Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien. Today's crash Course. The race to control the Arctic. Alaska has been an object of fascination, exploration, and exploitation for nearly two centuries, but its most inhospitable reaches. Those that creep toward the Arctic circle mile by frozen mile, have managed to hold onto their secrets for a very long time. Ice, plunging temperatures and brutal tundras have kept
outsiders at bay. That's all shifting now. Climate change is warmly Arctics formidable barriers sparking at geopolitical and commercial foot race. The US, China, and Russia are scrambling for access to precious resources like oil, gold, and rare earth metals. Russia is ramping up its military presence in the region, China is now a self described near Arctic nation, and the US is rushing to gain what its military describes as
Arctic dominance. Conoco Phillips, the US oil giant that is Alaska's largest producer of crude oil, recently won White House approval to forge ahead with its Willow drilling project on Alaska's North slope. Meanwhile, Alaska's fisheries, which account for more annual catch than the rest of the US's other coastlines combined,
are becoming increasingly stressed. Average Alaskans, wrestling with the twin threats of food insecurity and their attachment to storied livelihoods tied to fishing, are balking at further entrenchment of large commercial operators. There is, as they say, a story here. Joining me today is Liam Denning. Liam is an energy and climate columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, and he's pulled off something very rare and very hard to do. He has
repeatedly traveled to the Arctic to tell this tale. Liam is a wonderful writer and a keen observer of money, power and people. Liam, welcome to crash Course, great spage. So work on all this has so far resulted in three stellar features adorned with beautiful photos from Louis Palou, an award winning photographer who has spent years covering the region.
You've written one about the military ramp up in the Arctic, one about energy exploration, and another recently published about Alaska's fisheries. So we'll follow suit and build this episode around that troika. But first things first, how and when did you decide to go to the Arctic and nail down all of this?
Well, Tim, as you know, this goes back quite a long way. Louis and I, who've known each other for I guess about fifteen years now, first began discussing this seven or eight years ago, I believe, and I began discussing it with you and Bloomberg in general, I think in twenty eighteen, and we actually had it teed up just before COVID hit, which then inevitably shut everything down. And then about a year ago, thinking we could pull it off once again, we began to reach out to
the US Army and other key players in Alaska. And to be honest, I'm pinching myself thinking that we actually managed to pull it off. It's been quite the logistical lift.
Well, and you had to reach out to all of those stakeholders, the military, the energy companies, local fishing communities in order to embed yourself to sort of get there, buy in to have you come up there and spend time. And then you had to figure out how to get there, how to fly there, how to arrange all the various legs of each flight that took you there, which was its own sort of logistical nightmare, wasn't it. That's right?
I mean, I think one of the things you learned quite quickly is that Alaska is a US state, but it's not the kind of place you can just rock up to and look around. You know, it's vast. A lot of it isn't covered by a road network, particularly for example, the North Slope where the oil operations are, you physically just can't get there. You have to, you know, negotiate access, and similar with a lot of the Alaska
Native villages out in the west of the state. You need to get buy in before you really show up.
And why was it important you to go through all that?
Well, I think this goes back to the original reason, you know, Louis and I wanted to do this project was, you know, we felt that the Arctic is in some ways a kind of a grand blank canvas where we tend to project our narratives onto it, our ideas of what the Arctic is, and we felt that really to do it justice and to show our readers what it's really like there, you have to get on the ground.
You have to go and see what it's like just to even get to the place, what it's like to feel the cold and the extreme temperatures there, what it's like, frankly, just to bulk up in five layers of clothing and try to do anything there. And so that element of reality was what we were going for.
I'll just make a note to our listeners here. We'll have links all of Liam's stories in the notes to the episode. There. You'll find Louis Polo's gorgeous photography there, which will really give you a sense of the land and the environment that Liam covered and that they work very hard to overcome in order to get these incredible stories. So let's talk about the military foot race that's in motion there. You embedded with one of the airborne divisions
of the US Army and watch them train. You talk with them about their strategy in the region. Talk a little bit about that. What is on the US military's mind right now and why are they ramping up their commitment to the Arctic.
