Alun Anderson > Quotes

“in the late 1970s, Inuit set up their own Circumpolar Council to represent all their people around the Arctic, regardless of which nation they now found themselves in, they were the first to make us see the way the top of the world was interconnected.”
― Alun Anderson, After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic

“Russians live in a country that has borders with Europe at one end of their map and with Mongolia, China, Japan, and America at the other. Travel to the Inuit community living on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait and you can see Russia’s Great Diomede Island just two and a half miles away. Russians still dream of an undersea rail tunnel linking the two continents.”
― Alun Anderson, After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic

“The Russians moved to exploit their northern lands in a way that no other nation has attempted. Using gulag prison labor and internal exile, first under the tsars and then renewed under Stalin, towns were built across Siberia and up into the Arctic in search of minerals, timber, and other resources.”
― Alun Anderson, After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic

“I needed to understand the new quarrels between nations over who owned the Arctic, where their borders should lie, and whether a boom in oil, gas, minerals, and shipping would transform the economy of the Arctic as the ice melted away.”
― Alun Anderson, After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic

“I discovered that there are no experts on the Arctic and no grand sources for knowledge.”
― Alun Anderson, After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic

“Another odd feature stands out when you look at this pole-centered globe, and it turns out to be very important. All the rivers from the surrounding lands flow northward and into the Arctic Ocean.”
― Alun Anderson, After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic