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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Natural News, State Discourses & The Canadian Arctic
virility (see Dittmer et al., 2011; Dodds, 2002). But instead of ‗manhood‘ and ‗mastery‘ the issue was
overcoming cultural and linguistic diversity.
„Other‟ Tropes
While we have seen that Soviet submarines were in some cases an issue of concern, during the
1970s, overall only approximately 5 per cent of Canadian newspaper articles on the Arctic focused
upon the Arctic as a field for defence and sovereignty. The process of successfully negotiating
comprehensive land claims and articles focusing on Inuit society; as well as potential disasters
stemming from oil spills and related economic development issues comprised another 5 per cent
combined, while the ‗international North‘ – that is the definition of the Canadian Arctic in ways
which recognized the activities and interests of neighbours‘ – was negligible (1 per cent). A further 5
per cent was also made up of articles where Arctic was simply a term used as a metaphor: for brand
names or for issues actually unrelated to the North.
Overall, then, the discourses promoted by newspaper articles in this era, while mindful of
technology, climate and the role of science in the north, were clearly not framed by naturalized
actors which authorized development or securitization by virtue of environmental relationships as is
the case today. Rather, the discourses were counterpoised, and aligned with either the exploitation of
natural resources, or the need for protection from resource exploitation ‗accidents‘. For the media, it
was the relationship between oil, energy and national policy that took precedence over
environmental concerns, contributing to a strong state narrative which attempted to align north with
south through corporate interests, or more accurately interacting with state-centred discourses to
give meaning to the host of representations it encountered in the North. Still, if the role of the
Arctic and its environment in state building and public discourse in this era was not substantial, the
Arctic itself was a mere sub-text in a larger spectrum of state-building discourses and interests more
generally focused elsewhere: on relations with the United States, for example. Of the approximately
33,000 articles published in Canadian major daily newspapers on the Arctic since 1970, in fact, less
than one per cent came from this entire decade, reinforcing William‘s (2013) observation that the
power relations embedded in Arctic discourses are neither homogeneous and unchanging, nor do
they run exclusively between the Arctic and the Canadian south.
An International North? The Arctic in the 1980s and 1990s
„Recombinant‟ Discourse
By the 1980s, and well into the 1990s, a shifting focus of concern saw the rise of an Arctic media
discourse framed through the lens of environmental cooperation, emphasizing a series of treaties,
agreements and institutions which forged what has subsequently been called ‗the circumpolar
North‘, or the ‗international North‘ (Keskitalo, 2004; Heininen, 2004; Heininen & Nicol, 2007).
Table 1 references the fact that by 1989, the main interest of the media clearly revolved around five
general themes. These included environmental issues, like ozone depletion and climate change,
PCBs and oil spills (19 per cent of articles dwelt on these themes); economic development issues,
mainly related to energy development and pipelines (another 19 per cent of articles); sovereignty and