Well, I think one of the things you realize about Alaska's relationship with the rest of the US is that the Lower forty eight tends to remember that Alaska's there when it's feeling frightened about something. The classic example is the oil shock of the nineteen seventies when suddenly we decided,
you know, we had to develop Alaskan oil. And similarly with the Cold War, and what's happened with Alaska so far this century is it became kind of a military backwater during the War on Terror, kind of a staging post, frankly, for divisions that were cycling in and out of Afghanistan. And a few things have changed that in recent times. One is China's assertion of what it euphemistically calls near Arctic status, which I just think is a gorgeous phrase.
China is so big it could probably be near almost anything. I mean, exactly near South China, see near Japan, exactly near India, Russia.
And I think that began to ring alarm bells in Washington. And at the same time the War on Terror itself was winding down for various reasons, we also saw Russia reopening its military bases, a lot of which had closed down. These are the ones in the Arctic, as part of President Vladimir Putin's general kind of turn northward towards the Arctic, particularly for its energy resources, and so I think the
US is undergoing something of a Sputnik moment. It's remembering that Alaska is there, that it's a strategic salient, and that it is surrounded by potential ad or outright adversaries, you know, who might want to mess with that region. And so they've decided to reconstitute a division there, an army division. The eleventh their born, and those are the guys we went and spent time on a mountain side with earlier this year.
I want to ask you some more specifics about that. But you know, as you're describing all of these forces in motion around the Arctic right now, it's very reminiscent of the Great Game of the nineteenth century when European powers with scrambled to control Africa and parts of Asia. Of course, a game made it seem far less consequential than it was, but it was this sort of jostling for geographic power that hasn't really occurred very baldly like
that since then. And it's certainly in play right now in the Arctic, and it does sort of capture the imagination on so many levels, because it's fast, because it's unknown, because it's so far away because there's this idea that there are riches at stake, because there's local populations who are going to get displaced inevitably, or one hopes at least not brutally or tragically. And it's unusual to me in that regard. There aren't that many forums left like this on the planet, that's right.
I mean, Alaska is called the last Frontier for a reason, and in some ways it is kind of a throwback to an earlier rage. I mean, Alaska as a state has existed, particularly in the imagination of the Lower forty eight. Let's face it, really on two strategic dimensions. One is
as a frontier facing other nations. It was obviously territory that was purchased from the Russians originally, but also as basically as a storehouse for commodities, you know, lumber, fish, zinc, oil especially, And that's generally how we've tended to think of Alaska in the Lower forty eight. And we have to remember it is the least visited state of all fifty. For most Americans, it's a place they will never go to.
And originally it was Seward's folly when Lincoln, Secretary of State, made the purchase. Everyone thought that the Lincoln White House overspent and they'd never get the money back, so that proved be wrong. Yeah, it took about a century, gets a century, but there's still some unknown. So tell me what is the US military's goal there?
So this is interesting because when I was there, I tried to pin them down, you know, from privates right the way up to Major General Brian Eifler, who commands the eleventh there born on what the exact mission was. This is an unsatisfying answer, somewhat vacant broad because you really don't know what the threat to Alaska might be. It seems incomprehensible that anyone would actually try to invade
Alaska or take territory. It would probably end up being the biggest search and rescue operation in the history of the planet, just in terms of surviving. And that gets to really what their mission is at this moment. It's
to train troops to survive. You know, when you get there and you see the not just the grandeur of the place, but just the sheer desolate aspect of it, the emptiness, it becomes clear to you that having anyone operate there requires all sorts of training just to live, not just to manage the cold and wearing your clothes properly and all that kind of thing, but making sure you eat enough, making sure you drink enough, making sure you don't use fingernail polish on your fingernails, because that's
how you check for frostbite, and you can't do that if you're wearing lacquer. There are all sorts of things, and Louie and I, to a very minimal extent, compared to the soldiers who were training, had to do a little bit of that ourselves. You have to reimagine how you're living day to day and take care of the basics. And I think that is the army's mission right now. It's to regain a muscle that was lost maybe twenty or thirty years ago, around the time of the end
of the Cold War. So that as and when something happens, whether it's sabotage, whether it's a foreign fishing fleet showing up where they're not supposed to, whether it's a spy balloon showing up when it's not supposed to, that they have people on the ground both acting as a credible deterrent but able to deal with those things as they arise.
So is the strategy reactive or proactive? In other words, is the military responding to what they perceive as Chinese and Russian incursions or are they anticipating that Russia and China are going to continue to scramble for stakeholdings in the north around the Arctic, and the US better get busy and build its foundations out in Alaska.
