Sofus Frederiksen lives in a small river valley above a sheltered stretch of Greenlandic fjord, where in the winter slabs of floating ice fuse into a pale blue sheet. Frederiksen, a 49-year-old farmer of Danish and Inuit descent, built his house himself, and his 10 horses, 95 cows, and about 500 sheep make his farm one of the most productive businesses in the small town of Narsaq. From his kitchen, where pictures of his grandchildren cover the refrigerator, a window frames a 2,300-foot mountain, a steep slope of black rock and white snow. There, an Australian company called Greenland Minerals & Energy (GDLNF) hopes to build an open-pit mine, extracting uranium and what it says is one of the largest deposits of rare earth metals in the world. Like many in Greenland, the Frederiksen family thinks it’s a great idea. “We know that we have to move, and we have accepted it,” says Frederiksen’s wife, Suka. “We are only two people here against hundreds of jobs working in the mine. We tell ourselves that we have to give something for the Greenlandic people.”
The mountain is a reminder of the choices Greenland faces as its government scrambles to energize an economy heavily dependent on Denmark, the country that colonized it in the early 1700s. Narsaq also happens to be the birthplace of the country’s prime minister, and she is a strident supporter of mining. A native Greenlander with a broad face, bright eyes, and a smile that breaks like sunlight, Aleqa Hammond, 48, is the first woman to occupy the island’s highest office. Elected just over a year ago, she came to power on promises to mine the country and put it on the path to independence. “We have mountains with uranium content,” she says. “We have mountains with gold. We have mountains with iron. We have mountains with zinc and lead. We have mountains with diamonds. We have mountains that are there for us to use and bring prosperity to our people.”
Greenland is one of the few countries cheering global warming, or at least openly making the most of it. The melting of its ice cap, which covers 80 percent of the island, is a major contributor to a rise in global sea levels. By the end of the century, these levels may climb as much as 2 meters—enough to drown island nations such as Kiribati and the Maldives and flood coastal cities around the world. The Arctic, where a few degrees of temperature can mean the difference between frozen and flowing, is one of the areas where the impacts of global greenhouse gas emissions are most evident. Traditional Inuit hunters are finding it increasingly difficult to carry out their trade. The whale migration has shifted. The ice on which they ride their dog sleds is often thin or absent. Storms and waves once held back by slabs of ice are eroding the coastline, pulling houses into the sea.
And yet, even as global warming puts an end to one way of life, it may enable another. Longer periods of open water mean easier access to resources for ships and workers and the unlocking of the Arctic for drill rigs and mineral exploration. “The people of the Arctic have to adapt very fast,” says Hammond. “I simply refuse to be the victimized people of climate change.” In their long history on Greenland, the Inuit have survived changes in the climate that wiped out other cultures, including the Vikings. “We’re going to manage this one too, just this time differently,” she says. “This time we have other options than just hunting. We have the right now to our own underground.”
Inuvik is a town of 3,600 in the Mackenzie Delta in the Northwest Territories (NWT), about 100 km south of the Beaufort Sea. It is roughly one-third Inuvialuit (Inuit), one-third First Nations, and one-third non-aboriginal. For a month of the year, the sun doesn’t rise, and for another, the sun doesn’t set. All utility pipes run above ground because of the permafrost, the mix of rock, soil, and ice that is permanently frozen just a few feet below ground. Although Amar is originally from the Sudan, he had been living in Canada for about ten years when his cousin, a cab driver making good money in Inuvik, invited him to visit. Amar visited and stayed. That was 2009. He doesn’t plan to remain, but for now the wages are good and he saves nearly all of them—there’s nothing to buy around here. But this could change: Inuvik is the largest town in Canada along the Arctic energy frontier. It is always on the verge of booming, even if the big boom that promises to change everything hasn’t shown up.
