The Circumpolar North : Marginal or Global?

  While many New Yorkers share widespread southern stereotypes of the north as a marginal icy wilderness populated by intrepid explorers, stoic Eskimo living in snow houses and other characters from a Jack London novel, current reality is far different. The circumpolar north includes not only the high arctic, but also the cold but productive and historically critical waters of the North Pacific and North Atlantic, the majority of the territory of the rapidly changing Russian Federation, and a large part of the Scandinavian world. The arctic has been a key area for American science since the 18^th century, and NY scholars have been involved in northern research for many years. The founder of Anthropology in the US, Franz Boas, did some of his best work among the Inuit of the central arctic before taking up his post at Columbia University. The American Museum of Natural History holds some of the most important northern archaeological and ethnographic collections in the world, CUNY scholars have decades of northern field experience, and New York’s active Explorer’s Club (Peary & Kane Lodge) keeps alive the longstanding connection of this city with northern research and exploration. New York thus has a proud tradition of involvement in northern science and education, and this is a particularly favorable moment to bring CUNY to the fore-front of northern research and education.

  In recent years, the circumpolar north has moved from being a zone of military confrontation during the cold war to a center for large-scale international cooperation. As Global Change concerns spread, there has been a widespread scientific recognition that the north is a key part of the globe for monitoring major changes in temperature, marine and atmospheric circulation, green house gases, pollution spread, and ozone depletion. There has been a florescence of northern science initiatives and organizations (ARCUS, IASC, IASSA, PALE, GISP, GRIP,ITEX etc.) and large amounts of grant money have flowed northwards as a result. ARCUS (Arctic Consortium of the US) is a special consortium of US universities and centers formed in 1987, and it has been formidably successful in capturing Federal and international funding for northern research since (www: arcus.org). The US National Science Foundation maintains a separate Office of Polar Programs (OPP), with a large and heavily funded Arctic Section- no other part of the globe rates a special geographically defined section within NSF. Northern social science has also undergone a renaissance, aided by a new NSF OPP Arctic Social Science program. Community revitalization movements, Northern Native activism, rapid social change, and the emergence of self-governing northern provinces in Canada (Nunavut) and Greenland (Kalaaliit Nunaata) and native corporations in Alaska all demonstrate the social dynamism of a region marked more by oil rigs and computer aided classrooms than by snow houses. Environmental change concerns have stimulated coordinated interdisciplinary work on the long term record of human-environmental interaction, and Historical Ecology in the north is a particulary active field. The new multi-centered international educational initiative University of the Arctic has just voted to include the successful CUNY field school in Iceland in its program, and is inviting our further participation. CUNY is already involved in the region, and CUNY staff have already received over $1.4 million in external funding for northern projects.

We are global - not marginal, and we can play a strongly positive role in CUNY’s future.