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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Bounding Nature
presence first takes the form of rusting infrastructure left over from the Soviet era, whose continued
existence, however harmful to the environment, actually helps to visibly signify Russian claims of
historical ownership and use. Second, along the NSR, the government is establishing new sites to
station Russian Navy warships and border guard vessels (Patrushev, 2012), which will inevitably
patrol the waters near Wrangel and Herald Islands given that control of the NSR from the enlarged
zapovednik
is a stated aim.
Despite the commercial and militaristic undertones of the Wrangel Island
zapovednik,
Russia
trumpets a discourse of multilateralism and environmental protection in the Arctic to garner support
for its enclosure of geostrategic areas. In his 2010 address to the International Arctic Forum,
President Vladimir Putin declared, ―[i]f you stand alone you can't survive in the Arctic. Nature
makes people and states to help each other‖ (Harding, 2010), endowing nature with a surprising
amount of agency. The creation of national parks, however, subtly contests the idea of international
cooperation, as it shows that Russia does in fact want to stand alone, at least in the NSR. At the
same time, by acting on the suggestions of an international organization to expand the
zapovednik‘s
extent, Russia legitimates its actions to enhance its sovereignty. Moscow allegedly views international
relations as a zero-sum game (Jensen, 2010) and carefully chooses the international organizations
with which it aligns itself depending on how it will benefit its national interests. Certainly, Ottawa
behaves in a similar fashion: note its marshaling of international environmental norms and potential
use of UNESCO to support its enclosures of spaces in the Northwest Passage. In the cases of
Russia‘s Wrangel Island
zapovednik
and Canada‘s Lancaster Sound NMCA
,
UNESCO and UNCLOS
support national goals. Yet protections granted by Article 234, which allows countries to enact
environmental legislation to protect ice-covered seas, may soon be questioned if melting sea ice
turns into open water. In this case, nature, a rapidly changing entity, could actually end up
destabilizing traditional national agendas of sovereignty and security rather than enabling them.
Alterations in the Arctic environment‘s status quo could cause governments to try to quickly enact
artificial boundaries to make up for the disappearing ice. To alter Putin‘s turn of phrase, then, nature
could actually make people and states obstruct each other, or at least each other‘s movements.
Policymakers in Canada and Russia may be anxious to enact environmental regulations to maintain
state control in the face of possibly contested international law and fast changing seas. But it is
exactly the melting ice that elicits international calls for urgent action, granting Russia and Canada
the leeway to regulate and protect Arctic waterways whose ownership some states dispute.
The Wrangel Island
zapovednik
is now free of any human presence except for park rangers. As the
nature reserve expanded during the 1990s, the inhabitants of the local village, which park boundaries
had initially circumvented, were forced to relocate. In contrast to Canada, which has forcibly moved
indigenous peoples to remote lands to establish presence, Russia removes local inhabitants.
Furthermore, while Ottawa involves local communities in creating national parks, Moscow excises
them from such discussions. Historically, in Siberia, protected areas were created in areas where
there were only ethnic Russians;
otherwise, indigenous peoples were forced to leave (Poirier &
Ostegren, 2002). After the collapse of the USSR, it appeared that indigenous peoples might have a
say in management of the NSR. Osherenko (1992: 128) notes the in the aftermath of the USSR‘s
collapse, governmental and non-governmental organizations alike made several proposals to