It leans much towards the latter, I think. I think the third element that's happening here, and you'll see this in the Army's public documents on the strategy, is climate change. The ground is literally shifting beneath their feet. The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, and you know, when you're there, you can see it almost
happening in real time. I visited coastal villages where you can see chunks of the land just falling into the river or falling into the bearing sea and sitting there almost like gravestones. You can see like.
Big chunks of like glacial flows fracturing and falling off into the sea.
Not glacial flows, I mean, what I saw was literally riverbank and coastal earth that had fallen into the water, you know, And that's because we're seeing a combination of sea level rising but also the perma frost gradually melting and melting and melting. And since most of these places, particularly in the western and northern part of the state, are built on permafrost, I mean when you go there,
you see the houses all up on stilts. I saw an entire basketball court constructed on stilts in this village for the children to enjoy.
So it's more like a landslide, yes into the water.
Yes, And actually, I think you bring up an important point. We often see commentary on the Arctic portrayed as a scramble for things, you know, a scramble for resources, a scramble for influence. No one scrambles in the Arctic. It takes a long time to do anything. I think the better analogy is subsidence or encroachment. Things are changing, the physical landscape is changing. The pressures on the people there
are changing. The great powers around the region are changing their stance, And that's really what Not only the army is trying to plan for it, or at least ready itself for but frankly, everyone who lives there.
How many troops does the US have up there.
Now has roughly twelve thousand.
Twelve thousand seems to me like a relatively modest commitment, but it's nonetheless more significant than having ten people sitting in a house somewhere.
That's true, and I think, you know, one way of thinking about it is the entire population of Alaska is smaller than San Francisco. It's about seven hundred and fifty thousand people, so in terms of troops to population, it's pretty high. I also found out that Alaska has the highest number of veterans related to the population. It is
a military outpost in so many respects. The Army ran it for the first ten years when it became part of the United States, and everywhere you go, you know, you land at Fairbanks, the first people you see are troops getting off planes going to the nearby bases. It was obviously a frontline for the Cold War and is emerging once again as a potential frontline.
And as you accompanied the troops on some of their training runs, I remember from one of the stories you described that some of them were just learning how to basically embed themselves in the snow in white camouflage gear so they could look invisible. So they were learning how to become invisible in a landscape that almost invites invisibility, and it had this kind of redundant quality to it but also necessary.
That's right. And one of the really interesting aspects about it is if you go to a country like Finland, which basically wrote the book on winter warfare, they actually select their Arctic troops from certain regions of the country to better align with natural skills around skiing and that sort of thing. That is not the case with Alaska. I met troops the woman you mentioned who I attracted when she was doing camouflage training. She was from Florida.
I met a sergeant from South Texas who says that when he first got stationed there, he would get frostbite all the time wandering around outside, like picking up tools and that sort of thing. These are, in many ways really raw recruits for that environment. Half them had never even put on a set of skis before.
So what's the attraction to them to go there.
It's interesting for most of them. Certainly, the people I met on that training course, most of them had volunteered. They hadn't been told you have to go here. They had volunteered for this leadership course. And I think It's that classic attraction of going somewhere that's out of the way that otherwise you would never get to, and putting your body through that kind of environment, frankly, putting your
mind through that kind of environment. And that was another thing that you know, I really gathered by being there on the ground. Even during my six days there, the isolation and the darkness kind of began to get to me by the end of it. If you're stationed there for months on end, the isolation, the darkness, and the unrelenting nature of the weather, you know, the wind just whipping through you every day, it really starts to prey
on the mind. And it was certainly something that came up in a lot of conversations, the need to manage that and to not sort of draw into a cocoon, which I think is what can happen with a lot of these troops. You know, when I was speaking to Steve Decker, who is a retired US soldier who now operates as a civilian trainer at the Northern Warfare Training Center, he related a story from some years back, you know, where he saw on the ground not just a soldier,
but an entire platoon. Mentally to the rigors of the place.
Let's listen to that sound bite.
And I come walking back to where my platoon was and I look at him and there they're like maybe fifty yards away from me, and all three of our Occio sleds were sitting there, but the whole tune was standing around them, just staring at them. And I'm looking at them and I'm like, why aren't they setting up their tents? And so I'm walking over there and they're all just kind of just staring at it. It's like, this is the means to take all this away, but I cannot break out of this cocoon that I'm in
right now to do this. And I was just about to say something when one of my more forceful squad leaders blindsided me from the side and he comes like.
