The Future History of the Arctic

The Future History of the Arctic
By Charles Emmerson
Bodley Head, £20, 418 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

Colder than the scramble for Africa but no more dignified, the rush to claim the Arctic is one of the ugliest aspects of the hydrocarbon era. In 2007, a Russian parliamentary deputy even descended in a submarine to plant a Russian flag on the seabed under the North Pole. As Charles Emmerson asserts: “The idea of an unchanging Arctic ... is categorically wrong.” What, then, does the future hold for the storage locker at the top of globe?

A former head of global risk at the World Economic Forum, and still in his early 30s, Emmerson marshals a wealth of disparate material to sketch a region in transition. In the first of five sections, he offers a selective historical overview, its highlight a striking vignette of Fridtjof Nansen, the greatest explorer in history and a Nobel Peace laureate to boot. The second section addresses “the unfinished business of defining national frontiers”, while the third looks at climate change in the Arctic.

The region is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet. But, as this book acknowledges, much remains poorly understood, above all the interactive implications of multiple variables. Emmerson handles a contentious topic with equable good sense, though I would have liked more indigenous voices: 26 ethnic groups live across the Russian Arctic alone.

The fourth section of the book, dealing with natural resources, is the weightiest. Emmerson whisks the reader through the Alaskan Eldorado of 1968 and the failure of western oil companies to access Russian Arctic and sub-Arctic resources, despite many attempts. Although much remains unknown, everyone is convinced that a lot of oil is out there somewhere. Now that a warming climate has unfrozen swathes of ice-locked ocean, the race is on. “The [US Geological Survey] estimate for ‘undiscovered’ Arctic hydrocarbon resources represents 20 per cent of the global total,” Emmerson says.

The book concludes with a zippy economic essay on the latest Icelandic saga and a brief look at Greenland’s ongoing march to full independence. Emmerson is optimistic that politicians in Nuuk will succeed in breaking from Denmark, though it is hard to see how they will reconcile political aspiration with economic dependence.

The Future History is most gripping on the subject of Russia. Emmerson covers the subject well, ranging from Stalin’s obsession with industrial gigantism (25,000 died in the construction of the useless White Sea Canal alone) to the swaggering energy barons of the new Russia. In a neat allegorical conclusion, the author fetches up among the salted beechwood domes of the Solovetsky Monastery in the White Sea, among the most sacred places of orthodoxy, the site of the first gulag, and more. The whole history of Russia played out in microcosm on the Solovetsky archipelago: imperialism, communism and democracy. There, wandering among monks and ghosts, Emmerson finds expression for “the three-times distilled history of the Russian Arctic”.

He has travelled widely, and talked to a range of players, from atmospheric chemists to environmental campaigners. Throughout the book, dollops of direct speech leaven an otherwise dense narrative. But still, the stories would have benefited from some local colour. It never hurts to know what a person looks like, or to catch the flavour of a place. “The glory days of Deadhorse are behind it” is rather an understatement, if you’ve been there.

In this and other areas, one has the sense of a book not fully digested: Emmerson might have trusted in his own good sense and invested more in a synthesis of his prodigious reading. That said, this is an excellent primer to the economic issues of a region so recently and rudely thrust into the geopolitical limelight.

Sara Wheeler is the author of ‘The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle’ (Jonathan Cape)