New Book Examines the Fight for the Future of the Arctic

 

Fellow political geographer Klaus Dodds and I have just published a new book called "Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic." We’re tremendously grateful to our publisher, Yale University Press, for making the book a reality.

"Unfrozen" examines the twinned geopolitical and ecological crises facing the Arctic, where Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and climate change are both altering the terrain for cooperation and conflict. While the media hones in on the potential for a battle to break out, the region is not simply a battleground for great power projection. It remains a homeland for dozens of Indigenous Peoples, whose cultures, languages, and practices have evolved over millennia to make one of the world’s most inhospitable environments a place of sustenance, shelter, beauty, and hope. And while the Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average, issues dating back to the Cold War, like radioactive waste and decaying nuclear submarines left behind by the Soviet Union, stalk the region, too.

Change has always been a constant in the Arctic, where ice sheets have ebbed and flowed for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet some change is irreversible, at least on human timescales. Sea ice has shrunk to a quarter of its former volume. Fires fanned by a warming atmosphere now blast through ancient boreal forests whose sylvan creatures are migrating north in search of colder pastures. Some of the damage could be reversed if we halt greenhouse gas emissions. Yet as that seems unlikely, a turn towards geoengineering, which we discuss in the book, seems increasingly inevitable.

Klaus and I wrote "Unfrozen" over the past year, submitting our first draft in January 2025. As we raced against the printing deadline, we made countless updates to the text. The second inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump and his desires to annex Greenland threw one obvious wrench in the works. But we also tried to update the manuscript to reflect less bombastic yet still consequential events like Greenland’s election in March 2025 and the deteriorating security and economic situation in the NATO-Russian borderlands, where cross-border trade and exchange have dwindled to shadows of their former selves.

Additionally, as I spent a lot of time traveling in northern Norway, Svalbard, and Greenland in spring 2025 with the support of the Fulbright Arctic Initiative, we made sure to include some recent photographs, such as the one of a Greenland sled dog and her frisky puppies. The book includes 30 color photographs and three maps (all of which I made – and whose mistakes are all my own).

"Unfrozen" is out now. We’ve been delighted to receive some positive reviews from historian Michael Burleigh in The Literary Review and by writer and critic Caroline Eden in Engelsberg Ideas. I also spoke on BBC World Newshour in late September.

Mia Bennett is an associate professor in the University of Washington's Department of Geography. She researches the politics of infrastructure development in the Arctic by combining fieldwork and critical remote sensing.

This article appears courtesy of Cryopolitics and is reprinted in an abbreviated form. The original may be found here.