Arctic Environmental Modernities by Lill-Ann Körber Scott MacKenzie & Anna Westerståhl Stenport

Author:Lill-Ann Körber, Scott MacKenzie & Anna Westerståhl Stenport
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Nature, Nation, and Conservation

Debates over natural resource extraction on Spitsbergen relied upon a conception of the archipelago’s physical geography as requiring incorporation within wider political and economic geographies. Entrepreneurs and scientists from Europe had envisioned it as a source of raw materials for Northern European economies even by the second half of the nineteenth century, but despite several attempts, nothing had come of these ventures. In the opening years of the 1900s, however, mining industrialists with substantial capital and experience were able to realize their visions. The Spitzbergen Coal and Trading Company, backed by British capital, founded the coal-mining settlement of Advent City in 1905. The following year the American mining entrepreneur John Munro Longyear (1850–1922) established Longyear City (today known as Longyearbyen), which to this day remains the most populous settlement on the archipelago. The success of Longyear’s mining operation spurred companies from Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, and Britain to establish coal mines on Spitsbergen during the decade that followed, envisioning that the mines would supply a growing energy market in the industrializing northern part of Europe. This emergence of the archipelago as a site of economic activity in turn spurred a sense that some form of legal order was required to facilitate effective operations.

The imposition of that order could also be an end in itself. The nineteenth century was an age of nationalism across Europe, including in Norway, which until 1905 was yoked to Sweden through a union with the Swedish crown. A generation before independence, Norwegian politicians were already concerned with making Spitsbergen a Norwegian territory (Berg 1995, 2004). The political maneuvering through which the archipelago became the Norwegian province of Svalbard was framed within a narrative of legitimate Norwegian authority. This narrative demanded knowledge of physical geography to naturalize Norwegian political power. Geological surveys, observations of fauna distribution, and the creation of national parks each contributed to this goal. So did the establishment of mines controlled by Norwegian companies, in several cases initiated by Norwegian geo-scientists (Avango 2005).

The most important figure in this process was Adolf Hoel (1879–1964), who first visited Spitsbergen in 1907. He had excelled in geology at the University of Kristiania under the mentorship of Waldemar Christopher Brøgger, whose stint as professor of geology in Stockholm only strengthened a deep commitment to viewing science as an expression of patriotic attachment to territory (Hestmark 2004). Hoel’s interest in Spitsbergen coincided with Norway’s independence from Sweden in 1905 and a growing feeling in political circles that the archipelago ought to be annexed (Berg 1995, 150–7), but that interest did not translate into funding, even for cartography—a prerequisite for effective administration (Drivenes 2004, 177). The quest to create demand for research on Spitsbergen—and to link that research to Norwegian sovereignty over the archipelago—became the twin themes in the geopolitical narrative that framed Hoel’s career.

Hoel combined a commercial and a scientific gaze upon the environment of Spitsbergen. The coal deposits he discovered in 1907 led to another expedition the following year that combined geology and botany with a private claim to a site Hoel deemed particularly promising (Hoel 1966, 738).

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