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

by Laurence C. Smith

  Today, about seventy thousand Sámi live in “Sápmi,” their ancestral homeland stretching across northern Fennoscandia (see map on pp. x-xi). But Sápmi today is chopped up into four bits owned by Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. It is dismembered.

  The Sámi population can never form a single collective political unit within a country, as has happened in Canada and Greenland. Traditional reindeer herding, which moved animals all around Sápmi, is difficult or impossible. Also ethnic Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, and Russians have moved in, bringing industrial development, land privatization, and the loss of grazing and hunting grounds. With four different court systems to navigate, the collective ability of the Sámi to mount legal challenges to such encroachment is dissipated and constrained. And unlike what happened in North America and Greenland, none of the four governments are signaling any possibility of a sweeping land claims agreement, or a new Sápmi state, or individual home rules for each fragment.

  However, there are differences among the four countries. Since 1989 Norway, Sweden, and Finland have introduced elected Sámi parliaments, whereas Russia has not. These parliaments are politically weak, serving mainly as forums and advisors to their central governments, but they do provide a voice for the Sámi. Norway’s parliament, being the oldest and largest, is most consequential of the three.

  Also, when it comes to sticking up for aboriginal rights under international law, Norway is one supportive NORC. It was the first country in the world to ratify International Labour Organization Convention 169, thus committing the Norwegian government to preserving its aboriginal people, cultures, and languages through deliberate action (later, Denmark also ratified this ILO treaty). Norway was also one of five NORCs to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.474 In part to meet its obligations under these laws, Norway passed a sort of pseudo land claims law, called the Finnmark Act, in 2005. While not specific to Sámi people, it did transfer land ownership from the Norwegian government to its largest and northernmost county, where the population is about 34% Sámi.475

  While weak by North American standards the Finnmark Act is about as good as it gets in this part of the world. Similar trends are not apparent in Sweden, Finland, or Russia. None of these countries have ratified ILO Convention 169, nor is there any talk of land claims settlements. In Lapland, Sámi complain of imposters stealing their culture, wearing fake clothes, and butchering their language for tourists.476 The Sámi situation is most depressing in Russia, where a small population of two thousand has little to look forward to.

  Trapped on the Kola Peninsula—the militarized, industrialized heart of the Russian North—they are mostly unemployed with no parliament. What few reindeer herders remain complain of grazing lands privatized and closed, and horrid environmental pollution from mining, smelting, and leaking radiation from old nuclear reactors. Russian soldiers sometimes shoot their animals to eat or for fun.477 Snared in poverty, lacking land tenure, and with no political voice, they are quickly losing their aboriginal language. Of Sápmi’s four fragmented pieces, Russia’s has the most uncertain future.

  The Mi-8 Time Machine

  We thudded over the taiga in an orange Soviet-era Mi-8 helicopter, crammed against one of its little porthole windows. Below us was an endless plain of mossy lakes, cottongrass sedge, and hunched conifers stretching to infinity. My doctoral student Karen Frey murmured from behind a video camera while I wrote notes and GPS coordinates into a pad. Faint reindeer trails splayed here and there across the tundra, but the landscape was motionless. We’d been at it for over half an hour with no sign of life.

  Suddenly the Mi-8’s rotors whined and we were hovering. There were scraping noises up front and men speaking in Russian. The ponderous helicopter slowly eased its bulk onto the ground and a door clanged open. From its cavernous interior white Russian hands produced a burlap sack full of potatoes. From outside, dark, weathered hands reached up to take it.

  We had dropped by the campsite of a Nenets family, one of the largest of several aboriginal reindeer peoples of the Russian North. Their chum, a circular tent halfway between a teepee and yurt, was made of lashed wooden poles and reindeer hides. There were corrals and long sleds with curved wooden runners. Grubby, cute kids were peeking at us. Freshly flayed reindeer skins were drying. The whole place hung with smoke from burning smudge fires. Our Mi-8 wasn’t a helicopter, it was a time machine: The Nenets are one of the last people on Earth still following the ancient practice of moving around with their reindeer.

