The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [129]
It remains to be seen if China’s ongoing South-to-North Water Diversion will rekindle humanity’s past passion for massive water projects. Given the enormous obstacles—financial, environmental, and political—I am skeptical that any of these north-to-south water transfer megaprojects will materialize by 2050. But of the ones described here, Sibaral is the most developed. Central Asia is getting very, very dry, and its population is growing. Unlike the North American schemes, something about this project refuses to die. Despite serious likely environmental damages, it really could happen one day.
Regardless of whatever water engineering schemes are or are not undertaken by 2050, one thing remains clear. When it comes to water, the NORCs will be the envy of the world.
CHAPTER 10
The New North
Within hours after the CCGS Amundsen docked at Churchill, my life had changed completely. After months of railroads through desolate boreal forest, long empty coastlines, and the cold salt air of Hudson Bay, I sank back into the smog-choked din of my sweating desert megacity. It was familiar but surreal, exhilarating but perturbing, all at once—in short, the typical reaction most Arctic scientists have at summer’s end when they migrate from north to south, like overeducated birds, to reintroduce themselves to society.
What makes coming home so jarring, compared to other returns from other exotic places—isn’t simply culture shock. It’s human shock, seeing so many people again after dwelling in a place so empty of them. Even Iowa farmlands seem crowded after one has steamed for days along the Labrador coast or flown hundreds of miles overland, seeing virtually no trace of humans. To experience true northern solitude is both spooky and thrilling, like being time-warped to another planet without us. The question is how many more years things will remain like this.
The number of people wishing to visit, exploit, or simply become informed about the Arctic grows larger every year. The count of prospective students contacting me to pursue graduate degrees has leapt from none to dozens per year. At annual conventions of the American Geophysical Union, research presentations about the Arctic now overflow giant convention halls where before there was a tiny room of lifers talking only to each other. Some ten thousand scientists and fifty thousand participants from sixty-three countries participated in the 2007-2o09 International Polar Year.
Research and development spending is rising too. The U.S. National Science Foundation alone now funnels nearly a half-billion dollars annually toward polar research, more than double what it did in the 1990s. I wish that this trend meant winning a research grant was half as hard, but with so many new young scientists around, they are more competitive than ever. Global investments in the International Polar Year totaled some USD $1.2 billion. NASA and the European Space Agency are developing new satellites to map and comprehend the polar regions as never seen before. NASA’s investment alone will likely reach USD $2 billion by the middle of this decade.529
Thanks to heavy media coverage, images of drowned polar bears, bewildered Inuit hunters, and satellite maps of shrinking sea ice are now commonplace in people’s minds. In a remarkably short span of years these phenomena have changed the world’s perception of the Arctic from unconquerable ice fortress, to militarized zone buffering two nuclear superpowers, to frail ecosystem on the verge of collapse (or business bonanza, depending on one’s point of view). A place perceived as a maritime graveyard and killer of men even into the 1980s is now perceived as dissolving into a frontier ocean, laden with natural-resource riches for the taking. With so few actual Arctic residents around to protest these frames, all of them have been freely cemented into public consciousness by the words and images of their times.
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