Against decline? The geographies and temporalities of the Arctic cryosphere

Abstract

Over centuries, Western desires of Arctic space have consistently worked to render icy locales of the North legible to an audience further south. In non‐Indigenous reportage, the Arctic has been framed through a dominating lens that narrates it as a ‘natural region’ or cryosphere where elemental qualities such as cold, ice, snow and darkness reign supreme. The cryosphere is often overwhelmingly dissected and demarcated not by Indigenous historical and ongoing claims to space, but instead through the documented presence of particular biota as they correlate to lines of latitude and/or cold temporalities (e.g., ‘frozen for most of the year’). New descriptors such as ‘Atlantification’ are the latest in a line of tropes and descriptors being used to account and audit an Arctic that is said to be undergoing fundamental ‘declinist’ state‐change. Judged to be no longer satisfactorily described as a circumpolar region, rigidly defined by coldness north of the Arctic Circle, the Arctic's physical and environmental qualities are now being cultivated as a ‘new Arctic’. Ice and cold are fundamental to the everyday working and spiritual lives of northern communities. We argue that there are timely opportunities for ice humanities scholars to be mindful of enduring inhumanities in the sense of erasing/dispossessing those who inhabit worlds where there are co‐relationalities with ice, multi‐species relationships, and multiple spatialities, seasonalities and temporalities that do not pivot around Euro‐American/global framings of time and space, geopolitical worlding and extractive capitalism.

Imagining Himalayan Glacial Futures

“…As knowledge controversies like THED and 'Glaciergate' show us, international bodies like the IPCC -based in the Global North -scale up environmental crisis, fl attening regional diversity of knowledge and experience. Such hegemonic narratives of environmental crisis, when co-opted by Euro-American actors and institutions (Dodds and Smith 2022;Paprocki 2021), further neo-colonial policies and programmes that privilege techno-managerial and market-based responses to climate change . In the Himalayas, disciplines like scientifi c forestry and conservation biology greatly infl uenced climate change (mal)adaptation strategies, like ideas of fortress conservation in THED where local communities were seen as obstacles to the effi cient and rational organisation of nature (Guthman 1997).…”

“…An implication of this insight is to proceed with caution and concern, when engaging in debates around Himalayan glacial melt. We do not want to err on the side of 'climate reductionism' (Hulme 2009) or an apocalyptic imaginary (Dodds and Smith 2022;Swyngedouw 2010) that sees Himalayan glacial loss as a fait accompli because by inviting such foregone conclusions we risk losing ourselves entirely to our growing climate change anxieties while foreclosing the possibility for Himalayan glaciers to exhibit unexpected vitality. In addition to the emotional toll of the anxious 'cultural imaginary' of an iceless future ( Jackson 2015: 489), such a position makes it harder to hear, and to examine, the data that might temper or expand our anthropological visions of environmental futures (O'Reilly et al 2020).…”

Imperialism, colonialism, and climate change science

“…189–190) explain this phenomenon in the case of ice cores, suggesting that “only certain societies have been enrolled” into discussions of what ice cores can tell us about climate history. Jen Rose Smith and Klaus Dodds take this contention further, arguing that global stories of past and present climate change told from ice cores can risk assisting efforts to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and livelihoods in the Arctic (Dodds & Smith, 2022; Smith, 2020). This is an apposite point at which to hand over from an overview of how imperialism and colonialism have shaped climate change science historically to the burgeoning literature exploring the relationship between Indigenous knowledge and climate science today (Smith & Sharp, 2012; van Bavel et al, 2022).…”