  Anthropologists, even Russian ones, have long romanticized Siberian scenes like this. But most of Russia’s northern aboriginal people do not lead nostalgic frontier lives out on the land. Instead, they live in gritty, impoverished, multiethnic villages rife with unemployment, alcoholism, and suicide.478 Life expectancies are low. Aboriginal control over outside resource exploitation is virtually nil, as is the amount of royalty they receive when resources are developed. There is no prospect of winning private land title as has transpired in North America,479 and even if there were, under Russian law all subsurface mineral and energy rights still remain with the state. Vastly outnumbered as they are by ethnic Russians, there is no hope for sizable aboriginal political majorities except in small okruga (regions) and raiony (districts). Exceptions, like a tiny pod of Yukagir people who won self-governance in Sakha Republic,480 are rare. With so little political power, even their wild food is constantly under threat by commercial interests. In one recent case, aboriginals of Kamchatka beseeched President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin to halt auction lease sales of their salmon rivers so they wouldn’t starve.481

  Russia’s northern aboriginals don’t have time to debate political governance models or resource revenue-sharing schemes. Their priority is simply retaining access to wildlife and land, and keeping at bay the encroaching industries that would damage them. The Russian anthropologist Aleksandr Pika, who devoted his life to studying northern aboriginals before drowning in a 1995 Bering Sea boat accident, alongside five Eskimos and three Americans, once wrote:

  The numerically small [aboriginal] peoples of the North live on lands rich with oil, natural gas, uranium, tin, timber, and other resources. Society has not yet learned to take these resources without damaging nature. Society cannot live, in fact, without touching these resources. The peoples of the North are often guilty simply in that they live on these lands and their very existence poses problems for the state. Indeed, many feel that without these peoples, there would be no such problems, and that the peoples of the North should understand this, and not complain too loudly or too often.482

  This does not mean that the Russian government, or Russians more generally, care nothing for their aboriginal people. My student and I were sternly admonished to respect the Nenets family’s privacy by not photographing them, and thirteen of the aforementioned Kamchatka commercial salmon leases were, in fact, retracted to protect traditional aboriginal fishing rights. Under old Soviet law, aboriginals had no legal claim to land or its resources, but that has changed somewhat under the Russian Federation. Its 1993 Constitution now mandates that both be protected “as the basis of life and activities of the peoples” who live on them, and holds central and regional governments responsible for protecting “traditional ways of life.” To flesh out these general constitutional requirements, three meatier federal laws specifically addressing aboriginal land rights were adopted in Moscow by 2001.483 Chief among the new reforms is a revival of obshchiny, small group-owned plots of land to which families, clans, or villages can request exclusive use for traditional subsistence.

  It is a well-known adage in Russia that obedience to federal laws is inversely proportional to geographic distance from Moscow. However, these new ones, at least on paper, are a significant advance for aboriginal Russians. While Russia has not yet ratified ILO Convention 169, it is clear that these new laws were written to conform with many of its guidelines. Interestingly, the country’s recent recentralization of
power, begun under Vladimir Putin and reviled by the western press, is good news for Russia’s forty-five officially recognized aboriginal groups: If Moscow demands that the far-off regional governments implement and enforce the new federal laws, these people will be better protected.

