The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

If not for their uneconomic, market-forces-be-damned decision to develop a remote Arctic swamp half a continent away from Moscow, you’d surely be paying a lot more than you just did.
    The West Siberian Lowland is a vast, soggy plain bounded by the Ural Mountains in the west and the Yenisei River in the east and from 52° to 73° N latitude. It spans nearly one thousand miles in every direction, is one-third the area of the continental United States, and nearly six times larger than Germany. Weather alternates between a long subzero polar night in winter and dank mosquito heaven in summer. It is blanketed in wet, semifrozen peat and covered with lakes; its northern half is permanently frozen in permafrost. The fate of this frozen, carbon-rich peat, which is relatively fresh (<12,000 years old), is discussed in Chapter 9. But trapped in the rocks below the peat, thousands of feet down, we find another form of carbon that is considerably older. It is the cooked remains of twenty-three trillion tons of organic-rich muck that settled to the bottom of a long-gone sea between 152 and 146 million years ago. That muck is now called the Bazhenov Shale, 404 and it has changed not only Russia but the entire world.

Imagining 2050
    Our thought experiment has gained human texture. Against a global backdrop of rising material wealth, environmental stress, and total human population, we find the likelihood of smaller, flourishing cultures growing amid the milder winters and abundant natural resources packed into the northern quarter of the planet. From all indications these resources can and will be divided peacefully between nations, and global market forces allowed to exploit them. While Russia’s population is contracting, she reigns supreme in the economic potential of her enormous northern holdings of natural gas. In all other NORC countries populations are growing, led especially by the United States and immigrant-friendly Canada, with a growth rate very near that of India.
    Key settlements and physical infrastructure exist already, but their geography and quality vary widely. North America is efficient but condensed, Russia remote but far-reaching. Best developed are the Nordic countries: Perpetually warmed by the North Atlantic Current, they have extensive high-quality roads and rail, stable governance systems, and towns, ports, companies, and universities already in place, stretching from their southern capitals all the way north to the remote Arctic.
    Global immigration explains most of the projected population growth around the Northern Rim. But it is flowing into the larger cities, to places like Stockholm and Toronto, Fort McMurray and Anchorage. These are urban outposts in the midst of beautiful, expansive wilderness. Who will rule the rest?

CHAPTER 8
    Good-bye Harpoon, Hello Briefcase
“The foundation of our culture is on the ice, the cold, the snow.”
    —Sheila Watt-Cloutier (1953-)

“Inuvialuit are a proud and adaptable people. We wouldn’t have lasted for so many generations . . . if we weren’t.”
    — Nellie J. Cournoyea (1940-)

    “M EIDÄN ELÄMÄ ON AINA VAIHTUNUT,” said my host, rapping the rustic wooden corral fence with gnarled hands for emphasis. I eagerly returned my eyes to my new Finnish translator—perhaps too eagerly. She was gorgeous and something was definitely in the air. I didn’t know it yet, but just six weeks later we would agree to get married.
    “She says, ‘We’re always changing.’”
    “Hm? Oh, yes. Ask her to elaborate.”
    In my defense, I might have been distracted from the interview no matter who was translating. What I was hearing from my subject, a fiftyish Sámi reindeer herder in Lapland, was quickly turning into what I’d already heard in many other interviews around the Northern Rim. It was fast becoming clear to me that the perspective I’d carried into this project would need to be broadened considerably.
    I had come up here—I thought—to write a book about