Heather N. Nicol is Professor in the Department of Geography at Trent University, Canada.
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Natural News, State Discourses
& The Canadian Arctic
Heather N. Nicol
This article seeks to show how state-centred geopolitical rationales develop, shift and change, using a case study of
media depictions of the Canadian Arctic. The author first examines popular conceptions and issues of Arctic issues as
conveyed to southern Canadians through news articles in 1970-79, 1989, 1999 and 2009, and then highlights and
deconstructs recurring and popular ‗tropes‘, or literary devices, throughout the years, from security/sovereignty, to
environment to economic development.
Introduction
The process of climate change has been given geopolitical agency, and a rich discourse on climate
change has created a series of compelling and urgent Arctic ‗threat assessments‘. These threat
assessments have gained traction with actors with broad regional and territorial interests. Dittmer et
al (2011), argue that this represents a trend and is part of an upsurge in space-making practices in the
region which access a great variety of representations, discourses and interventions by any number
of actors--including foreign ministries, militaries, corporations, scientific bodies, academic
researchers, and others. Because of this, they argue, we should look beyond those voices which
speak to the unusual, heroic and spectacular, to find a geopolitical analysis which is better tuned to
translocal and everyday practices‘. These everyday practices, they suggest, lead us to a much richer