  Imagining 2050

  A final and keenly important distinction must be drawn between the emerging new aboriginal policies of North America and Greenland versus those of northern Europe and Russia. While the former do accord value and protections to the traditional cultures of the past, they also seat chairs at the table of the future by devolving political power, land management decisions, and natural resource revenues including oil and gas royalties. But in the Nordic countries and Russia, emerging policies seek to preserve “traditional” cultures and ways of life above all else. Indeed in Russia, demonstrable proof of such activity—raising reindeer, for example, or subsisting by hunting and fishing—is a key requirement for winning aboriginal protections and privileges, including obshchiny. Also, the old Soviet tradition of limiting legal recognition of aboriginal status to populations having fifty thousand or fewer persons has been retained, such that small, scattered aboriginal groups can win these privileges but not large ones. At first blush, such policies sound noble—what’s wrong with trying to protect vanishing ancestral cultures from going extinct? But, as put by the recent Arctic Human Development Report, “one must question the tendency to consider change as a threat to some immemorial ‘tradition’ in discussing indigenous societies, when it is called progress in western societies.”484

  Put bluntly, the Nordic and Russian aboriginal policies encourage the mummification of aboriginal people and their historical practices into bits of living folklore. By not going far enough, the new legal protections—well intentioned and keenly desired by their subjects as they may be—lapse into paternalism, pure and simple. Aboriginals win permission to carry on their ancient ways—to the gratitude of village elders and future anthropologists—but are denied forms of empowerment that matter most for the future: political power, a say over land use and development, a say over environmental protection, and the right to receive royalties from all the natural gas, oil, and minerals that will be plucked from beneath their feet. Their cultures are denied the right to evolve. Instead, they are pickled under a glass bell jar.

  When I try to imagine the role of NORC aboriginals in 2050, I sense two very different scenes unfolding. In the eastern hemisphere, I see fascinating historical enclaves, where people can still carry out ancestral subsistence traditions on the land. Their lives are not so different from today except they have become living museum displays, beset by anthropologists and a global tourist trade. In the western hemisphere, I imagine unprecedented new societies taking hold. They are a unique blend of the old and the new, choosing some parts of traditional culture to retain and others to abandon. People run their business corporations in the morning and go hunting in the afternoon (the ringed seals and polar bears are now protected but harbor seals and salmon are moving in). Pipelines and ports are spreading, natural gas is flowing south, and royalties are flowing north. In Canada, the first university above the sixtieth parallel has been founded.485 The global fleet bristles offshore but the land belongs to them. I see the original stewards of this land taking it back again.

  PART THREE

  ALTERNATE ENDINGS

  CHAPTER 9

  The Pentagon Report

  Our thought experiment so far has been propelled by big drivers, the four global forces of demography, natural resource demand, globalization, and climate change. A fifth—enduring legal frameworks—cropped up in discussions of sovereignty over the Arctic seafloor and the political power of aboriginal peoples. Throughout the book we have stayed within the confines of the following ground rules as stated in the opening chapter:

  No Silver Bullets (incremental and foreseeable advances in technology),

  No World War III (no radical reshuffling of our geopolitics and laws),

  No Hidden Genies (like a global depression, a killer pandemic, a sudden climate change),

  and

  The Models Are Good Enough.

  These overarching drivers and ground rules have served the 2050 thought experiment well to this point. I hope it has kept the book from being shelved in the science fiction sections of bookstores and libraries. The described outcomes are deduced from big trends and tangible evidence already apparent today, rather than political ideology or my wonderful imagination. They favor the likely over the unlikely. I honestly expect, should I live long enough, to see many or all of them materialize within my lifetime.

  In this chapter and the next, let’s step out of the comfort zone a bit. What are some other outcomes these trends could provoke? Are the four forces robust, our ground rules reasonable? If not, how might they surprise us? This chapter explores six less assured, but plausible, developments that could affect some of the big trends presented thus far. Five of them originate in the North, but have global or far-reaching consequences. Let’s begin with climate change, by breaking the ground rules on hidden genies and computer models.

  The Evolution of Climate Models

  The motivation for running climate models is nothing like the motivation for making weather forecasts on the nightly news. Those seek to identify specific events, like a storm front, and are meaningful only a few days into the future. But climate models forecast average climate variables, like mean January temperature, and are meaningful many decades into the future. They do this by taking account of certain things—like deep ocean circulation and increasing greenhouse gas concentrations—that simply don’t matter for short-term weather. It’s not possible to know what the exact temperature will be in Chicago next August 14 or January 2 at three o’clock in the afternoon, but it’s very possible to know what the average August or January temperatures will be. One is weather, the other is climate.

