The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

by Laurence C. Smith

  Extraction industries will favor projects nearer the water. Looking ahead, our northern future is one of diminishing access by land, but rising access by sea. For many remote interior landscapes, the perhaps surprising prospect I see is reduced human presence and their return to a wilder state.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Third Wave

  “Canada: A few acres of snow.”

  —Voltaire (1694-1778)

  Number One ($596 billion per year)

  —Rank of Canada among U.S. trading partners (2008)

  The preceding chapters imagine a 2050 world in which global population has grown by nearly half, forming crowded urban clots around the hot lower latitudes of our planet. Mighty new poles of economic power and resource consumption have risen in China, India, and Brazil. People are urban, grayer, and richer. Many places are water-stressed, uninsurable, or battling the sea. Some have abandoned irrigated farming altogether; their cities rely totally on global trade flows of energy and virtual water to even exist.

  We have a diverse basket of new energy sources but still rely heavily upon fossil fuels. Natural gas is especially lucrative and under aggressive development in all corners of the world. Among these is the Arctic Ocean, where investment capital is flowing north as the peaceful settlement of seafloor claims, diminished sea ice, new maritime port facilities, and specialized LNG tankers have made offshore gas extraction increasingly economic. The NORCs’ relative water riches are envied by all. Milder winters have encouraged billions of southern organisms to press northward, including us. But in remote continental interiors, many small villages and extraction industries have been abandoned, even as new ones flourish along the coast.

  These broad pressures and trends portend great changes to the northern quarter of our planet, making it a place of higher human activity and strategic value than today. But history tells us that the pace and pattern of human expansion will not be uniform. There are many differences among the NORC countries, like steep temperature contrasts and an uneven geography of natural resources. Disparities abound in their historical patterns of settlement and infrastructure. Demographic trajectories, and national views on foreigners and aboriginal rights, vary greatly. The decisions of past political leaders on how to develop their frontiers still carry legacy today, as do current attitudes toward economic globalization and trade.

  How much do these different preexisting conditions across northern countries matter? Many of the global and regional forces described thus far will be shaped by them. Their contrasts bring finer detail to the broad outlines of the 2050 thought experiment drawn thus far, and are the subject of this chapter and the next.

  Quick! Hazard a guess: Of the following six countries, which has the fastest population growth rate out to 2050—China, Brazil, Canada, Iceland, Mexico, or Norway?

  If you picked China, Brazil, or Mexico you guessed wrong. In terms of percent growth (not sheer numbers) you may be surprised to learn that none even makes the top three. Canada, Iceland, and Norway are all growing faster with population increases of 20% or more expected by 2050 (see table on page 173). Their base populations are much smaller of course—the sum total of people living in these three countries today is half that of Germany—but there is no disputing their extraordinary rate of growth.

  The model projections tell us that by 2050 human populations will be larger in all of the NORC countries except one. The glaring exception is Russia, where falling births, rising deaths, and an aging population promise a precipitous decline of nearly one in five people. Of the NORCs, Russia alone joins Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Italy as a population loser by 2050. But even with 24 million fewer Russians, the total population of the eight NORC countries is still projected to rise by 76 million people (+15%). Most of this will be driven by growth in the United States (+86 million, with perhaps +15 million in northern states389) and Canada (+11 million), with nearly +3 million more arriving in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland.

  Some Population Densities and Trajectories 2010-2050

  (Source: United Nations Population Division)

  Where will all these new people live? Outside of Europe, the NORCs control most of the land areas lying north of the forty-fifth parallel. Excluding the Greenland Ice Sheet, this is over forty million square kilometers of land, more than quadruple the area of the lower forty-eight U.S. states. By my calculations390 roughly fourteen million square kilometers—about one and one-half times the size of the United States or China—are quite livable. Might these be the lands into which new settlements will spread?

