Heritage, Conservation, and the Geopolitics of Svalbard: Writing the History of Arctic Environments

Abstract

In their examination of heritage and conservation practices in Svalbard and the Spitsbergen archipelago from the nineteenth-century to today, the authors mobilize the concept of critical geopolitics to show how Arctic localities have been used as instruments of Norwegian nation building, past and present. They argue that the writing of environmental history is never separate from politics or societal and culturally inscribed power structures by which spaces construed as primordial and pristine landscapes become privileged sites for the construction of Arctic ideologies. The establishment of national parks, the construction of mining heritage sites, or the undertaking of settlement archeology all serve such purposes, by which Svalbard becomes an icon of the culturally and politically motivated definitions of “wilderness.”