Civil dialogue at Arctic Encounter hides deepening rifts

Ever since humans began moving north across the Siberian tundra 45,000 years ago, they have been chasing a constellation of northern dreams. Pleistocene people followed in the gigantic footsteps of woolly mammoths and the fuzzy paw prints of saber-toothed kittens. In more recent centuries, gold, whales, and potential shortcuts to Asia all called. For a few misguided souls, the dream of an open polar sea beckoned. And for hardy explorers and fortune-seekers, the lure of the unattainable, whether narwhal tusks, the North Pole, or some godforsaken world record was enough to tempt them to the Earth’s extremes.

All of these competing visions suggest that the Arctic has long meant vastly different things to different people. But never have I felt stronger cognitive dissonance as to what the Arctic represents than at this year’s Arctic Encounter Summit, North America’s largest gathering on the region, where the U.S. and Greenlandic flags hung side by side.

While photographing the unlikely juxtaposition of the Greenlandic and US flags, I think I accidentally captured Thomas Dans, head of the US Arctic Research Commission, striding underneath them.

Each spring, the conference takes place in Anchorage, Alaska, bringing together approximately 700 policymakers, diplomats, scientists, representatives from Native corporations and organizations, businesspeople, and others who wish to have their say on the future of the Arctic. While visions of the next fifty years were being floated inside a conference center, outside, people were struggling to make it through the next hour. Two blocks away from the venue at Town Square Park, bedraggled, largely Alaska Native homeless people sat outside in the cold. The past winter had not been kind. Alaska faced one of its coldest seasons in recent history, and the Anchorage Assembly criminalized camping.

While the city works to install cameras in the park to deter crimes like “challenging someone to fight,” the big guns were gathering in the Dena’ina Convention Center to talk shop about the incredibly exciting defense opportunities awaiting in the Arctic. This being America, entering the conference hall required passing through a metal detector. Many participants had already risked life and limb to reach the venue. Each year in Anchorage, 15 pedestrians are killed by cars, which whiz down the city’s one-way streets with nary a crosswalk in sight. A better investment in safety for conference-goers than a metal detector might have been a crossing guard, but where’s the security theatre in that?

The metal detectors would certainly have killed the vibe at Arctic Circle, the region’s largest annual conference in Reykjavik. In the Icelandic capital, the primary people one glimpses in the street are not the unhoused, but rather Gore-Tex-clad American tourists cheerfully paying $30 for a bowl of thin lamb soup. Faced with similar lunch prices inside the conference venue, it is the conference-goers rather than those outside who choose to go hungry – at least until the next reception.

Dual-use real-talk

Alas, nobody was starving at Arctic Encounter as delegates listened to the first session of the day on “Dual-Use Infrastructure in the North.” Matthew Beck, VP of Operations at Quartermaster, a US Army logistical unit that helps oversee global field services like supplying food, water, and fuel, emphasized, “We actually view the Arctic as a major part of our R&D strategy going to a more militarized factor of what we’re building.”

Emilie Åsberg, the CEO of Havguard AS, a Norwegian company that pioneers underwater defense technologies for maritime security and surveillance, was asked about dual-use. The female executive held no illusions about the often euphemistic term. “We build it for defense first,” she countered. “We need the best systems to work in critical situations. And then you can have systems that are similar, that can work in civilian situations.”

Åsberg did try to soften her company’s hardware in other ways. “We try to make all the technology look like nature. The first technology we created is called the Jellyfish – basically to blend into the ecosystem,” she said. The CEO remained tight-lipped about what exactly Jellyfish does, but one thing is certain: when camouflage masquerades as environmentalism, greenwashing has reached new heights.

How I found myself in a windowless conference hall where Arctic cooperation was the last thing on the panelists’ minds was thanks to a U.S. State Department program aimed at “increasing mutual understanding between people of the United States and other Arctic countries.” The Fulbright Arctic Initiative generously supports 20 scholars from seven Arctic states to partner on policy-relevant research, carry out an exchange in another Arctic country (or, for those not from the U.S., to come to the U.S.), and participate in three meetings held across the Arctic over 18 months. The program was founded in 2014 during a more collaborative period in the region’s history, and I was a member of the fourth cohort.