Froll people around, get their shit like that, and then they started getting moving. But I watched it at a lot that withdraw where people just they just withdraw within themselves and they will not make.
Efforts to alleviate the pain that they're going through whatever. And I've done it myself.
What kind of a military presence do the Chinese and Russians have?
So Russia in so many ways is the Arctic whale. It has the most territory, the most people, the most economic activity, and the biggest military presence in the Arctic. And in a way that's understandable. They have the biggest physical presence in the arc.
They truly are in our nation.
Absolutely, whereas we are more a southern nation with an Arctic fringe the best way to put it. So, their military presence is big, both in scale and its elements. For example, you know a lot of the strategic nuclear fleet is based up in the Cola Peninsula close to Finland. So Russia's presence is huge and is only going to get bigger, in part because Putin has made it such a central plank of his vision for what Russia will
be as a great power over the coming decades. You know, that need to open up a northern sea route as the ice melts, That need to export more oil and gas from the Arctic coast as the old West Siberian fields go into terminal decline. China, well, China's a bit different. China isn't an Arctic nation. It's forays into the Arctic right now mainly consist of the odd naval patrol, the
odd joint exercise with the Russians. They do have scientific outposts throughout the Arctic, and you know, it's widely thought that those are essentially dual use. But China clearly has designs on the Arctic as an undergoverned space, to use that phrase, particularly as waters that are outside of economic zones become more navigable. China sees that as a place where it can stake out a position, maybe send its famous fishing fleets, and you know, become more of an Arctic power.
But as of yet this isn't something that anyone sees turning.
Heart no, but certainly if you read the Army's strategic papers, I mean, the word China comes up more often than your average Trump rally. It's very much front of mind. In some ways. It's kind of strange. Although Russia is the very present power, in some ways, China has feared more.
All right, on that noe, Let's take a break, Liam, We'll hear from a sponsor, and then we'll come back and talk about some of the commercial war games going on up there. We're back with William Denning, a Bloomberg opinion columnist who's been charting the rush to control the Arctic, as told through his repeat visits to Alaska. So oil, oil, oil, A lot of contemporary Alaskan history and geopolitics can be looked at through that lens canon Liam.
Yeah, and I think it's particularly poignant right now, given what's going on in the Middle East for us to remember that Alaska's oil boom really is owed to the
Yong Kapo War. It was the Arab oil embargo that followed that that essentially persuaded Congress and then President Nixon to force through the construction of the transk Alaska Pipeline and kick off a boom that you know eventually led to Alaska during the nineteen eight is becoming the kind of the shale power of that period, accounting for about a quarter of US oil production.
As you noted one of your pieces, there's an ocean of oil and gas rosen in place beneath the Arctic, and I suppose the logic for the energy companies exploring up there is that climate change is going to make that less hard to get to or am I oversimplifying?
Yeah, there is that horrible kind of doom loop going on. As the ice melts, you open up more resources to exploit, which then help more of the ice melt. That's definitely going on. But I think it's important to remember that the oil resources up there, and don't get me wrong, all the estimates indicate there is a lot of oil and gas in the Arctic. It's frozen in place, not
just by ice, but by its sheer remoteness. Going back to that idea I had earlier on about the lower forty eight, remembering Alaska when it's feeling anxious about the world. That is what led to the oil boom in Alaska. This is not a place that you would ordinarily really want to go to get oil. It's really hard, it's really expensive. Only the biggest players can go there. If
you get it wrong, it can be catastrophic. Shell famously wrote off seven or eight billion dollar last decade trying to get oil out of the Chuchise and got nothing. So it's not just a question of as the ice melts, we will develop more of it. It's also does it make economic sense? Does it make sense on some other axes, for example energy security.
You have this interesting little statistic in your piece that I think onshore projects in Alaska can take about fifteen years to sort of come to fruition offshore when you're out in the water can take thirty years, and projects elsewhere unless threatening climates can be anywhere from several months to five years, depending on the scope of the project. Is that right more or less?
Yeah, that's an estimate for the National Petroleum Council. That is one of the things that I think prevents what some people would call it a scramble for oil in the Arctic. You know, if you're looking at a project that's going to take fifty years or thirty years to come to fruition, particularly at this moment in time, when you know some people are estimating oil demand could peak this decade or next decade, it's very hard to get a financier to sign off on that.
