Circumpolar Newsings
Books review: The final meltdown 
(Simon Kuper/Financial Times, 13 November 2009) -- Sara Wheeler is such a seasoned Arctic traveller that one winter she towed her baby son around Lapland on a sled. In The Magnetic North, her wonderful account of her journeys through the region, she wonders if her children will “talk to their children’s children about the Arctic as my generation speaks of black-and-white television and tinned spaghetti”. They almost certainly will. It’s no coincidence that four weighty books about the region are being published at once. The old Arctic is dying, and a new, perhaps more habitable one will replace it. These books are not warnings against climate change: it’s too late for that. Rather, taken together, this quartet is at once a requiem for the old Arctic and a fearful welcome to the new one. Glyn Williams’s Arctic Labyrinth and Peter Nichols’s Final Voyage are partial histories of the old, frozen Arctic. Wheeler’s odyssey and Alun Anderson’s After The Ice chart the new, melting Arctic and the incipient “cold rush” for its oil and gas. There are hundreds of billions of dollars buried in those thawing seabeds. As the Arctic defrosts, the region may finally join the rest of civilisation, Anderson suggests, even though he doesn’t like the idea. The Arctic was always a scarcely habitable wasteland. “Twelve months of winter, and the rest is summer,” one traveller tells Wheeler. The region’s empty landscape makes you understand your own insignificance, Wheeler says, and it draws misfits and misanthropes. When she asks a fellow Arctic addict, “What keeps you here?”, the reply is: “It’s not what’s here. It’s what’s not here.”
Posted 14 November 2009; 10:17:40 PM. Permalink
Tagged: Books, Blogs and Publications, Circumpolar News, November09, Tourism / Perspectives
Hundreds of migrating reindeer drown as Arctic ice collapses beneath them
(Daily Mail, 14 November 2009) -- Hundreds of reindeer on their annual migration across a frozen lake above Sweden's Arctic Circle have drowned as ice collapsed beneath them. The herd of around 3,000 reindeer were being moved by their Sami herders from the western shore of the frozen lake Kutjaure to their winter grazing grounds in the east. Suddenly, some reindeer at the front turned back, causing the ice to crack and several hundreds to drown. 'In the ensuing commotion the whole herd moved in circles, adding great pressure and weight on the ice,' said Erik Gustavsson, a manager at the County Administrative Board of Norrbotten. The reindeer crashed through the ice and then trampled on each other as they tried to climb out of the water, he said. The indigenous Sami population live year-round in the harsh conditions of northern Sweden, Norway and Finland and are highly dependent on the reindeer for their livelihood. There are some 20,000 Swedish Sami who herd reindeer. Bertil Kielatis, chairman of the Sirges Sami village that owns the reindeer,said he had never seen anything similar in his lifetime and that there was no clear explanation as to why the herd hesistated to move forward. 'Probably, they were fightened by something or felt worried,' said Kielatis. Video on the website of Sweden's television channel, SVT, showed hundreds of carcasses lining the muddy shore of lake Kutjaure, which has been used for decades to transport the reindeer from their summer grazing fields to the 'winterland', where they spend the winter months. On Friday, two helicopters assisted the herders with dragging the dead reindeer from the lake. Kielatis said because of the herd's special breeding value, the economic loss could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. As it is too expensive to bury or transport the dead, their bodies will most likely be scattered in the surrounding wilderness, he said. [See also "Reindeer herd drowns in icy Lapland waters" at The Local: Sweden's News in English, 13 November 2009.]
Posted 14 November 2009; 7:15:04 PM. Permalink
Tagged: Circumpolar News, Economic and Commerce Issues, Flora and Fauna, Indigenous Issues, Natural disasters and other problems, Nordic Region, November09, Sweden
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