed in conservation initiatives, which, in seeking to manage or minimize change, often provoked it. The 1916 Migratory Birds Convention disrupted seasonal Indigenous hunting activities, while Kluane and other wildlife reserves excluded hunters from traditional territories. Experiments in stocking game�including bison in Wood Buffalo National Park and reindeer in the northwestern Arctic�affected landscapes, wildlife, and those who had traditionally relied on them.
The war and postwar era witnessed a new order and scale of environmental change. The construction of the Alaska Highway left a disrupted and polluted landscape exposed to disease, sport hunting, fire, and development. Cold War activities, from building the DEW Line in the 1950s to training flights over Labrador in the 1980s, imposed additional impacts on local sites and regions. Mining development had diverse and often devastating consequences, transforming northern environments from the Klondike to the Yellowknife region to northern Ontario. These impacts were felt throughout the cycle of prospecting, exploitation, and abandonment, exhibiting the implications of changing mining practices. Prospectors, road crews, and trappers burned northern forests, often intentionally to expose the rock. In 1940, C. H. D. Clarke commented that �Fire is the thing to fear��less because of concerns regarding forests, as in temperate regions, than because of its impacts on caribou. Mining wastes were dumped in lakes and their fish populations were depleted. More recently, seismic lines, oil spills, and tundra defaced with tire tracks have accompanied petroleum exploration, while dams have drowned rivers and forests, disrupted flow regimes, and released mercury from the soil. These consequences together testify to the distinctive environmental changes imposed by energy developments across the north.
These developments also had indirect consequences, including new geographies of exploitation, production, and control. Newcomers affected certain regions more than others: coastal areas attracted whalers, and mineral-rich regions attracted prospectors. Other areas, including much of the eastern Arctic, tended to be bypassed. Development catalyzed regional transformation, as roads and aviation routes opened up new areas. In the Klondike, and ever since, northern miners have displaced wildlife, which, combined with shifting patterns of subsistence, has affected the well-being of Indigenous people. The movement of agricultural species and diseases together formed a �broken frontier� of ecological imperialism, with consequences for both ecosystems and Indigenous communities. Efforts to adapt food plants and animals from elsewhere to northern conditions, while often unsuccessful, have sometimes had significant local impacts�as seen, for example, in the clearing for grazing of winter caribou habitat in northern Saskatchewan, with lasting consequences for the local Indigenous economy. Diseases have formed their own history of environmental and social change. A history of disruption of northern communities by pathogens, often in combination with hunger and other hardships, culminated in epidemics of influenza, measles, and other afflictions in the twentieth century, often brought north by military or industrial operations. In many communities, epidemics catalyzed the transition into the modern world, along with new economic activities, health, and social services. This history has blurred the boundaries between nature and humans: environmental change has affected humans as much as other species; hybrid landscapes have formed in which people and their consequences touch every part of nature, and nature is present in every aspect of human activities; and northerners and the northern environment have shaped the effects of interventions such as community relocations and hunting regulations.
And from Ice Blink's conclusion�
Change has been a pervasive feature of the northern environment, evident in its histories of climate, fire, and species. As these chapters explain, change has also been central to human history in the north: as the consequence of development or other interventions, or as a factor compelling adaptation. Mining�s toxic residues, lands flooded by dams in Quebec and elsewhere, and the local impacts of DEW Line stations all testify to the capacity of industry and technology to transform ecosystems. Development projects have also had wider impacts, as roads or railways (even those that failed, as Jonathan Peyton explains) opened up regions: in the Northwest Territories, Quebec, and elsewhere, mines and dams have been only the starting point for transformation. Fire has often played a role in these transformations, accompanying, as Liza Piper notes, prospecting and other industrial activities. Our chapters have explored other interventions, as well, including efforts to domesticate reindeer (as Andrew Stuhl describes) and to establish gardens to support southern diets. The entire north has experienced the consequences of human impacts on the global environment, including contaminants and climate change, as my and Emilie Cameron's chapters discuss.
Yet these episodes also illustrate how the concept of �impacts,� with its implication that humans are an external force, does not adequately describe historical interactions between humans and the northern environment. Environmental change has most often been experienced and understood in terms of people, and particularly Indigenous ways of life and wellbeing. As Piper explains, after 1870, excessive hunting by explorers, whalers, and miners was experienced alongside other pressures on Indigenous northerners' food supplies imposed by natural variability and hunting regulations. Similarly, the effects of infectious diseases were felt not only directly but through disruption of relations with nature, including an accelerated shift to southern foods. Further, as Arn Keeling and John Sandlos note, the toxic aftermath of mineral exploitation has been experienced not in terms of pristine ecosystems, but in relation to existing ties between humans and nature, including hunting. Contaminants and climate change must also be understood in terms of their consequences for humans, again reminding us that the north is not only a natural but a cultural landscape. These chapters also demonstrated how northern nature has itself shaped the consequences of human activities. The effects of reindeer grazing were partly determined by the ecology of tundra, peculiar atmospheric and ecological conditions rendered the region vulnerable to radioactive fallout and persistent organic pollutants, and Arctic ecosystems and wildlife have a special sensitivity to climate change. Thus, ecosystems and humans together define the effects of changes set in motion by human activities. These chapters therefore underline the value of understanding change in terms of new relations�of domestication, exploitation, or contamination�between humans and nature, in which species, ecosystems, and human activities together produce new environments.
No comments:
Post a Comment