(Daniel Cressey/Nature News, Nature 478, 174-177 (2011), doi:10.1038/478174a, 12 October 2011) -- Last month, US researchers took a 4,000-tonne gamble when they steered the Marcus G. Langseth through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Ocean. The 72-metre research vessel was not built to plow through ice, so it had never ventured that far poleward before. But the rules are changing quickly in the new north. Managers at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the ship, decided to send the Langseth into the Arctic after reviewing satellite images that showed that the intended survey area in the Chukchi Sea had been largely clear of ice for four of the past five summers. ...

Governments keen to access this wealth are stepping up their activities in the area as a prelude to claiming rights to resources in vast swathes of territory under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). ... By some accounts, all this bluster points to a new cold war that could hamper scientists working in the Arctic. But geologists, oceanographers and others who have been conducting research in the region generally see more cooperation than competition.

"What you read in the media is geopolitical conflict," says Hajo Eicken, a sea-ice researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "What we see is quite the contrary. In many cases, you can do Arctic research only if you have good international collaboration in place." For researchers, a bigger problem is securing ship time. With the flurry of interest in the Arctic, scientists must compete with drilling companies and others for time on ships designed to operate in the region, which are in short supply. That is how Coakley and his colleagues ended up testing the Langseth in the Chukchi Sea. ... Commercial concerns are driving much of the activity in the Arctic Ocean, with oil companies, in particular, jockeying for position. ... At the same time, tourist ships are increasingly plying the waters off the west coast of Greenland. ... The north has become a popular destination.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research

(Liza Piper, "Environmental health in the North: The example of nutrition"/Northern Canada Workshop at Network in Canadian History and Environment, 13 October 2011) -- For several years now, I have been researching and writing about the relationships between health and environmental change in the North over the past 150 years. When I initiated this project, it was enormous in scope, reaching from the late-eighteenth century right up to the present. I came at the topic from the perspective of Alfred Crosby’s seminal work on ecological imperialism. Specifically, I wished to explore the role that disease organisms played in facilitating the imposition of colonial control over the lands and people who would eventually make up Canada’s three northern territories (the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut).

Euro-Canadian germs worked as assistant colonizers in a process of social and environmental change that was its most intense from the late-nineteenth century into the late-twentieth century, and culminated in moments of crisis across the North in this period. These moments of crisis were signalled by epidemic outbreaks (such as a 1928 influenza epidemic in the Mackenzie Valley and a 1949 poliomyelitis outbreak in Chesterfield Inlet) and episodes of starvation (including the well-known famine in the Keewatin in the 1950s). These crises, in turn, shaped the emerging colonial relationships binding camps with communities, north and south, and defining northern society and economy in the twentieth century. Thus it was the responses to ill-health and ecological change that shaped much of the colonial apparatus of the Canadian state in the North. ...

The health of northern environments and the health of northern people were closely connected. Northern lands and waters were transformed in the twentieth century: as a result of increased hunting, trapping, and fishing (to the point of over-harvesting of game animals, fur-bearers, fowl, and fish species); as part of new industrial developments; and through the emergence of new commercial and social geographies (new transport routes, new populations centres, and so forth). So, too, northern diets changed.

... as my essay demonstrates, by the latter half of the twentieth century, the Canadian state came to use nutrition and nutritional science as the means by which to understand and to attempt to manage changing relationships between (predominantly Aboriginal) northerners and their environments. That is, diet became a tool of colonization and “nutrition” a means for colonizers to deal with the impacts they were having in the North.

This item is the thirteenth in a series of posts on the environmental history of northern Canada.

Tagged: Arctic, News, Research