Our final meeting was originally scheduled to be held in Washington, D.C. Yet once the organizers realized that all of the relevant policymakers with whom we might wish to share our research would be at Arctic Encounter, they shifted the location to Anchorage. That was a good choice, it turns out, for when we met with Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) on the final day of the conference, she explained that she had read our policy brief on her flight from DC. Airplanes are the reading room of choice for someone who is a member of Alaska Airlines’ incredibly exclusive three-million miler club. (The only other member is Alaskan insurance agent Stephen Routh.)

So, my participation in the Fulbright Arctic Initiative is how I found myself listening to Thomas Dans, the Trump-appointed head of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, which advises the president and Congress on Arctic research, speak from the main stage. Dans is also founder of American Daybreak, a non-profit advocating for the annexation of Greenland.

Dans learned Russian while attending a public high school outside of Baltimore, which he explained began teaching the language after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957. Despite the machinations of the Trump administration and American Daybreak, he called for a “peaceful Arctic.” Addressing the audience, he stressed, “Russia and the United States gotta get along. You know, there are different spheres of thinking, but our view, especially in the scientific world, is, we cooperate in space, we need to find ways to cooperate. We did it in the darkest days of the Soviet Union.”

The next day, I sat listening to Jacob Isbosethsen, Greenland’s Head of Representation to the U.S., offer a strident defense of his country’s autonomy. Reflecting on the volatile past few months, he spoke of the sleepless nights many of his compatriots have suffered as they fretted over whether the US might actually take over Greenland. “Of course we are not for sale. You don’t buy and sell our country, our land, our people. You don’t buy and sell people in 2026,” Isbosethsen underscored to a round of applause. “What we have experienced is of course very very difficult, because we know that we need each other – the United States, Greenland – our security is your security.” He reminded the audience that for over a third of the United States’ history – ever since the military began building weather stations and runways in Greenland during the Second World War – the island home to 57,000 people has formed an integral part of North American defense.

Isbosethsen admitted that it has been challenging to maintain a constructive dialogue with all this “political noise.” Yet at Arctic Encounter, the dialogue throughout the conference remained civil, which made the proceedings even more surreal. How could Dans and Isbosethsen, who share such diametric views, be plenary speakers at the same event? One wonders if they encountered each other in the exclusive Denali Speaker Room, which had a security guard posted to keep non-plenary speakers out, lest they steal a few cubes of cheese.

In session on sovereignty, Alaska Natives take back power

While the Trump administration and Greenland remain at odds, sessions held by Alaska Native leaders reminded a packed room of the long and painful history of the U.S. government threatening Indigenous People within its own borders. A moving discussion by Alaska Native leaders on Indigenous sovereignty recounted the heinous – and secret – plans by the US Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s to use nuclear bombs to create an artificial harbor near Tikiġaq (Point Hope). This is the longest continually inhabited site in North America, where Iñupiat have lived for 2,500 years. All of that history could have been gone in an atomic instant if Project Chariot, as the operation was called, had materialized.

Fortunately for Alaska and the world, Iñupiat resisted. As Janet Ahlalook, a board member of Olgoonik Corporation, explained, “People of Point Hope were able to stop the plans by the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The way that they were able to mobilize and communicate across the region was incredibly important and powerful. One of the mechanisms they used was the formation of a newspaper, Tundra Times, by Point Hope Native Howard Roth, who began sending out articles about the plans by the AEC and worked to bring people together to coalesce around a position of opposition and ensure that their positions were represented in the plans the federal government had.”

Ahlalook added, “Many times we have felt a Goliath coming to our region and our people have been David in fighting back.” Her testimony speaks to the power of organizing – and of newspapers, too. Sadly, Tundra Times closed shop in 1997. But a powerful documentary about Project Chariot can be found on Vimeo, and Iñupiat continue to organize. In fact, Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, the non-profit founded in 2015 to bring together North Slope Iñupiat communities, organizations and corporations, organized the conference session.