I arrived in summer on a road trip with a friend. We drove up the Dempster Highway, which begins in the tourist town of Dawson City and winds northward for 736 km to Inuvik, the only road in Canada that leads into the Arctic Circle all year round. Dawson is frozen in commemoration of its own birth, the Klondike Gold Rush that brought workers and investment in droves, but this nostalgic display quickly fades from view once we’re on the road, with forest giving way to mountains, and mountains flattening into rolling hills and eventually tundra. The gradual disappearance of trees marks a climate growing harsher; eventually, the anemic black spruces, leaning lazily in every direction thanks to the permafrost, disappear altogether. In every direction are undulating expanses of land, and for hours at a time, there are no signs of human life, no power lines or even guard railings to prevent the tired driver, hypnotized by the vastness of it all, from veering off the road.
A specter haunts Inuvik, and the Dempster was constructed in anticipation. That specter is oil and gas, and the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline that will transport it south. The Arctic is estimated to contain at least a quarter of the world’s undiscovered natural gas reserves and 13 percent of its oil. A third of Canada’s remaining conventionally recoverable natural gas resources and a quarter of its light crude oil reserves are located in the NWT and Nunuvat.
The possibility of massive oil exploitation has periodically galvanized the region into a frenzy, prompting visions of a boom many times more drastic than the one currently overtaking western Pennsylvania and upstate New York; it is perhaps more on par with the development of the Alberta Tar Sands in the ’70s, which transformed Calgary from a farming town into a wealthy oil capital. The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline was first proposed in 2004 by a consortium of oil giants, including Imperial Oil, ConocoPhilips, ExxonMobil, and Shell. One thousand one hundred and ninety-six kilometers long, the pipeline would connect Inuvik to northern Alberta, link up to existing Tar Sands infrastructure, and transport gas to markets across Canada and into the United States. The Pipeline is part of the Mackenzie Gas Project which, when completed, will be the largest pipeline system in Canada’s north, driving the development of other fields in the region, much as the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline will drive further development of the Tar Sands by connecting it to foreign markets.
The government approved the Mackenzie Gas Project in 2010, but two years later, disaster—of a sort, anyway—struck: US natural gas production reached an all-time high and natural gas prices dipped to a ten-year low. Suddenly, the Mackenzie Valley reserves began to seem less attractive, and the project was placed on hiatus. Shell is trying to sell its share, while the remaining partners decided at the end of 2013 not to go ahead with the project in its originally proposed form.
“The oil men, they come and go,” said Gerry Kisoun, who was born along the banks of the Delta, grew up in Inuvik, and is now Deputy Commissioner of the NWT. “They come for a while, think they are going to make big money, and then all of a sudden, somebody says ‘there’s not going to be any pipeline.’ And away they go. They’re here for a couple of days, compared with the fifty-plus years I’ve been around here and part of the community.”
Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old McDonald’s. You won’t get a burger there, though–its cash registers and soft-serve machines have given way to old tape drives and modern computers run by a rogue team of hacker engineers who’ve rechristened the place McMoon’s. These self-described techno-archaeologists have been on a mission to recover and digitize forgotten photos taken in the ‘60s by a quintet of scuttled lunar satellites.
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise (first slide above). Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it’s being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible.
“We’re reaching back to a capability that existed but couldn’t be touched back when it was created,” says Keith Cowing, co-lead and founding member at LOIRP. “It’s like having a DVD in 1966, you can’t play it. We had resolution of the earth of about a kilometer [per pixel]. This is an image taken a quarter of a fucking million miles away in 1966. The Beatles were warming up to play Shea Stadium at the moment it was being taken.”
Between 1966 and ’67, five Lunar Orbiters snapped pictures onto 70mm film from about 30 miles above the moon. The satellites were sent mainly to scout potential landing sites for manned moon missions. Each satellite would point its dual lens Kodak camera at a target, snap a picture, then develop the photograph. High- and low-resolution photos were then scanned into strips called framelets using something akin to an old fax machine reader.
[. . .]
The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten.
They changed hands several times over the years, almost getting tossed out before landing in storage in Moorpark, California. Several abortive attempts were made to recover data from the tapes, which were well kept, but it wasn’t until 2005 that NASA engineer Keith Cowing and space entrepreneur Dennis Wingo were able to bring the materials and the technical know how together.
