A changing Arctic

Recognizing living and thriving in northern latitudes

Photo:Ilan Kelman
Aptly named shopping livelihoods in Longyearbyen, Svalbard.

Ilan Kelman
Agder, Norway

The Arctic: a desolate, cold wasteland offering little to human life and livelihood, apart from explorers and extractors. Or perhaps it is time to bury this myth to recognize millennia of living and thriving in the northern latitudes. Recent centuries opened new vistas, bringing people and jobs along with cultural and environmental destruction.

Today’s Arctic livelihoods run the range from old to new, from living with the environment to trying to separate from the environment. Fishers haul in their catch in sight of oil and gas infrastructure. Herders and hunters keep their traditional knowledge alive, while catering to sedentary tourists seeking “authenticity.” And many towns, including those around the Arctic, would feel incomplete without religious leaders, civil servants, store owners, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and taxi drivers.

Arctic livelihood changes sometimes seem as rapid as Arctic environmental and social changes. Tourism jobs crashed and then bounced back because of the COVID-19 pandemic, including at airports and on cruise ships. Shipping is not just about recreation, but is also about cargo. Companies are planning for the prospects of far shorter ice seasons opening up shipping routes.

The Arctic gains and loses as a center for other extractive livelihoods. In January last year, the largest known rare earth metal deposit in Europe was revealed near Kiruna, Sweden. A year later, Norway awarded a new round of oil and gas licenses for its Arctic waters. Around the same time, Canada’s government signed over control to Nunavut for the autonomous territory’s vast reserves of gems and metals.

All these opportunities, risks, and detriments cascade to other livelihoods. Money-based purchasing (via cash or card) for services and goods has become the norm, along with a taste for imported luxuries, from food to entertainment. Reliance on local knowledges declines for survival and for thriving.

Increased globalization promotes migration. People move into and out of the Arctic to seek their preferred livelihoods and lifestyles. Many heading north retain the mindset that used to dominate Svalbard, Norway’s high Arctic archipelago, of get in, get rich, and get out. It was based mainly on coal mining, now giving way to tourism and science.

Increased rates of Arctic migrants and visitors bring income to many residents. They can also undermine what people seek in these areas, as infrastructure scars photographic vistas and monthly income draws people away from their cultures. Disagreements and competing interests are inevitable. Dams for hydroelectric power, extraction including logging, and transport infrastructure appear on and interfere with prime herding, fishing, and hunting lands and waters.

These shifts affect values about and of livelihoods. Dominant economic approaches including macroeconomic indicators and growth-based assumptions prefer counting money over people’s mindsets and well-being. Financialization highlights short-term profits over long-term satisfaction and happiness. Community ways for quality of life—subsistence contributions to food and clothes, bartering and exchange, and wealth as heritage, nature, and culture—are downplayed.

None of this advocates for living as Arctic peoples did 5,000 years ago by giving up electricity, rapid travel, clean water, professional healthcare, the internet, international food, and all the other amenities that do improve livelihoods and lifestyles in the 21st century. It seeks to marry the old with the new, offering choices lasting generations, not transforming a town for swift gains and then vanishing south, far away from the wounds left on the people and the landscape.

Tourism need not be exploitive. It can engage with traditional ways of being, possibly even influencing visitors to do better for themselves and their homes. Resource extraction and electricity generation can respect nature’s rights, even if it means fewer profits to outsiders who are already rich. Shipping does not have to ruin the intangible values melding nature and culture.

The baseline remains Arctic livelihoods for and by Arctic peoples, with the latter including ancient and recent arrivals. The Arctic is neither a blank slate nor a pristine place. Global changes initiated far away by powerful interests, a good proportion of whom have never been near the Arctic, affect daily lives, livelihoods, and lifestyles across the north.

There will be no panacea, especially as the world always changes. There can be locally fulfilling, sustainable, prosperous combinations of livelihoods for enjoying Arctic living.

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of  The Norwegian American.