Matthias Finger is Professor at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
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What Does the Arctic Teach Us?
An Epistemological Essay on Business-Government
Relations
Matthias Finger
The Arctic is where the future of our industrial civilization is currently being played out: the melting of the Arctic ice
and of the Greenland ice cover would (and will) not only mean significant sea-level rise; it would certainly also represent
an irreversible tipping point in the Earth‘s climate system. In other words, the accelerating changes in the Arctic affect
us all. In addition, and given that industrial development (and economic growth for that matter) remain based on
natural resources (fossil fuels and minerals), the Arctic, along with other resources-rich regions of the world, has become
one of the new theaters of global natural resources exploitation and international rivalry. Arctic fossil fuel resources
represent a significant amount of the still globally available reserves. But exploiting them is not without environmental
risks. Burning them will further accelerate global warming and bring the global climate closer to the dangerous tipping
point. Ironically, such resources exploration and exploitation are precisely made possible by (some of) the consequences
of industrial development in the form of global warming and subsequent receding ice coverage. This means that, in the
Arctic, industrial civilization has it in its hands to address the root causes of the looming global ecological crisis, or at
least the root causes and consequences of global warming. The Arctic thus serves as a perfect case in point, whereby one
can explore whether industrial civilization is capable of slowing down and eventually stopping fossil fuel-based
(industrial) development, and who might be able to do so. This is the topic of this article, whereby the Arctic basically
serves as a socio-ecological laboratory for analyzing the dynamics of fossil fuel-based industrial development. But, while
being a laboratory, it is also an entirely serious case.
Introduction
This is neither a technical, nor an empirical, but rather an ethical and epistemological article. In it, I
take the Arctic region
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as a case in point to reflect on industrial civilization‘s ability to reduce fossil
fuel (and resources) extraction and, by doing so, (re-)gain control over its (industrial) development.
This is not a typical way to look at the Arctic region, nor is this article really about the Arctic. This is