Peder Roberts

Assessing Arctic futures: voices, resources and governance

Interest in the future of the Arctic is running high, motivated in large part by belief that climate change will open new possibilities (and unleash new threats). Wealth from shipping and natural resource extraction features prominently in narratives about the Arctic in the media, and governance of the region has become a major concern as new actors demand influence. We use three components of current discourse about the Arctic to help reveal connections between how the region is constructed and how the right to decide its future is articulated. Voices are the actors who participate in the discursive construction of Arctic futures, with varying degrees of influence. Resources are objects upon which actors inscribe values, thus locating them in the discourse. Governance refers to the structural features through which action is regulated within spaces, restricting also the range of legitimate actors. We demonstrate the usefulness of these concepts through brief case studies of coal on Spitsbergen, hydrocarbons in the Barents Sea and whaling in the North Atlantic. We conclude by emphasizing the value of a historical perspective to understanding contemporary debates about the future of the Arctic.

Heroes for the past and present: a century of remembering Amundsen and Scott.

In 1911-1912 Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott led rival parties in a race to the geographic South Pole. While both parties reached the Pole--Amundsen first--Scotts men died on the return journey. Amundsen became a Norwegian icon through his record-setting travels; Scott became a symbol of courage and devotion to science. The memory of each was invoked at various points during the twentieth century in the context of contemporary Antarctic events. Scotts status as a scientific figure was central to the Scott Polar Research Institute, while Amundsens lack of scientific legacy became a way for British polar explorers to differentiate themselves from Norwegian contemporaries during the interwar years. After 1945 Scott and Amundsen were again invoked as exemplars of national polar achievement, even as the rise of large-scale science on the continent overshadowed past British and Norwegian achievements. In the present Amundsen and Scott remain wedded to particular values, focused respectively on national achievement and sacrifice in the name of science, while their race has become secondary.

Science as national belonging : The construction of Svalbard as a Norwegian space

This article examines how science has been employed to establish, maintain, and contest senses of belonging on Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago administered by Norway since 1925 under an international treaty. Our central argument is that the process of constructing Svalbard as a space belonging to Norway has long been intertwined with the processes of describing and representing the archipelago and that participating in those processes has also permitted other states to articulate their own narratives of belonging – on Svalbard in particular and in the Arctic more generally. We deploy the concept of belonging to capture a sense of legitimate presence and stakeholdership that we do not believe can be adequately captured by narrow concepts of sovereignty. Norway’s historic and current use of science validates (and even naturalizes) its rule over Svalbard. At the same time, other states use science on Svalbard to articulate geopolitical scripts that portray them as stakeholders in an Arctic that is of transregional relevance due to the effects of climate change.

Animals as instruments of Norwegian imperial authority in the interwar Arctic

During the first half of the twentieth century a number of individuals in Norway participated in the transfer of animals from both the Arctic to the Antarctic regions and vice versa. These projects ...

Intelligence and internationalism : the Cold War career of Anton Bruun

The Danish marine biologist Anton Frederik Bruun (1901–1961) is chiefly remembered as an explorer of the deep-sea fauna and a key figure in international scientific organizations during the 1950s. As the Cold War increasingly permeated the marine sciences and it became too expensive for small states to operate deep-sea research vessels, he became an asset to the USAs oceanographic establishment as it sought to first assess Soviet strength (in terms of research, technology and logistical capacity) and then to build up American oceanography in response. Bruuns contacts with the USSR – including a visit in 1957 – strengthened his contacts to the American military as well as American oceanographers. His enthusiasm for raising interest in the marine sciences in developing countries could also be matched to American geopolitical goals. Bruuns participation in the Scripps Institution of Oceanographys Naga expedition to the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand captured the mutually beneficial nature of his American connections. Bruun was able to use the USA to reach distant oceans, while the USA in turn gained from Bruuns prestige as it forged connections with friendly states through science, an increasingly important arena for Cold War competition.

