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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Bounding Nature
heyday such efforts enjoyed in the 1990s. Yet whereas post-Cold War Arctic environmentalism
perceived the region as a global commons, to which the creation of the Arctic Environmental
Protection Strategy and Arctic Council attest, many of today‘s conservation efforts reflect a more
territorialized, state-based approach that enrolls ideas of nature and sustainable development to
enhance sovereignty. Young (2009) rightly critiques media headlines and commentators like
Borgerson (2008), who stir up worries of a new ―Great Game‖ in the Arctic. But at the same time,
growing concerns in Ottawa and Moscow over Arctic shipping and also increasingly valuable, fixed,
non-renewable resources – namely oil and gas – as opposed to boundary-straddling fish or polar
bear stocks have led the Arctic‘s two largest littoral countries, Canada and Russia, to attempt to draw
more lines in the water in the guise of national parks.
A growing body of literature theorizes the relationship between environmental measures and
sovereignty (Young, 1989; Langlais, 1995; Kuehls, 1996; Van Amerom, 2002; Larsen, 2005; Hazen,
2008; Smith, 2011). Geographers and other scholars have also carried out a significant amount of
research on the interplay between sovereignty and ocean spaces, especially in the Arctic (Steinberg,
2001; Dodds, 2010; Ebinger & Zambetakis, 2009; Gerhardt & Steinberg, 2010). Yet little scholarship
has considered the intersection of these areas in the Arctic to analyze how the region‘s states are
enacting environmental measures to enhance sovereignty at sea through purported stewardship.
Kuehls (1996) uses the term ―ecopolitics‖ to describe border-surmounting environmental problems
like climate change and sea ice melt that go ―beyond sovereign territory.‖ He argues that the
production of environmental boundaries in fact makes it possible to erode political boundaries – a
transformation that is unfolding in the Canadian and Russian maritime Arctic. On the one hand,
environmental boundaries adhere to an increasingly accepted international norm of sustainable
development that Marong (2003) identifies as championing economic development, poverty
reduction, and environmental protection. On the other hand, these environmental boundaries
enhance the ability of a state to manage and secure its territory – or, in the case of the Northern Sea
Route (NSR) and Northwest Passage (NWP), their contested waterways. Elden (2013: 49) avers that
geopolitics has become conflated with political geography and suggests we return to literally
grounding ourselves in the ―land, earth, world rather than simply the global or international.‖ In this
study of how Russia and Canada determine their conservation areas, that is what I seek to do.
In this article, I first trace the recent history of environmentalism and sovereignty in the Arctic to
understand how Canada and Russia have arrived at the creation of national parks as a type of
performative sovereignty, outwardly demonstrating state power to audiences ranging from their own
citizens to the international community. I then compare Canada‘s proposed Lancaster Sound
National Marine Conservation Area (NMCA) at the mouth of the NWP with Russia‘s recently
expanded Natural System (
zapovednik
) of Wrangel Island Reserve, near the eastern entrance to the
NSR. The Lancaster Sound NMCA and Wrangel Island
zapovednik
lie in waters that are valuable for
their geostrategic position and shipping potential. The conservation areas have also been designed so
as to avoid conflicting with oil and gas interests. The two case studies of the Lancaster Sound
NMCA and Wrangel Island
zapovednik
provide a useful lens for examining domestic politics of
zoning, exclusion, and access alongside Arctic geopolitics and sovereignty issues. National parks do
not just simply safeguard nature: instead, they are actually complex products of statecraft, domestic