Book review: The Future History of the Arctic

AS THE world warms, and the ice of the Arctic Ocean dwindles, the belt of frozen land that rings the sea at the top of the world is going to warm faster than almost anywhere else, with results ranging from interesting to cataclysmic, depending on how many of the triggers for further rapid change the process ends up pulling.

One way or another, the Arctic is going to figure much larger in human affairs than it has until now.

That's the prospect that prompts this book – but despite the title, it's not the place to go for visions of quaking Alaskan permafrost in 2030, or an ice-free North Pole thronged with Russian gas rigs in 2100, or rippling Greenlandic wheat fields in 3000. You could organise the different scenarios for the Arctic future in probability bands: this, if we stick at two degrees of warming, this for four degrees, this for the roasting disaster of six. It isn't what Charles Emmerson wants to do. Disappointingly, he defines "future history" as the history of futures rather than the future of history. Here, yesterday leads not to tomorrow but to today's "motivations, hopes, fears and ambitions" for the Arctic.

He tells the histories in question with wit and verve. His reach is enormous, as it needs to be, for Arctic history is a Scandinavian story and an Inuit story, a Canadian and a Russian and an American one. Emmerson carries us more or less right around the circumpolar landscape, datelining different instalments everywhere from Murmansk to Nuuk, and gathering as he goes, fistfuls of different perceptions and grand strategies.

There's room here for the details of 19th-century Canadian election results and for Shell's problems on Sakhalin island in the 1990s, for Icelandic investment bankers and for Finnish icebreaker design. For once, there's room too for a gigantic factor often pushed to the margins of polar history: the awe-inspiringly inhumane, deliberately anti-ecological Soviet programme for the development of the Arctic. "Let the fragile green beast of Siberia be dressed in the concrete armour of cities", he quotes. If you want a lucid, readable briefing on Arctic history, underpinned by excellent research, this is the book for you.

The problem comes when he approaches not even the future but the present. Everywhere he goes, he has astonishing access, and from the point of view of the book it proves to be a bit of a curse, his very own literary version of the "resource curse" of abundant oil. He writes as an insider who expects to go on being an insider – he's a geopolitics wonk for the World Economics Forum – and when he interviews key players in the business or politics of the Arctic, he reports what they say with a wary, deeply hedged tactfulness that files off any sharp edges that might give offence. Global warming in the Arctic, he tells us cautiously, "will involve both tragedy and success, destruction and innovation, risk and opportunity and, for better or worse, losers and winners".

For better or worse, in fact, the book ends up adhering to a sort of CEO's eye-view of the world, a relief map of the northern end of the globe as it might look from the perspective of Davos. It is not very interested in actual geology or the actual science of permafrost. It can be sharply sceptical about the likely balance sheet for some particular project, like the proposal to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska, but on the whole it only registers the possibility for controversy over development. It doesn't really explore it; it takes it essentially for granted that what pays will happen. Place features as the changing backdrop of business travel, people are viewed in the lens of executive expectation. No doubt it is notable that the chief exec of Greenland's new national oil company doesn't wear "a dark grey suit or a pair of hand-crafted $2,000 brogues" – yet, after all, not wearing $2,000 shoes is also the normal experience of mankind.