Introduction: the politics of Antarctica

For a continent that is often regarded as essentially separate from the global political and economic system, Antarctica has a complex and interesting political history. The Antarctic Treaty (adopted in 1959, and entering into force in 1961)2 is the bestknown but by no means the only political agreement to impact the continent. At the same time, many of the currents that washed against and across lands around the rest of the globe also reached the Antarctic. The aim of this book is to show some of the myriad ways in which the continent for science and peace is also a continent created by politics, maintained by politics – and indeed, generating politics. In 1948, the American explorer and scientist Laurence Gould could write in an essay entitled ‘Strategy and politics in the polar areas’ that, ‘Politics in the polar regions are still largely concerned with political claims and their maintenance’.3 While his article was mainly concerned with Antarctica, it drew attention to the wider nature of claim making in areas considered too remote and too underpopulated for the kinds of colonial settlement that was common to regions such as southern Argentina and Chile, the Falklands/ Malvinas, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. In these more northerly latitudes, land was appropriated, settled and administered. Where there was ‘maintenance’, it came largely in the form of importing practices already pioneered elsewhere – of disempowering indigenous communities, establishing property regimes, building fences and hedges and managing new environments. For territories that lacked indigenous populations and held little prospect of permanent settlement, resource harvesting and territorial claiming were ends as well as means. By the time Gould penned his article, the politics of the Antarctic was a very different affair to one say of 1908 let alone 1808. The burst of sealing around the Antarctic Peninsula during the early nineteenth century made it rare to see even a single fur seal in South Georgia by the turn of the twentieth century. Yet few (quite possibly none) of these sealers regarded themselves as pioneers after whom others would follow. Claiming and regulating Antarctic space came first in the early twentieth century, when a new resource boom – this time in whaling – led Britain to claim the Falkland Islands Dependencies (now known as the British Antarctic Territory and the separate South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) in 1908. By 1946 six other states had registered claims (Australia, Argentina, Chile, France, New Zealand and Norway). Like his mentor Richard E. Byrd, Gould was a passionate advocate of an American Antarctic claim, owing to the country’s extensive involvement in exploration, exploitation and science, but the United States and its fellow postwar superpower, the Soviet Union, resisted such

Antarctica: A Continent for the Humanities

In the introduction we unpack the idea behind the volume, both as a contribution to Antarctica scholarship, but also as a reflection on the humanities, more specifically the environmental humanities. Antarctica has never been a stable concept within the realm of human discourse and we interrogate the prevailing perception of Antarctica as a continent for science. Noting that there have been many ways to imagine and experience Antarctica in the past, and that there are at least as many possibilities for the future, we chart the expansion of humanities scholarship in Antarctica, and what that could mean for our understanding of Antarctica. We also point toward the pedagogical value of deconstructing Antarctica as a continent for science—and the paradox in using the humanities to do so. Finally, the introduction sets out the structure of the book, providing a short overview of the chapters and thematic lines running through them.

Priestley’s progress: the life of Sir Raymond Priestley, Antarctic explorer, scientist, soldier, academician

(No abstract available) Priestley’s progress: the life of Sir Raymond Priestley, Antarctic explorer, scientist, soldier, academician, by Mike Bullock, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017, 197 pp., £38.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-7864- 7805-7

A Forecasting Classic in Hindsight

ence and technology studies (STS), even though the current position of history (of science) within STS may be difficult to decipher. When it comes to meteorology and weather forecasting, Friedman’s themes have been elaborated and his topics written into a larger intellectual context. In 2017 a comprehensive history of meteorology in Norway (1760–2016), Vinden dreier [“The Wind Changes”], was published. Friedman set up a contradiction between the “old” meteorology at the mother institution— the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, established in 1866—and the “new” Bergen School, situated at the regional weather forecasting station. In Vinden dreier, the historians Yngve Nilsen andMagnus Vollset have implicitly questioned whether this dichotomy is correct, and they have emphasized the continuity in meteorological research and Bergen’s connection to the national weather service. Perhaps Friedman, seeking to investigate why concepts that changed meteorology and weather forecasting in theUnited States were developed in Bergen, overlooked a broader disciplinary context over time? Despite some shortcomings, Appropriating the Weather is definitely worth a second look—and the attention of a new generation of readers—thirty years after it was originally published.

Post-colonial Antarctica

This chapter explores how postcolonial perspectives have informed and contributed to ‘critical Antarctic studies’. Shortly after Dodds published an essay in Polar Record entitled ‘Post- colonial Antarctica: an emerging engagement’, leading postcolonial theorists posited the ‘The end of post- colonial theory?’ in the journal PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association). Lambasting postcolonial theory as irrelevant, parochial and Anglo-centric, 1 their piece captured a powerful current of discontent. But for Robert Young, a leading theorist of post- colonialism and author of field- setting introductions to postcolonial theory and practice, such an obituary seemed out of place and time...