97
Arctic Yearbook 2013
Bennett
Perhaps given the environmental protections already in place for the Wrangel Island
zapovednik
, in
2000, an employee of Russia‘s Central Marine Research and Design Institute posited that one of the
most likely conflict areas between NSR activities and Russian environmental protection legislation
would be the ―coastal waters of the Wrangel Island and Chukot Peninsula‖ (Semanov, 2000: 103).
Yet it appears that the Kremlin has found a way to make environmental legislation and commercial
shipping interests mutually supportive. In December 2012, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed
a decree expanding the park to include Wrangel Island‘s one formerly inhabited village and extend
the
zapovednik
‘s buffer zone out to a total of 24 nautical miles, which the UNESCO World Heritage
Committee had recommended upon awarding the ―World Heritage‖ designation in order to further
strengthen the protection of the area‘s biodiversity
(Gruzdev & Ovsyanikov, 2012). Similar to
Canadian justifications for creating the Lancaster Sound NMCA, Wrangel Island
zapovednik‘s
director
and the Deputy Director for Science explain in a memorandum: ―[t]he protected sea area and the
buffer zone around the islands of Wrangel and Herald have geopolitical significance and allow better
control of the traffic of ships along the Northern Sea Route‖ (Gruzdev & Ovsyanikov, 2012).
7
The
Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment will manage the
new buffer zone, revealing the entanglement of commercial and environmental interests. Further
revealing the deliberate nature of zoning in the Russian Arctic, just months after the expansion of
the
zapovednik
‘s borders, Rosneft and Exxon-Mobil agreed to explore three license areas for
hydrocarbons in the Chukchi Sea. The latter company declared these and four other areas ―among
the most promising and least explored offshore areas globally‖ (ExxonMobil, 2013); indeed, the East
Siberian and Chukchi Seas have been estimated to hold 100 billion barrels of oil equivalents
(Verzhbitsky et al.,
2013). As in Canada, oil and gas activities literally juxtapose conservation efforts.
Governments strictly zone and bound waters for certain purposes even as ocean currents, fish and
marine mammals, ships, and potentially oil spills flow through. Zoning treats the waters as a flat,
two-dimensional space when in fact they are dynamic and three-dimensional. An exploration of the
verticality of Arctic sovereignty may be in order given the many recent studies of spatial topology
(Belcher et al., 2008; Secor, 2012) and the geometry, verticality, and dimensionality of sovereignty
(Sloterdijk, 2009; Williams, 2011; Elden, 2013).
Along the entire NSR, there is a connection between not just sovereignty and conservation, but
actually militarization and conservation. The Kremlin, aware that sovereignty requires more than
drawing lines on a map, has crafted what Ivan Kratsev (2007) refers to as ―sovereign democracy,‖
with the government defining sovereignty as capacity. Andrey Kokoshin, the chairman of the Duma
committee on ex-Soviet countries, stated, ―[w]e will have to stand up, I think, for our interests in an
active fashion, especially in the Arctic...We need to reinforce our Northern Fleet and our border
guards and build airfields
so that
we can ensure full control over the situation‖ (Smith & Giles, 2007:
4, emphasis added). Kokoshin‘s statement reflects the logic of preparedness and national security
that drives many of the Kremlin‘s actions, including environmental legislation. In Russia, the military
and the quality of the environment have been closely interlinked since World War II (Heininen &
Segerståhl
, 2001), and this does not seem to be coming to an end. Although Russia has generally
banished civilian use of
zapovedniks
, it has granted scientists and the military certain access rights,
speaking to the continuation of the Soviet military-civilian divide. On Wrangel Island, the military‘s