On Wednesdays for the next few months, polar bears and elephant seals will be visiting households up and down the country. Viewers of the BBC’s new natural history spectacular, Frozen Planet, will be turning their eyes towards the Polar Regions. And they will not be alone. In the last few years there are plenty who have been talking, worrying and pontificating about the future of our planet’s coldest places. The most heated debate centres on the Arctic Ocean. More than twelve books on the topic have appeared since 2009. Conferences, where suited bigwigs rub shoulders with their sealskin clad indigenous colleagues, have been mushrooming all over the place. At one not so long ago, I spilt coffee down Greenland’s deputy foreign minister’s rather fetching reindeer jacket. The Arctic, it seems, is back.

Icebreaker

People will probably already have a decent idea of the key debates. Warming in the earth’s northern reaches has caused dramatic environmental changes over the last twenty years. The ice is retreating, never more so than in 2007 which broke all records. Where it does remain, it’s thinner and more brittle than before and offers less resistance to a range of new reinforced ship hulls frantically being designed in Finland and elsewhere. The Arctic suddenly looks more accessible. For some ambitious folk it is the new frontier, promising untold riches from natural resources, fishing, faster shipping routes and tourism. Oil and gas majors have recently stepped up their interest in the region. After BP’s failed deal with the Russians, Exxon are now nosing around in the Kara Sea. A British firm, Cairn Energy, continues to look for oil off Greenland’s eastern coast, much to Greenpeace’s annoyance. Elswehere on the island, a bunch of intrepid British geologists are also fossicking about. They think that their Black Angle mine will yield billions of dollars.

Worrying times?

For many this “opening up” of the Arctic is worrying. The concerns are broadly threefold. Firstly, the rapid industrialisation of the Arctic may expose the fragile ecosystem to new and significant environmental hazards. Oil slicks can be even harder to deal with when they get under ice flows and rigs are in turn much more vulnerable in the Arctic seas. In the cold, toxins and pollution stay around for much longer than elsewhere on the globe. More tourist and commercial shipping north of the 66th parallel will also require search and rescue infrastructure that currently does not exist. Response times to a calamity today - environmental or human - would in all likelihood be in the order of days rather than hours.

Secondly, there is the geopolitics. Some reckon that a future hydrocarbon bonanza will reignite the Cold War tensions that only 30 years ago left the chilly northern reaches among the most militarised and tense on earth. For evidence they point to the planting of a titanium Russian flag beneath the North Pole in 2007 and the frantic recent efforts by Arctic states to map their own sea floors for submission to UN arbitration. Strategic and military concerns seem to be rising to accompany this. The Americans are uneasy that the Russian icebreaker fleet dwarfs their own by a factor of twenty. The Canadians just two years ago opened a new polar military base on Baffin Island as part of its new ‘use it or lose it’ Arctic policy. And in a touching gesture of cooperation, the Russians have restarted Cold War flights buzzing American airspace. A recent Pentagon publication even considered the possibility of Islamic terrorism following in Peary’s footsteps.

Thirdly, there are the locals - so often lost from the dialogue. Inuit and other indigenous groups in Arctic states (with the exception, perhaps, of Russia), are becoming increasingly assertive about their land rights. The Saami in Norway already have their own parliament. The inhabitants of Greenland may soon push for full independence from Denmark following the success of their home rule vote. And in Canada, natural resource exploration is subject to ever tightening control by indigenous groups. There is the prospect of greater clashes between states eager to cash in on an Arctic bounty and local groups claiming their own slice of the action.

So the High North now has a bewildering array of interested parties: states, NGOs, indigenous groups and multinationals to name but a few. Managing their competing claims on the region, and juggling their often contradictory understanding of what the “Arctic” is - or should - be will not not easy. There is certainly potential for conflict. Furthermore, it can seem that the existing international governance structures in place are woefully inadequate. At present the region is policed by a piecemeal set of international accords overseen by a unique body: the Arctic Council. This former environmental organisation now has a broadened scope and includes the five Arctic littoral states (Canada, America, Norway, Russia and Denmark, of which Greenland is a part) as well as Finland and Sweden. Indigenous groups are ‘permanent participants’ and several EU states also enjoy ‘observer status’ at its meetings. But the Council remains weak. It is hampered by state rivalry and lacks funding, a permanent secretariat and official bite to back its bark. While it has produced regulations governing Arctic shipping and off-shore oil exploration, it cannot enforce them and is still constitutionally unable to address the pressing issue of sovereignty or land ownership.

The Arctic's new borders

But while they may be understandable, many of these concerns are overinflated. As I write, scientists are devising ways of using broken ice floes as barriers to prevent and contain - rather than complicate - the spread of oil leaks. Actual episodes of geopolitical tension in the North have mercifully remained surprisingly rare. Just this year the Russians and Norwegians agreed on a long-disputed maritime border. International collaboration on environmental matters and joint military exercises is commonplace. Indeed, there is a strong case that the Arctic is the most cooperative international zone on earth. In some ways the future looks bright. Most of the big oil and gas deposits (as much as 90%) are found well within undisputed national borders making the possibility of resource fuelled land grabs highly unlikely. The region’s indigenous people are certainly vulnerable, but they are also the world’s most adaptable communities. In short, hope remains as the ice retreats.

A long history

The doomsayers also lack a historical perspective. Many times in the past, the Arctic has been subject to investor hype and accompanying concern. The region has a long industrial history of boom, bust and phantom geopolitical tension. It has seen many resource economies come and go. Whaling, sealing, and then fur trapping have been bringing Europeans and North Americans to the Arctic since the 16th century. With each explosion of economic growth has come largely unrealised fears of international tension.