  The First Waves

  Actually, they already have. The forty-fifth parallel does miss Toronto, Canada’s largest city, but captures virtually all of the rest of Canada, plus a row of northern U.S. states from Minnesota to Washington. The cities of Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Ottawa, and Montreal are all contained within the planet’s northern quarter of latitude. Tracing the forty-fifth parallel farther east, we see it snares all of Germany and the United Kingdom, and indeed much of Europe, including the cities of Paris, Brussels, and Budapest. Looking still farther east, it swallows Russia, most of Mongolia, and a good chunk of northeast China, including the city of Harbin.

  To the north, we find that even the harshest Arctic hinterlands have long been occupied (albeit thinly). The first people to see the Arctic Ocean were probably Mongolic, reaching the northern coast of what is now Russia by thirty to forty thousand years ago, if not sooner.391 By at least fourteen thousand years ago, their descendants had crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska. From there, groups spread south and east across North America, some reaching eastern Canada and Greenland by about forty-five hundred years ago. A later wave of Mongolic invaders again swept across Arctic Canada to Greenland, supplanting the first. The ancestors of today’s Aleut, Yupik, Inuit, Chipewyan, Dogrib, Gwich’in, Slavey, Cree, Nenets, Khanty, Komi, Dolgan, Evenk, Yakut, Chukchi, Tlingit, and many others migrated and grew. Our circumpolar colonization was nearly complete.

  Northern Europe got a later start because it was buried under an ice sheet. But after the glaciers retreated it was invaded and reinvaded many times, beginning about twelve thousand years ago. From genetic studies it appears that its most ancient occupants today are the Sámi and Karelians of northern Scandinavia and northwestern Russia.392 A second clue comes from linguistics: Today’s Sámi and Karelians (and Finns and Estonians) speak derivatives of Finno-Ugric, predating the arrival of Germanic (Swedish and Norwegian), Baltic (Latvian and Lithuanian), and Slavic (Russian) Indo-European languages in the region. This is why Swedes, Norwegians, and Icelanders today can sort of understand each other whereas Sámi and Finnish sound like pure gibberish to them and also to Russians. The last bits of undiscovered land—Iceland and the Faroe Islands—weren’t colonized until the Vikings found them in the ninth century A.D.

  Next came more waves of expansion and rediscovery. French and British trappers and traders arrived in the New World; Russian Cossacks surged east through Siberia all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries almost three million Scandinavians emigrated to the American Midwest and rural Canada. Today, there are Nigerians moving to Fort McMurray, Iraqis to Stockholm, Filipinos to Yellowknife, and Azerbaijanis to Noril’sk. There are growing cities, guest-worker programs, and multinational corporations. As I drove across the Arctic Circle in my rental car, just a few hours north of Fairbanks, it was with a Starbucks Venti latte still clutched in my hand. The latest invasions have begun.

  So, unlike the Arctic Ocean seafloor, even our northernmost landmasses are hardly a vacant frontier. Siberia has thirty-five million people, most living in million-plus cities. Canada and Alaska share thirty-four million, the Nordic countries twenty-five million. However, we are still talking about some of the lowest population densities on Earth, especially in Canada and Russia with only three and eight people per square kilometer, respectively (see preceding table). If all Cana
dians could be airlifted from their cities and sprinkled uniformly across the country, every man, woman, and child would get their own eighty-two-acre spread. The same exercise in China would yield less than two acres per person; in India less than one.393 But no landscape on Earth is settled uniformly like that. We concentrate in specific places for specific reasons—for arable soil, at strategic trading crossroads, along rivers, and so on. Physical limitations have always influenced human settlement patterns in the past, and they will continue to do so in the future. Obviously, one of the biggest limitations on human settlement in these northern areas has always been the cold.

