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Gross Domestic Product, Land Area, and Population of NORCs versus Other Major World Economies

The foundations of this New North run far south of the Arctic Ocean, to global immigrant destinations in Toronto and natural gas markets in Western Europe. They are laid by the global forces of demographics, natural resource demand, globalization, and climate change—together with lesser actors like the shipping industry, UNCLOS, and aboriginal land claims agreements. A broad set of “push” and “pull” forces—physical, ecological, and societal—are set in motion. The changes will unfold along the preexisting bones of geography and history, the legacy of past political decisions, the birth rates and migrations of people. They will be constrained by physical realities like the continental effect, sea ice, thawing ground, and an uneven distribution of natural resources. In many ways, this coming-of-age for a new geographic region is just business as usual in the history of the world. But unlike past human expansions it will probably be orderly, bearing little resemblance to the violence and genocides so common in the past.

In many ways, the New North is thus well positioned for the coming century even as its unique ecosystem is threatened by the linked pressures of hydrocarbon development and amplified climate change. But in a globally integrated 2050 world of over nine billion people, with mounting megatrends of water stress, heat waves, and coastal flooding, what might this mean for motivating renewed human settlement of the region? Extending the thought experiment further, to what extent might a wet, underpopulated, resource-rich, less bitterly cold North promise refuge from some of the bigger pressures described in the first four chapters of this book?

If Florida coasts become uninsurable and California enters a Perfect Drought, might people consider moving to Minnesota or Alberta? Will Spaniards eye Sweden? Might Russia one day, its population falling and needful of immigrants, decide a smarter alternative to a 2,500-kilometer-long Sibaral canal is to simply invite former Kazakh and Uzbek cotton farmers to abandon their dusty fields and resettle in Siberia, to work in the gas fields?

Such questions demand consideration of what makes civilizations work in the first place. In his book Collapse, my UCLA colleague Jared Diamond scours human history to ask the question of why civilizations fail. By studying past collapses like Easter Island and Rwanda, and close calls, like eighteenth-century Japan, he identifies five key dangers that can threaten an existing society. In no particular order, they are self-inflicted environmental and ecosystem damage, loss of trading partners, hostile neighbors, adverse climate change, and how a society chooses to respond to its environmental problems. Any one of these, Diamond argues, will stress an existing settlement. Several or all combined will tilt it toward extinction.

Turning the question around, what causes new civilizations to grow? My approach suggests that first and foremost will be economic incentive, followed by willing settlers, stable rule of law, viable trading partners, friendly neighbors, and beneficial climate change. No one of these alone is enough to spawn a major new settlement, but several or all combined might tilt one into existence, or encourage existing outposts to grow.

At first blush all eight NORC countries fulfill these requirements to some degree. Save Russia, they rank among the most trade-friendly, economically globalized, law-abiding countries in the world. Whether a boon or a curse,535 they control a valuable array of coveted natural resources. Already, they enjoy more petitions from prospective migrants than they can or will absorb. Media hype about Arctic scrambles notwithstanding, they are friendly neighbors. Their winters will always be frigid, but less bitterly so than today. Biomass will press north, including some increased agricultural production in contrast to the more uncertain futures facing