You spend a lot of time at Kuparak, a Carnico Phillips project site, given all of these challenges. Why is Carnical Phillips there.
Well, this will sound perhaps a little banal, it's there because it's already there. With a lot of these big oil provinces that were developed in response to the oil shocks of the nineteen seventies, they were developed under a very specific set of pressures and circumstances. Oil prices were super high, so you could justify pretty much anything, and you had governments prodding you in the back to get
this done in order to bring about energy security. Now, the fact is Conico is already the largest player there, and if you think about the Willow project, as you mentioned, which is the new one that's being developed. You know, if you think about that, Konko is going to spend something like seven or eight billion dollars on that project. It's a reasonably sized oil project, but certainly it's not
a giant project. But the reason they can do it is because it's only a few miles from where they already have investments made in pipelines, gravel minds, that sort of thing.
So it's incremental.
Right. If you were a new player, it would be almost unfathomable to think that you might just go in there and develop that from scratch.
You also noted in your piece that the energy companies face the same environmental and climactic challenges that the military faces. Equipment breaks down, it's hard to get people to live there,
et cetera, et cetera. Another thing that's in play, obviously too, is that there has been this sense that the fossil fuel industry has plateaued or has been peaking as there's a push toward green The irony in Alaska is the climate change that fossil fuels help engender is making it easier for fossil fuel exploration to proceed apace in Alaska.
But is there any thinking, even a veteran player like Conico, that all of the money they're spending and all these projects they're working on now have a shorter half life than maybe they did a decade ago because of the green energy push? Or is the oil that's being extracted up there going to continue to be necessary and desired and purchased for a long time.
I think if you ask the oil companies, they will say yes, for a couple of reasons. One is, generally they view oil's longevity in the local energy system as being longer than some others, particularly environmentalists would think, or like I think. The other thing is it comes back to that issue of incumbency. You know, a company like Conico can produce a barrel of oil from Alaska for thirty bucks or less. You know, the oil price right
now is ninety bucks. So for them, they look at that it's in a politically stable part of the world, the US, And they say, okay, well, even if oil demand does peak and plateau and decline, who's going to be the last producer standing? Is it going to be US in Alaska or some high cost producer in some unstable part of the world.
They can still do it profitably, so they'll still.
Do it, that's right. And I think, you know, as President Biden's approval of the project earlier this year, the Willow Project, which was controversial, I think as even he recognized with his Green Agenda, you still need stable incumbent energy supplies to get you to the point where the new energy systems we're building now can take over.
And as the US's own strategic reserve WANs as other wars are gang fought, what about the indigenous communities that are sort of caught in the crosshairs of either military incursions or commercial exploration. We'll talk about that more as we transition to the next segment. But what kind of fissures is that And raising.
This in some ways was the most fascinating aspect of not just the energy feature, but also the fisheries feature. Is I think coming from the lower forty eight. We tend to have this rather outdated, almost colonial view of Alaska Natives as these subsistence fishers and hunters living off the land and entirely separated from you know what, we would call it westernized or industrialized economy, and that's really far from the truth. If you go to the North
Slope where the ore production is. So the North Slope is an area, it's bigger than thirty nine states, it's only got about eleven thousand people living in it, which would feel about half a Madison Square garden. Ninety percent of their borough revenue comes from taxing oil production. Their whole lifestyle, everything from the fuel to running the snow machines they use to hunt or to fuel the boats they use to go fishing, the revenue to build housing,
to run healthcare programs, it all comes from oil. And that's what makes the energy transition in a place like that particularly acute as an issue. They recognize that the warming climate is changing their physical environment. They recognize it's affecting the fish, it's affecting the caribou, but they also recognize that without that revenue, their way of life is pretty much over. They would probably have to evacuate a lot of those people if you switched off the oil
revenue tomorrow. So it's just a very difficult tension that they have to deal with.
We're going to dig into that deeper after the break and want to just stop for a moment. How to hear from one of our sponsors, and we'll come right back. We're back with William Denning, who's educating us about the Arctic. Liam we focused on the military and energy consideration shaping the new Arctic land rush. Let's now talk about fish. Why do fish figure so prominently in Alaska's economy and cultural identity.
