Introduction: Arctic Modernities, Environmental Politics, and the Era of the Anthropocene

Abstract

Since its “discovery,” the Arctic has held a longstanding significance as a critical, and exceptional, space of modernity. It has been utilized and imagined as a location where the past, present, and future of the planet’s environmental and geopolitical systems are played out. These imaginations and projections have hit a crescendo in recent years, catalyzed by anthropogenic climate change, accelerating resource extraction, mass tourism, and a heightened global awareness and activism regarding environmental change, indigenous rights, and nature preservation. Arctic Environmental Modernities critically investigates the exceptional status of Arctic environmental discourses and practices by foregrounding the diversity, hybridity, and multiplicity of Arctic modernities, and by nuancing differentiations between sublime “nature,” cultural and vernacular landscapes and cityscapes, and social practices. To this end, the book addresses the rise and conflicted status of Arctic modernities from nineteenth-century European exploration of the Arctic to the present day. Arctic Environmental Modernities provides a framework for examining the continuing role of the explorer mythology in accounts of Arctic modernities, while foregrounding methodologies that contest such a monolithic historiography.