Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene

283 Pages·2017·4.88 MB·English

by  Lill-Ann Körber

Palgrave Studies in
World Environmental History
ARCTIC ENVIRONMENTAL MODERNITIES
From the Age of Polar Exploration
to the Era of the Anthropocene
Edited by Lill-Ann Körber, Scott MacKenzie
and Anna Westerståhl Stenport
Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History
Series Editors
Vinita Damodaran
Department of History
University of Sussex
Brighton, United Kingdom
Rohan D’Souza
Shiv Nadar University
Agra, India
Sujit Sivasundaram
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, United Kingdom
James John Beattie
Department of History
University of Waikato
Hamilton, New Zealand
The widespread perception of a global environmental crisis has stimulated
the burgeoning interest in environmental studies. This has encouraged a
wide range of scholars, including historians, to place the environment at
the heart of their analytical and conceptual explorations. As a result, the
understanding of the history of human interactions with all parts of the
cultivated and non-cultivated surface of the earth and with living organ-
isms and other physical phenomena is increasingly seen as an essential
aspect both of historical scholarship and in adjacent fields, such as the his-
tory of science, anthropology, geography, and sociology. Environmental
history can be of considerable assistance in efforts to comprehend the
traumatic environmental difficulties facing us today, while making us
reconsider the bounds of possibility open to humans over time and space
in their interaction with different environments. This new series explores
these interactions in studies that together touch on all parts of the globe
and all manner of environments including the built environment. Books
in the series will come from a wide range of fields of scholarship, from the
sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The series particularly encour-
ages interdisciplinary projects that emphasize historical engagement with
science and other fields of study.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14570
Lill-Ann Körber • Scott MacKenzie • Anna Westerståhl Stenport
Editors
Arctic Environmental
Modernities
From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the
Anthropocene
Editors
Lill-Ann Körber
Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Scott MacKenzie
Department of Film and Media
Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Anna Westerståhl Stenport
School of Modern Languages
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History
ISBN 978-3-319-39115-1 ISBN 978-3-319-39116-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39116-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957716
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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A
cknowledgments
The editors are grateful to the many people, organizations, and grant-
ing agencies that have supported our work on this project. We benefited
from the opportunity to organize multi-year Arctic programs at the
Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study’s annual conferences
between 2013 and 2016, a project that originated in San Francisco in
2013. The early stages of research that went into this book were pre-
sented at the 2014 “Arctic Modernities” conference in Tromsø, Norway,
and in conversation with Anka Ryall, Henning Howlid Wærp, and
Johan Schimanski of the Arctic Modernities and Arctic Discourses proj-
ects at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. We value the feedback we
received at the Hammarskjöld lecture series at the Nordeuropa-Institut
at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin in 2015. Lill-Ann Körber wishes to
acknowledge the support provided by the Henrik Steffens Professorship at
Humboldt-Universität and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst;
Scott MacKenzie, the Fund for Scholarly Research and Creative Work
and Professional Development, Queen’s University; Anna Westerståhl
Stenport, the European Union Centre of Excellence, the Jean Monnet
Center of Excellence, the Conrad Professorial Humanities Fund, and
the Research Board at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;
and Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport wish to acknowl-
edge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
which provided them with an Insight Grant. We are grateful for the
diligent work undertaken by our research assistants Noelle Belanger,
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Carlo Di-Gioulio, Paul Greiner, and Garrett Traylor, and for the editorial
assistance provided by Angela Anderson. We benefited from the astute
feedback offered by colleagues Verena Höfig, Janke Klok, Mark Safstrom,
and Stefanie von Schnurbein, as well as by our external readers.
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Arctic Modernities, Environmental Politics,
and the Era of the Anthropocene  1
Lill-Ann Körber, Scott MacKenzie, and
Anna Westerståhl Stenport
2 The Disappearing Arctic? Scientific Narrative,
Environmental Crisis, and the Ghosts of Colonial History 21
Andrew Stuhl
3 Petro-images of the Arctic and Statoil’s Visual Imaginary 43
Synnøve Marie Vik
4 Arctic Urbanization: Modernity Without Cities 59
Torill Nyseth
5 Cod Society: The Technopolitics of Modern Greenland 71
Kristian H. Nielsen
6 Re-reading Knut Hamsun in Collaboration
with Place in Lule Sámi Nordlándda 87
Kikki Jernsletten and Troy Storfjell
vii
viii CONTENTS
7 The Polar Hero’s Progress: Fridtjof Nansen, Spirituality,
and Environmental History 107
Mark Safstrom
8 Heritage, Conservation, and the Geopolitics of Svalbard:
Writing the History of Arctic Environments 125
Dag Avango and Peder Roberts
9 Toxic Blubber and Seal Skin Bikinis, or: How Green Is
Greenland? Ecology in Contemporary Film and Art 145
Lill-Ann Körber
10 The Negative Space in the National Imagination: Russia
and the Arctic 169
Lilya Kaganovsky
11 Invisible Landscapes: Extreme Oil and the Arctic
in Experimental Film and Activist Art Practices 183
Lisa E. Bloom
12 Icelandic Futures: Arctic Dreams and Geographies
of Crisis 197
Ann-Sofie Nielsen Gremaud
13 Feminist and Environmentalist Public Governance
in the Arctic 215
Eva-Maria Svensson
14 The Greenlandic Reconciliation Commission:
Ethnonationalism, Arctic Resources, and Post-Colonial
Identity 231
Kirsten Thisted
CONTENTS ix
15 Arctic Futures: Agency and Assessing Assessments 247
Nina Wormbs and Sverker Sörlin
Index 263