When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action. They drove to Los Angeles, where the refrigerator-sized drives were being stored in a backyard shed surrounded by chickens. At the same time, they retrieved the tapes from a storage unit in nearby Moorpark, and things gradually began to take shape. Funding the project out of pocket at first, they were consumed with figuring out how to release the images trapped in the tapes.
n mid-1964, just three years after President John F. Kennedy put the U.S. on course for the moon, a team of engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, became the first NASA group to study piloted Mars/Venus flyby missions based on Apollo Program hardware. They conducted their study because they wanted to see humans voyage to other planets and because President Lyndon B. Johnson had made it clear that, to reduce spaceflight costs, the U.S. civilian space program after Apollo should be based on spacecraft and rockets developed for the moon landing.
In its public statements about its future, NASA emphasized that President Johnson supported Earth-orbiting space stations. Modified Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM) spacecraft would ferry scientist-astronauts, supplies, and new experiment apparatus to the low-cost stations, which, it was hoped, would provide concrete benefits to American taxpayers through research into biomedicine, new manufacturing processes, Earth and Sun observations, and advanced technology development. Johnson also supported continued lunar exploration.
LBJ’s vision of NASA’s future made no mention of piloted Mars/Venus flybys based on Apollo’s technological legacy. On the other hand, neither did it specifically forbid them.
Even before the MSFC engineers completed their study in February 1965, other NASA centers sensed that they might be left behind and began their own studies of Apollo-based piloted Mars/Venus flybys. On 1 October 1964, North American Aviation (NAA), the Apollo CSM prime contractor, began such a study for the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, Texas. NAA presented results of its nine-month study at MSC on 18 June 1965.
The company proposed to exploit three main Apollo Program hardware elements for its piloted flyby missions: the CSM; Saturn V rockets; and the Spacecraft-LEM Adapter (SLA), which in Apollo lunar landing missions linked the bottom of the CSM with the top of the Saturn V S-IVB third stage and housed the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) moon lander. NAA was the SLA prime contractor.
Turkey has echoed the prevailing Western sentiment, calling for a diplomatic solution to the crisis and for Ukraine's territorial integrity to be respected — but that was before the Crimean referendum, which directly impacted the Tatar minority (ethnically related to the Turks).
The indigenous Tatars, which make up 12 per cent of the population in Crimea, have a history of strained relations with ethnic Russians in the region. They were expelled from Crimea by Joseph Stalin after the Second World War and only began to return in the 1980s.
They fiercely opposed the annexation of Crimea, fearing a return of Russian rule. The Tatars boycotted the referendum, which ultimately resulted in the Crimean peninsula being parcelled off to Moscow.
Since then, Turkey has kept tight-lipped, largely due to domestic reasons, according to experts.
"We’ve seen the Turkish government be very quiet on this because Russia's a very important trade partner,” said Bessma Momani, an associate professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.
Russia is Turkey's main import source —about $26 billion worth in 2012, with natural gas alone accounting for about $12 billion of the total. Russia also supplies nearly 60 per cent of Turkey's energy demand. Last week, Turkey agreed to bring in more Russian gas through its Blue Stream pipeline, which enters via the Black Sea.
Turkey, already fraught with domestic woes, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's failed Twitter ban to silence a corruption scandal that spawned a rash of violent protests, has enough on its plate, with the presidential election looming in August. Any disruption of energy supplies or cost at the behest of the West could have serious political implications.
“They basically don’t want to rock the boat that way,” Momani said.
“Most of Europe’s populist parties are doing well in the polls, including the [Dutch] PVV,” says Sarah de Lange, associate professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam and an expert on Europe’s radical right. “The Moroccan incident didn’t affect their popularity very much.” Overall, in fact, populist parties are stronger in Europe now than they have been in decades.