  Climate models are also amazing tools for figuring out how our complex world actually works. Suppose that it is an observed fact that summer rainfall is declining in Georgia, but this phenomenon simply won’t show up in a climate model’s simulations no matter how many times it is run. Puzzled, its programmers realize that something is missing and wonder what it might be. Into the model goes a hypothesis—say, loss of forest (trees pump enormous volumes of water vapor back to the atmosphere), because many trees have been removed to build Atlanta suburbs. Does the model now correctly simulate the measured rainfall decline? If so, congratulations—new scientific understanding has been won about how rainfall works in Georgia, and the climate model has been made more realistic. If not, on to test the next hypothesis down the list. Eventually the missing bit of physics is discovered, the model is improved, and its creators move on to ponder its next little failure.

  At their core, climate modelers seek to understand how the atmosphere functions, and how it responds to changing drivers. By studying when and where the models break down, we improve scientific understanding of how the real world works, and our models become more accurate. After more than fifty years of trial and error, they have now evolved far beyond their primitive ancestors of the 1960s. We’ve learned a great deal about how Earth’s climate system actually operates. In today’s generation of models, complicated things like El Niño and the Hadley Circulation emerge organically without programmers having to “add” them at all. That is very encouraging, because it tells us the models’ assumptions and physics486 are realistic and working correctly.

  The big push now is to hone down climate model spatial resolutions (i.e., the “pixel size” of their simulations) from hundreds of kilometers, useful for broad-scale projections like the ones presented in this book, to kilometers, which is what local planners need. But even at the coarser spatial scale of today’s generation of models, many important conclusions about our future are now well vetted and uncontroversial. All of the megatrends discussed so far—rising global average temperature, the amplified warming in the Arctic, rising winter preci
pitation around the northern high latitudes—fall within this uncontroversial category.

  More troublesome are the short-sellers and inside traders of natural climatic variability. Volcanoes, wildfires, and sunspot cycles are just a few of many phenomena imprinting their own natural variations over the underlying greenhouse gas signal. But now these volatile (and fairly common) phenomena, too, are being added to climate models and tested.

  Where climate models suffer most is in capturing rare events lying totally outside of our modern experience. Most weather stations are less than a century old; the satellite data era began only in the 1960s and ’70s. These records are far too short to illuminate the full range of our Earth’s twitchy behavior. Shifting oceans and ice sheets are key drivers of climate yet contain toggles and circuits with longer patience than our short instrumental records. They add boosts, buffers, and dips to the overall greenhouse effect, so we must understand them as well.

  Unfortunately, a naturally twitchy climate makes the steady, predictable push from anthropogenic greenhouse gases more dangerous, not less. From the geological past we know the Earth’s climate has not always been so quiet as it is now. Therefore, through greenhouse loading we are applying a persistent pressure to a system prone to sudden jumps in ways we don’t fully understand. Imagine a wildcat quietly sleeping on your porch—it looks peaceful but is by nature an ill-tempered, unpredictable beast that might spring into a flurry of teeth and claws in an instant. Greenhouse gases are your knuckles pressing inexorably into its soft slumbering belly; the global ecosystem is your exposed hand and arm.

  Rare or threshold behaviors—like a permanent reorganization of rainfall patterns, accelerated sea-level rise, or a giant burp of greenhouse gas from the ground—all pose legitimate threats to the world. We know they are plausible but, unlike greenhouse gas forcing, don’t know yet how probable. But their behaviors, too, must be added to climate models somehow. Just because something seems unlikely doesn’t mean it won’t happen, or that its impacts are not potentially enormous if it does. These are the climate genies, and we are just beginning to discern the outline of their various sleeping forms. To find them at all, we must turn to the prehistoric past.