Well, you know what's really interesting is when we first conceived this project, fishing was something in the back of our mind, but it was not one of the topics we were really going to address up front. But as we did reporting on the other features, all sorts of people said, you've got to write about fish. Fishing is a big topic here. It's important to Alaska for a few reasons. One is it's just a very big industry.
It's the biggest private sector employer in the state. It's the biggest coastal fishery in the US by a large margin. But also it's integral to the way of life, particularly in rural Alaska, particularly in Native villages, simply because they rely on fishing to eat, to live in some ways, to give meaning to their life and provide a sense.
Of community, as they have for yards.
For at least ten thousand years. And that really came home to me in a meeting with elders and village members in a little village called Quatlook in western Alaska, where one of the elder is a woman named Liz Dylan, quite simply and poignantly laid out the importance of fishing as told to her by her ancestors, by her elders back in the day.
And you've got a clip of that, so let's have a quick listen.
Our elders shoes to say, fish will be always living in the waters. They come once a year and they come back the next year. But the fish will be in the waters for us to catch and to eat and harvest, and they will never they will never disuppair until the end of the world.
What are some of the mean species of fish that inhabit the waters around Alaska, because that's actually a factor in all of this.
Right, absolutely, so, the big one economically is actually fished far out of sight of land in Alaska, and that's Alaskan pollock. Pollock is a sort of a codlike pretty low value but fairly an offensive white fish, which you'll find in things like McDonald's Phillia fish sandwiches. The other big I think more iconic species that people would tend to think of as king salmon, snow crab, king crab, halibut. These are the fish that you might buy in the supermarket anywhere in the US.
So Alaska is essentially the fishery that feeds fish to the lower forty eight.
States, absolutely, and Alaskan pollock is interesting partly because you will find it in things like school meals, that kind of thing where you need a relatively cheap fish protein just for sustenance. And the fisheries in Alaska are under stress right now too, right, That's right, and that's why so many people brought it up to us as we
were doing our reporting. It's also big reason why Representative Mary Peltola was elected in twenty twenty two in an upset, you know, the first Democrat that Alaska had sent to the House in fifty years, the first Alaska Native representative. Ever, a big part of her platform was protecting the fisheries, and she was also a pro willow She was pro willow yes in part because she recognizes the importance of that revenue for native communities.
So she's juggling these sort of tensions between one kind of economic development and another one that also can overshadow traditions and lifestyles and needs. That's right.
I mean it gets to that issue around Alaska, which is I think, particularly in the lower forty eight, we tend to think of Alaska as a giant national park where you know, there's just polar bears roaming around and nothing really happens. But you get there and you realize that, you know, industrialization is a key feature of the Arctic economy, in the Alaskan economy, it's hard to separate those things out neatly.
Talk to me about the tensions between local and indigenous fissures and big commercial operations. The troll, as you note in one of your pieces, and I quote catching and killing your own dinner, is one of the many things that set Alaska's apart from the residents of most other states.
Absolutely. So you know, when you go to these villages This comes home to you just on the plane we flew from Anchorage out to Bethel, which is the hub of the Yukon cousco Quim Delta in western Alaska, and on the plane there's more boxes of groceries than there are suitcases. Because it costs a hell of a lot
to live out in western Alaska. I paid a visit to the supermarket one day, and you can be paying fifteen dollars for a lot for bread, ten dollars for a quarter of milk, eighty dollars for a box of diapers. Living there without living off the land is frankly impossible. So as we've seen in the past, beginning about a decade ago, when regulators come into these villages and say the salmon run is very low this year, you're going to have to stop fishing for a couple of weeks,
a month, a whole season. It's an existential threat. It's not just oh my hobby got blocked off for the summer. What am I going to do now? This is people who fish the dinner literally out of their backyards and then smoke it, store it up for the winter to get them through those months. And if that is taken away, they lose a sense of food security, they lose importantly a sense of food sovereignty and that idea of controlling their own destiny. I think it's particularly important in these
alaskaative communities, and they lose a sense of community. You know, you travel along the cosco Quin River and all along the banks, you see these fish camps, and it's where families and neighbors gathered sometimes for weeks on end during the summer to fish and process the fish that they would need to get them through that.
And now are those communities evaporating as commercial fishing continues to sprawl.
The impression I get is that physically their landscape is kind of crumbling into the rivers and the oceans.
That is happening because of global warming, because.