That’s a worrying trend for the continent’s moderates. In late May, Europeans will head to the polls to vote for a new European Parliament. As it stands now, far-right nationalist groups, led by politicians like [the PVV's Geert] Wilders and Marine le Pen of France’s Front National party, are poised to make historic gains. Wilders has been busy over the past few months travelling around Europe, meeting with his populist counterparts and forging an alliance that now has the potential to make a significant impact on European politics. According to Pollwatch2014, a far-right bloc in the European Parliament could win around 38 seats from at least seven EU countries. A modest number in the 766-seat legislature, but enough to make it eligible for more than $3.7 million a year in public funding.
The irony is that Europeans will be funding a political movement in the European Parliament that wants to dismantle the EU. “What’s dangerous is that we’re seeing an increase in support for these parties throughout Europe, and that is affecting mainstream politics,” says de Lange. From Austria to France and the Netherlands, the radical right has gained momentum amidst frustration with the status quo. De Lange partly blames mainstream parties for failing to come up with novel approaches to a radically changed 21st-century environment. Mass migration, for instance, has altered the face of Europe but centrist parties have done little to address issues of European identity and integration that have come along with it.
The PVV and Front National, meanwhile, have openly embraced those issues, with a bullishness that appeals to an increasing number of Europeans who question the relevancy of the EU. The likes of Wilders have played to those sentiments, promising to “liberate Europe from the monster of Brussels.”
Euro-skepticism has been around since the birth of the EU. But in recent years, particularly in the aftermath of the 2009 financial crisis, it has become the cause-célèbre of the far right. The economic collapse of Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece has helped reactionary ideologies flourish, spawning neo-fascist groups like the Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary, which managed more than 20 per cent of the popular vote in recent parliamentary elections. In Italy, Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the fascist leader Benito Mussolini, was welcomed to the political stage.
Mainstream conservatives appear to have been taken off guard, unable to mount a coherent response to the popularity of the more extreme groups. In the U.K., the populist U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) has been outpolling the Tories and nipping at the heels of Labour. One in five Tory supporters now say they will vote UKIP.
With polls suggesting far-right parties could score big gains in European parliamentary elections on May 25, rightist leaders “want to highlight the dangers of EU overreach,” says Cas Mudde, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia’s School of Public & International Affairs. Le Pen, Wilders, and Farage all want their countries to leave the 28-nation bloc. The EU’s offer of emergency financial aid to Ukraine also makes an inviting target for the rightists, who routinely accuse Brussels of wasting taxpayers’ money.
Even as they attack the EU, some rightist leaders don’t seem keen to get too close to Russia. Wilders, for example, is strongly pro-U.S. and pro-Israel, putting him at odds with Kremlin policy. His comments on the Ukraine crisis “have nothing to do with Putin or with foreign policy,” Mudde says. Wilders views the situation as “a bailout,” in which European taxpayers are being asked to support a corrupt regime, he says.
UKIP’s Farage said he has respect for Putin, “compared with the kids who run foreign policy” in Britain. But, he added: “I don’t like him, I wouldn’t trust him, and I wouldn’t want to live in his country.”
Others, though, seem flattered at the treatment they’ve received in Moscow. Le Pen was snubbed by American politicians when she visited the U.S. in 2011. In Moscow, though, she had an audience with the speaker of the Duma, the lower house of parliament, telling him that she opposed sanctions and wanted to restore “traditional, friendly” relations with Russia.
Along with the National Front, rightist parties from Austria, Belgium, Hungary, and Italy sent observers for the Crimea referendum. (Some others, including UKIP and the Dutch Freedom Party, didn’t participate.)
The European rightist party that’s closest to Putin may be Hungary’s Jobbik. Its leader, Gabor Vona, made a high-profile visit to Moscow last year and declared that Russia considered Jobbik “a partner.” Mitchell A. Orenstein, a professor of political science at Northeastern University, writes in a recent Foreign Affairs article that the Kremlin may be subsidizing some smaller rightist European parties, such as Greece’s Golden Dawn.
Just as European rightists seek political advantage in the Ukraine crisis, Putin has his own reasons for cultivating them. “Russian support of the far right in Europe has less to do with ideology,” Orenstein writes, than with Putin’s desire “to destabilize European governments, prevent EU expansion, and help bring to power European governments that are friendly to Russia.”
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