Svalbard Case Study

4 Key excerpts on "Svalbard Case Study"

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  Arctic Environmental Modernities

  From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene

  • Lill-Ann Körber, Scott MacKenzie, Anna Westerståhl Stenport, Lill-Ann Körber, Scott MacKenzie, Anna Westerståhl Stenport(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Why are the episodes described above relevant to action in the present? First, Svalbard continues to be characterized as a space for industry, a space for wilderness, and a space for cultural heritage protection, all within an overarching theme of legitimizing the influence of competing actors. Coal mining continues to be a significant economic activity, although few believe that it will survive the current low world market prices and the position of coal in current debates on anthropogenic climate change. This final factor is particularly noteworthy. Norway has pushed hard to portray Svalbard as a space for science—most notably climate research—symbolized by its stewardship of an international research community at Ny-Ålesund, formerly a coal mining settlement. UNIS was founded in 1993 and dominates the downtown of Longyearbyen. With the strengthened environmental law of 2002, responsible environmental management has become an increasingly important aspect of Norway’s claims to legitimate administration (further strengthened by its sponsorship of science). This applies also to the increasingly substantial efforts to preserve cultural heritage—including remains of mining. The power to govern Svalbard, and to determine its future, remains tied up with the production of narratives that construct the archipelago as a series of human and natural environments.

  An extension of this point with particular relevance to the present is that narratives about Svalbard cannot be considered as peculiarly “Arctic” in any self-evident sense, and that the demarcation of its natural and cultural heritage reflects values from far further south. To characterize a certain space as Arctic is to incorporate it within a system of meaning that is underdetermined by physical geography. The Arctic is defined differently depending on the context, from the Arctic Circle to climatological boundaries (such as the 10 °C isotherm) to definitions based upon administrative convenience. The history of Svalbard and its representations in the form of material remains (just like its present and its future) was framed within narratives constructed elsewhere. These are Norwegian stories, Soviet stories, as well as Swedish, British, and Dutch stories, more than they are Arctic stories. While the absence of an indigenous population makes these links appear starker than they would be in Greenland, northern Canada, or Siberia, we nevertheless argue that Arctic spaces are constructed in (and often for) southern consumption, and that historiographic and analytic frames based on cartographic location must be regarded with skepticism. The growth of the Arctic as an organizing category in the twenty-first century—inscribed upon bodies such as the Arctic Council and knowledge productions such as the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment—only strengthens the need to examine critically how and why that particular category has been employed and what narratives are supported by its use (Keskitalo 2004

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  Extreme Tourism: Lessons from the World's Cold Water Islands

  • Godfrey Baldacchino(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Mosj also reports that Svalbard has a warmer climate, more rain and a 10% reduction of glacial ice volume since the 1960s (http://miljo.npolar.no/mosj/MOSJ/reviews/review022.pdf). The polar areas are in fact excellent laboratories for research on environmental and climate change. Research in different sciences is, besides mining and tourism, one of the major industries on Svalbard. Scientists and environmental observers constitute a significant tourist segment. In August 2004, a group of U.S. senators, among them Hillary Clinton, visited Svalbard in order to increase their knowledge about the impact of climate change (Fyhn, 2004). Despite few negative observations of tourism impacts (Svalbard Tourism, 2004), the Norwegian Polar Institute has expressed some concern and looks at tourism as a possible threat to the Svalbard environment (Johansen, 2004). It must be recalled that tourism as a locally based industry has a very short history. Moreover, given that Svalbard has long been a laboratory for scientists from all over the world, any impact of tourism can be monitored by a vigilant environmental authority in relation to a large array of historical knowledge and data. The Governance of Tourism Meanwhile, Svalbard is undergoing another revolution: a shift towards governance prac- tices. Whereas ‘government’ refers to activities undertaken primarily or wholly by state bodies, “ … the essence of governance is its focus on governing mechanisms, which do Svalbard, Norway 137 not rest on recourse to the authority and sanctions of governments” (Stoker, 1998, p. 17). As the modern society and the modern state has developed “ … no actor has sufficient overview to make the application of particular instruments effective; no single actor has sufficient action potential to dominate unilaterally in a particular governing model”, argues Kooiman (1993, p. 4).

