Exploring Arctic’s past, and its uncertain future

Published 1:40 pm Thursday, February 18, 2010

”The Future History of the Arctic” by Charles Emmerson ($28.95)

“In the mind of a ten-year-old almost any line on a map is worth crossing for the sake of it.” Charles Emmerson turned his childhood fascination with “our half-imagined Arctic” into a life’s work.

In “The Future History of the Arctic,” Emmerson explains the forces that have shaped the history of the Arctic and will shape its future.

He never loses his childhood sense of wonder at the land above 66 degrees 33’ 39” north; the Arctic remains for him an idea that cannot be mapped.

As a child, however, he believed in its resilience; as an adult, he understands its vulnerability. The book comes full of characters — explorers, politicians, shipping magnates, artists, scientists — as well as with a rich vein of marginalia (reading lists and odd facts about the north).

Their dreams of the Arctic give the book an archival feel. A kind of calving, as happens to icebergs, goes on throughout this fascinating book.

Something you thought would always be there falls away in great, dumb, resounding chunks: “Our ideas of the Arctic — permanent, pristine, unchanging — will persist long after they have been overtaken by Arctic change. But slowly, bit by bit, our ideas of the Arctic will have to adapt. As they do, a little bit of our sense of earthly eternity will be lost forever.”

McClatchy-Tribune Information Services