Of climate change, absolutely, and climate change is also having an impact on the fish. It's a controversial topic exactly how much it's having an impact, but you can see how in a delicate ecological web that changes in water temperature can affect not just salmon themselves, which are the fish they prize, but also the fish that the salmon feed on, and that can have all sorts of cascading effects. But you also see in just the encroachment of the
outside world. One woman I spoke with at a village meeting, she was very upset about the impact on fishing, but you also got a sense that she was worried about the young people in their village losing their connection to the land and playing video games instead and not learning how to subsist. And I think in some ways that's the thing that's really gutting these communities. It's that sense that they're breaking decisively from their past.
And how do the large commercial fisheries see all of this.
I think the sense you get from the commercial fisheries is that Alaska pollock is a giant money maker. It is the second biggest wild fishery on the planet, and that they are providing an important source of protein for a world in which demand for fishes going up. But essentially wildfishing peaked in the nineteen nineties. A lot of the growth we've seen since then is farmed fish, and that really the issue is climate change. It's not really
their issue. They're not the ones who are, you know, fishing out the salmon runs from western Alaska, and that it's kind of up to society to address climate change, not then, So.
As you noted at the top, you and I began talking about this as a project for you about five years ago or so. And you've looked at the military, You've looked at the energy exploration, You've looked at the local communities and fisheries. What have you learned over the course of your reporting that you didn't know before you set out to do this? What are some of the big AHAs for you?
The biggest AHA for me is that the Arctic is a and this may sound a little weird, is a complex human society. Because, as I say, like it doesn't sound weird like many in the Lower forty eight. I thought of the Arctic in kind of symbols and images, you know, frozen landscapes, polar bear as, the odd oil rig, that sort of thing. But you get there and you realize, you know, there are nations living there. They live complex lives, and they're just as fragmented as we are in the
Lower forty eight. For example, with the fishing issue, there are these things called community development quotas, so sixty five coastal villages actually get a portion of revenue from the pollock troll. Now they don't want to see the pollock troll ending, but their neighbors just up river who don't get that money are complaining that those trollers are fishing them out, destroying their way of life. And similarly with the oil.
Are those differences because of the way the various populations were expropriated when outsiders came in, where there's just different deals cut in order to give commercial interest access to the land when indigenous peoples were appropriated.
I think there is a long history of that, you know, and it goes back to the Alaska Native Claimed Settlement Act in nine in seventy one, and then the Magnus and Stephens Fisheries Act of nineteen seventy six. There have been various attempts to square the circle in Alaska of balancing indigenous rights with the desire, particularly from the outside to exploit Alaska's rich resources, and with the community development quotas in particular. I think in some ways that came
from a good place. It was a sense that these native villages should be getting some portion of the revenue from the waters off the coast, But it also cleaved them from some of their neighbors. And you see this also in land division. You know, one of the villages. I went to a place called Quagillingock, which means place of no river, which is sort of ironic because it's
sinking into the water. They are, as we speak, trying to work out how they can buy parcels of land further away to eventually move that village to higher ground because they know it's daser kind of numbered.
So before we wrap up any other things you've learned.
I would go back to this idea of the imagined narrative that Alaska and the wider Arctic is an area that I think is in some ways fixed in our mind, but it's also a place where we project narratives. China is projecting a narrative of becoming a great power. The US is projecting a narrative of being suddenly beset by enemies. Russia is projecting a narrative that even as its armed forces are chewed up in Ukraine, it's going to emerge
as a powerful Arctic nation. All these things are clashing, and the people who live there are frankly caught in the middle.
Liam, thank you for wrapping things up for us. We're out of time. Thanks for joining us today.
Thank you.
William Denning is a calumnist with Bloomberg Opinion. You can find his work at the Bloomberg Opinion website and on the Bloomberg Terminal. You can find Liam himself on Twitter at Denning Here at crash Course, we believe that collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising, and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I learned that the title that I gave to this episode, the Race to Control the Arctic, actually might not be the right title given everything that
Liam just told me. What's going on for both commercial operators, the military, and everyone else up in Alaska is a long, cold, challenging slog. What did you learn? We'd love to hear from you. You can tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion handle at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review.
It helps more people find the show. This episode was produced by the indispensable Ona masurakas Moses on Dom and Me. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing help from Sagebauman. Jeff Grocott, Mike Nize and Christine Danden Bylark Blake. Maple says, our sound engineering and our original theme song was composed by Luis Gara. I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another Crash course