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  Postcolonial Perspectives on the European High North

  Unscrambling the Arctic

  • Graham Huggan, Lars Jensen, Graham Huggan, Lars Jensen(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 ). At the same time, investigating the individual histories of specific Arctic territories can help contest the facile, essentialist narratives of progress, development, and ecological “state change” that are all too common to public and media discourse on Arctic places. An unscrambling of this space can help, not just to uncomplicate current understandings of Arctic scrambles, but also to carve out paths for more productive and critical reflection in the region’s distinctly complex times.

  It is thus important to assess circumpolar geopolitical developments in the Arctic in terms of both global international relations and individual domestic politics of the multiple countries involved (Pedersen 2009 ), as well as in relation to the multiple contemporary industrial and capitalist processes that are intertwined in the region. For this reason, I have divided this chapter into three primary sections, each of which looks at the role that these industries—here, coal mining, scientific research, and adventure tourism—have played and continue to play in Svalbard’s geopolitical positionality.

  Of Northern Extraction: From Coal Rush to Coal War

  The 63,000 sq. km Svalbard archipelago is one of the planet’s most northerly and remotely inhabited settlements. Located at 78 degrees north, some 640 km north of the Norwegian mainland and 1300 km from the North Pole, this ice-packed archipelago is two-thirds covered by glaciers, and its soil is frozen to a depth of up to 500 m. Between mid-November and late January, the sun sinks a full eight degrees below the horizon, enveloping the land in complete polar darkness; the average temperature in February, Svalbard’s coldest month, is −16.2 C. In contrast to the winter, from mid-April to mid-August the islands enjoy 24-hour daylight, and once the snow has disappeared (usually by July) and the temperatures rise into the late teens, its umber, tussocky valleys are covered in wild flowers—poppy, polar willow, saxifrage—that take advantage of the long periods of daylight. The wildlife that calls Svalbard home includes over a hundred species of migratory birds, as well as arctic foxes, polar bears, and reindeer on land, and seals, walruses, and whales offshore. The islands’ western shores and coastal waters are warmed by the Gulf Stream, which melts sea ice and helps to keep the fjord open for maritime access for several months each year, while also making it relatively tolerable for human life.

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  International Law and the Arctic

  • Michael Byers(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  79–80. 21 Ibid. 22 For a map of Svalbard, see http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/04/svalbard/ svalbard-map. 16 territory “jagged mountains”) was the original name of the entire archipelago and the name used in the 1920 Spitsbergen Treaty. Svalbard (Norwegian for “land with the cold coasts”) is the modern name, with Spitsbergen now being used to refer to the largest of the islands, and the treaty increasingly being referred to as the Svalbard Treaty, as will be done here. Svalbard is a land of fjords and ice-capped mountains, with roughly half of the archipelago being covered by glaciers. A total landmass of 62,000 square kilometers makes Svalbard about twice the size of Belgium, albeit with a much smaller population. Only 2,500 people live there, all of them on the island of Spitsbergen. There are no indi- genous peoples. Coal has been mined on the island of Spitsbergen for more than a century, with about four million tonnes still being shipped to Europe each year. The Gulf Stream confers relatively mild temperatures and seasonally ice-free waters, while good infrastructure and flight connec- tions with Europe make Svalbard one of the easier and more comfort- able places for tourists to experience the Arctic. Each summer now, dozens of cruise ships operate within the archipelago, some of them carrying more than 3,000 passengers. Svalbard has also become a center for Arctic science, with many countries – including China and India – operating research stations there. It is home to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, where hundreds of thousands of seed samples from around the world are preserved deep in a permanently frozen mountainside: the ultimate security policy for global crop diversity. 23 Sovereignty over territory is usually a matter of customary inter- national law, but in this case the 1920 Svalbard Treaty is determinative. 24 In the nineteenth century, Svalbard was widely considered to be terra nullius and therefore open to all.

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