  The Uneven Cold

  As a general rule the higher the latitude the more severe the cold (and seasonality, of course)—and the fewer the people. However, being near an ocean does change things. Thanks to the geography of continents and the sluggish, heat-carrying thermal properties of water, air temperatures do not simply vary from south to north, or from low elevation to high, but also with distance from a westerly ocean.394

  Take, for example, the line of 45° N latitude defined earlier. On the Pacific coast of Oregon, the average January daytime temperature along this line is 52°F. Moving east through the Montana-Wyoming border, South Dakota, and Minneapolis it tumbles to 22°F. Temperatures persist in the low twenties through Green Bay, Wisconsin (home of the Packers), Ottawa (20°F), and Montreal (22°F) but leap abruptly for ship captains on the Atlantic Ocean, thanks to the Gulf Stream current and its north-flowing extensions that carry warm water north all the way from the tropics. Their heat warms 45° N’s land-fall on a beach in southern France (49°F) and lingers for a while over western Europe. But by Milan (40°F) the warm touch is fading again, and by Stavropol, Russia (25°F), it is gone. Tracing the January averages along this single line of latitude, we found temperature swings of over thirty degrees!

  This is the so-called continental effect, in which the interiors of continents experience colder winters and hotter summers with distance from a major ocean, especially on their eastern halves.395 The continental effect helps create the numbing cold of the “Siberian Curse” described in Chapter 5, and the southerly dip of permafrost in eastern Canada and eastern Russia. It is what forces people living in Ottawa to bundle into parkas in winter, while due east in Milan they get by with light jackets and fashionable scarves. It is an important reason why the northern penetration of human settlements has been greater in western Canada than eastern Canada, and in western Russia than eastern Russia. Together with heat from the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current, it explains why most of the Eurasian population north of 45° N is piled onto the western end of the continent, and thus the historical agrarian settlement pattern of Europe.

  The Coastal and Lowland Imperative

  Another important consideration for human settlement patterns, especially in cold places, is terrain.396 Even prehistoric nomadic hunters, who worried little about permafrost or crop yields, preferred low-lying valleys and coasts.

  The reason again is temperature. High elevations are colder than low elevations, and usually more rugged too. As a general rule of thumb, air temperatures fall roughly 6.5°C for each kilometer of increased elevation (18.8°F per mile). Thus, high-elevation ground is colder. It allows permafrost to exist farther south than it otherwise would in the mountains of Norway, the mountain cordillera of western Canada, and on the Tibetan Plateau. In Russia east of the Yenisei River, high elevation compounds the continental effect, making these lands among the coldest on Earth. They are deeply frozen in permafrost, useless for agriculture, and frighteningly cold in winter. In North America, temperatures grow colder mainly from south to north, but in Russia, it’s from west to east.

  For these and other reasons the northern high latitudes have never been a strong draw for southern settlers. Their extreme seasonality makes for a short (if intense) growing season. Abundant water and hot summers create a moist haven for hordes of mosquitoes. The freshly scoured landscape, exposed only since the last ice age, has poorly developed soils. Biological richness is low and essentially still colonizing since the glaciers’ retreat. It’s not surprising, therefore, that our past historical expansions have left vast northern land areas only lightly touched.

  In Canada, most French and British colonial settlements hugged southern coastlines and rivers. Farms would later spread across her low, flat prairies, bracketed by rugged mountains to the west and rocky Precambrian crystalline shield to the east. All of Alaska’s major settlements are either in low-elevation terrain, along the coast, or both. Norway’s long-axis mountain spine crowded its settlements along its shores where grew societies of fishermen, explorers, and (now) offshore oil and gas drillers. Sweden, Finland, and northwestern Russia, in contrast, are low-elevation and permafrost-free. They have been widely settled since prehistory and their reindeer-herding, dairy, and cool-weather agricultural societies count among the oldest in Europe.

