Wisdom of affect? Emotion, environment, and the future of resource extraction

Abstract

The “Arctic Uchronotopias” special issue of Polar Record is an important contribution to scholarly reflection on resource extraction. The ideas, perspectives, and empirical cases that we encounter have significance for extractivism wherever it takes place, both inside and outside of the Arctic region. To see extractivism through an Arctic lens is particularly useful since it brings up many of the issues that are often at stake in extraction activities, but not always at the same time: geopolitics, transboundary relations, environmental and climate impacts, cultural and natural heritage, indigenous relations, rights issues, local and regional development, and lives and fates of communities. Above all, these papers bring out the full spectrum of issues and tensions related to ongoing major global shifts, such as the Great Acceleration and Overheating, and those transformations of which resource extraction forms a major part. The research presented in Arctic Uchronotopias demonstrates that affect and emotions have explanatory value in the geopolitics of Arctic resource extraction. It also shows that emotional and cognitive experience and wisdom carry values and properties that conventional Environmental Impact Assessments and other technologies of evaluation and decision-making can capture.

The trouble with local community in Longyearbyen, Svalbard: Howbig politicsand lack offellesskaphinder a not-yet-decided future

“…In the circumpolar setting, Longyearbyen bears some similar traces as communities in Greenland, northern Canada or northern Fennoscandia struggling with the pains of boom and bust cycles. Shared elements include replacing or combining mining with tourism and research, experiencing the ambiguous impacts of both environmental destruction and protection, and other issues where rationality meets emotions (Sörlin, 2021). Threatened Indigenous livelihoods due to climate change impacts combined with globalised markets (often a problem documented in Arctic anthropology, shown e.g.…”

The figure of the guide: arctic nature guiding as productive behaviour on Svalbard

“…There exists already an established recognition of the experiential worth and “client value” of the tourist guide’s dramaturgical skills (Røkenes et al, 2015) and a wider debate on the role of interpretation in guiding (see Reisinger & Steiner, 2006). But concerned with a creation model of mediation, the ANG guide displayed agency in “value-based” as a common, and communalising, process towards knowing differently; this functions through an evocation of perceptive sensibilities that resonates with increasing attempts to recognise the value of affect and emotions in Arctic geopolitics (Sörlin, 2021) while exploring multiple epistemic authorities (Brattland et al, 2018).…”

Resource Extraction and Arctic Communities

“…It is a modus operandi that is especially hard to deal with since it also brings profit to the exploiters and wealth and sovereignty to states. Historically, it has until recently been considered largely virtuous, pragmatically useful, and underpinned by a comprehensive framework of legal and economic principles and institutions (Sörlin, 2021a).…”