One particularly relevant episode gripped Britain during the 1910s. During this decade we witnessed a stock market boom in companies speculating in coal mines high in the Svalbard archipelago. Then, as now, the technical difficulties of operating in the North made the few deposits of minerals frequently uneconomic. But at the time the islands were owned by no-one, officially ‘no man’s land’ and devoid of mining tariffs or regulation. Barriers to entry were non-existent and the romance of the Arctic coal mine galvanised investors from across the world. Celebrity explorers, such as Ernest Shackleton and Herbert Ponting, fuelled the hype. Soon the previously uninhabited islands had groups of miners from ten different countries competing to ship small deposits of coal in a bizarre legal void. Sometimes they fought hand to hand. Mutinies were periodic as men stayed through the polar winter. Today, visitors to Svalbard’s capital, Longyearbyen (named after the Boston venture capitalist Charles Longyear who started much of the craze) can still see the remnants of old railway lines connecting the failed mines to the shore. In the island’s museum, claim posts, once hammered precariously into the permafrost, line the walls: an early act in a long history of land grabbing that leads directly to today’s seafloor explorations.

Svalbard, formerly Spitsbergen

As the First World War convulsed Europe, even the acting foreign secretary Lord Curzon took an interest in Svalbard (then known as Spitsbergen). Largely under his auspices, the islands took on a new geopolitical significance to accompany its economic potential. Rumours circulated that Germany was using it to spy on British ship movements. The popular press worried about Svalbard’s potential as a submarine base so close to the Allied encampments at Murmansk and Archangel during the Russian Civil War. In this climate of uncertainty and with stocks of iron ore and coal dwindling at home, the estimates of the archipelago’s potential mineral wealth became grossly exaggerated. One dour Scottish professor felt sure the islands contained enough iron ore to service the entire world’s demand for decades. Rumours of gold circulated freely. It was an “Arctic El Dorado”.

In the end, however, as quickly as the hype and geopolitical tension grew, it was gone. The Treaty of Spitsbergen, ratified in 1925, settled the nagging issue of the ownership of the islands. Sovereignty over the archipelago was given to neutral Norway with clauses guaranteeing open access to all signatory states. All but the biggest coal companies eventually went bust (two continued under massive state subsidies). Today Svalbard is something of a triumph of international cooperation, housing more than 40 different nation-states under Norway’s jurisdiction. Testament to that fact is an odd building found just next to the Arctic University in Longyearbyen: the world’s only international seed bank, guardian of the globe’s genetic biodiversity.

A programme for the future

This story provides us with some useful context. It reminds us that the rhetoric surrounding the opening up of the Arctic to commercial exploitation is not new. And it demonstrates the region’s uncanny tendency to muddle through despite rising international tensions. But more than anything the story of Svalbard’s abandoned mining ruins tells us that the Arctic is a place Westerners have continuously invested with an enormous imaginative resonance. Distant and alien, the High North is more often than not a space for us to fantasise about, somewhere onto which we can project our fears and dreams. In the 1910s, the hype over Svalbard was born of wider British fears both about war-time coal shortages and German military expansion. In 2011, as fears over the future of oil and gas become more persistent and the West continues to eye Russia with weariness, the Arctic has re-emerged into the public consciousness. A new generation is involved, but the narrative has barely changed.

Accompanying and reinforcing this imaginative process is a lot of cultural baggage and tales of derring-do that work to promote our fascination with this far-off place. This is often powerful stuff, as seen by the numbers (including Prince Harry) who venture forth to ‘conquer’ the North Pole and test their manliness. In the right hands, the North can seemingly be shaped to house any dream. The result is that we are really discussing a vague and slippery concept. It is, after all, simultaneously the land of Phillip Pullman’s armoured polar bears, Santa Claus and, most recently, the ‘future’ of oil and gas. What we are witnessing is not then the unveiling of a mysterious frozen kingdom. The current interest is but the latest in a constant process by which outsiders reimagine and redefine an area that they often know little about. It is all part of our interest in exotic frontier markets.

The lost mines of Svalbard

When in 1904 Francis Younghusband blasted his way to Lhasa and broke Tibet’s spell for thousands of Europeans for which the kingdom had become a mythical sanctuary, John Buchan noted that he felt a strange sense of sadness at the ending of the unknown. It was as if the innocence and allure of the place had gone. It had become corrupted. Some, whether they are environmentalists, travel writers, explorers or just hopeless romantics seem to hanker after the Arctic in the same way. For some that don’t live there, a sense has developed that the spell of the Arctic is melting with its ice. What follows will be all oil soaked guillemots, Texan oil drillers and ice warfare. But don’t be glum because in truth that past world never existed. It is a distraction.

The key to developing a coherent strategy for managing the Arctic in the future will therefore be less about ‘ecosystem based management’ and ‘innovative governance solutions’ (though they are all valuable). It will be in finding some common ground in this imaginative process: to agree on the version of the Arctic we, and its 200,000 or so inhabitants, really want. One way might be to pay more attention to the lessons of the region’s long industrial history and escape the exaggerated claims of impending doom. But even so, reconciling the pristine white sanctuary imagined by the environmental lobby with the next oil frontier promoted by the multinationals as well as the homeland understood by Arctic’s indigenous groups will not be easy. For us westerners safely ensconced in our centrally heated homes, it will doubtless involve us leaving a good deal of imaginative baggage behind. But if we could manage it, it might just be a sea change the Inuit would welcome.