  Given all this, it took prospects of financial gain to attract nonnative settlers to remote northern areas. In the ninth century seafaring Vikings—ancestors of today’s Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes—variously plundered or settled Russia, Greenland, Canada, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. The (re)discovery of North America attracted French and British trappers and traders who penetrated across Canada in search of beaver. From Siberia came the call of sable fur. After defeating the Khan near modern-day Tobol’sk, Russian Cossacks swept three thousand miles east from the Urals all the way to the Pacific Ocean in 1697, completing the Russian version of “manifest destiny” a full century and a half before the United States did. Their legacy was a system of remote outposts where Russian fur traders and missionaries interacted with dozens of aboriginal groups. It took gold discoveries to bring new rushes of people to the Yukon and Alaska. Some remained after, commingling with the existing aboriginal population to grub out frontier lives as miners, trappers, and small farmers. That was pretty much how the situation remained, until the Second Wave.

  If expansions of early settlement were shaped by climate, terrain, and gold, in the twentieth century they were shaped by politics and war. Two major transformations happened that altered huge areas of the Northern Rim forever. The first was Joseph Stalin’s decision to grow the Gulag, a vast network of thousands of forced-labor work camps and exile towns across Russia between 1929 and 1953. The second was the decision of the U.S. Army to invade western Canada during the depths of World War II.

  The Second Wave: Stalin’s Plan and the U.S. Occupation of Canada

  Even before Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States was worrying about how to defend Alaska. It was impossibly remote, reachable only by ships or air, with no road connecting it to the rest of the country. Meanwhile, Hitler’s armies were devouring Europe, and Japan’s advance across Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands seemed unstoppable. From Washington, the view of the entire northwestern corner of North America—not just Alaska but western Canada as well—was of a broad soft flank, completely vulnerable to an overland invasion by Japan.

  Bases were thrown up in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and the Aleutian Islands and several thousand troops rushed to them. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, American fears went into overdrive and a deal was struck between Washington and Ottawa: Canada would allow the U.S. Army to develop her frontier and connect it to Alaska, so long as everything was turned over to her after the war. The U.S. military-industrial machine swung into gear and selected its beachhead, a sleepy Canadian farm town called Dawson Creek, at the end of a minor western spur line for Northern Alberta Railways.

  In March 1942 the residents of Dawson Creek got the shock of their lives. The train arrived, but instead of bringing the expected dry goods and furniture, it was loaded with heavy equipment and work crews of the U.S. Army. They had come to carve a fifteen-hundred-mile-long emergency road through uncharted wilderness—through British Columbia and the Yukon, connecting Dawson Creek all the way to Fairbanks—in under a year.

  Canada’s
government watched from Ottawa as the U.S. Army opened up her western frontier. Forty thousand American soldiers and civilian contractors poured into a vast wilderness of forest and bog, a place with no roads and hardly any settlements. It was home to fewer than five thousand Canadians, mostly aboriginal hunter-gatherers.

  Dawson Creek became the gateway of what would eventually be called the Alaska Highway. To ferry supplies, dozens of new airfields were cut into the wilderness to form the Northwest Staging Route, later used to shuttle some ten thousand American-built airplanes—painted with the Soviet red star—to Alaska, where they were handed over to Russian pilots.397 Another six-hundred-mile road and pipeline were built to bring crude oil south from fields at Norman Wells. Yet another road was built to link the new highway to the Alaskan port of Haines. The old gold rush town of Whitehorse had a new population explosion and sprouted pipelines running north and south. A telephone network was built, together with new shipping facilities along the Mackenzie River. Through immense manpower and treasure, the United States had opened up another country’s wilderness and connected Alaska by road to the rest of the continent.398

  The same thing was going on elsewhere in the Northern Rim. A major airport and base were built in Keflavík, Iceland, and more than thirty thousand troops kept there during and after the war. That facility is now Iceland’s international airport. Another built at Sondre Stromfjord is now Greenland’s international airport; the American-built road there is now the longest in the country. Another airport in northern Greenland (Thule Air Base) is still retained by the U.S. military and is now the northernmost air base for the United States.