Geoengineering is in, and adaptation is cool

The direct threat of nuclear explosions has receded in the Arctic, although enormous concerns over both on- and offshore radioactive waste remain in the Russian Arctic. The expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in February also means that there is no active treaty constraining the nuclear arms race. Nevertheless, fears of nuclear annihilation have been replaced by the climate crisis. As society’s failure to rein in greenhouse gas emissions puts the planet on track to exceed 2°C of global warming in the next decade, solutions that involve technological interventions are emerging.

Every passing Arctic conference welcomes more and more sessions on geoengineering, though you’ll rarely find that word in conference programs. Instead, Arctic Encounter convened sessions on “Slowing the Loss of Sea Ice | Research, Governance, and Technological Needs,” and “Risks, Opportunities, and Governance in Arctic Climate Interventions.”

Ice thickening seems to be one of the most promising solutions, especially as it could be deployed at local scales. That is what UK-based non profit Real Ice is testing in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut in an area the size of a football pitch. In contrast, approaches like solar radiation modification, which involve techniques like brightening clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space, run bigger risks of modifying large swathes of the atmosphere – and of scaring off the public.

Ice thickening proponents are keen to relabel their intervention as a form of “adaptation” rather than “geoengineering” given the knee-jerk reactions many often experience to the latter. In some sense, I agree with their choice of words. Making sea ice thicker also seems less invasive than, say, erecting a concrete seawall to prevent coastal erosion. The installation of such unnatural infrastructures can damage snowmobiles in winter and create eyesores in summer. Even if produced with the help of underwater pumps, thickened ice is still “real ice,” as it were.

During the session, one audience member suggested changing another turn of phrase. She offered that talk of an “ice-free Arctic” should be recast as an “ice-absent” or “ice-scarce” Arctic to convey a “sense of loss rather than liberation.” As an entire landscape disappears, some Iñupiat are eager to reverse the tide. Vera Metcalf, Director of the Eskimo Walrus Commission, an organization created in 1978 by Kawerak, Inc., a Bering Strait tribal consortium, noted that many of the people they represent want to “build a solid sea.” Reflecting on the ethics of geoengineering, however, she offered:

“We as Inuit or Yupik people are still trying to understand what this is and what the consequences are to our communities. It’s like we’re playing with nature to create more ice, and Merle [Apassingnok, another panelist] would agree that’s a belief that we’re struggling with. So you have to look at our Inuit way of living to figure things out. I mean, loss of sea ice, it’s a concern. But yes, it’s also a conflict that we have, trying to understand what geoengineering is to us. It’s gonna take some time.”

The Golden Arches lose their Arctic luster

After the session on climate interventions, I struck up a conversation with someone from Alaska who had spent a lot of time in Siberia. He knew a lot of Russians and still was in touch with several of them. I found it odd that in just the last decade, I could attempt to put my paltry Russian language skills to work when running into people like Hero of the Russian Federation and former president of State Polar Academy Artur Chilingarov at Keflavik Airport after Arctic Circle. I’m also still dining out (or rather in) on the memory of hot, salty, buttered potatoes I ate inside the nondescript Soviet apartment belonging to a woman in St. Petersburg who I had once met at an Arctic conference, back when the coffee breaks were crammed with people jet-lagged from their Aeroflot flights from cities like Novosibirsk and Vladivostok. Now, here I was in Anchorage trying to eke out as much second-hand knowledge as I could about the Siberian mammoth ivory trade from an American who last visited Russia pre-pandemic.

Perhaps there is no better illustration of the Arctic that has come and gone than what Ethan Tyler, Managing Director, Lands, of the Aleut Corporation, said while on stage next to Thomas Dans. The Aleut Corporation owns the decommisioned U.S. Naval Air Facility on Adak, an outpost of the Aleutian Islands closer to mainland Russia than Alaska. When asked what future he envisioned for Adak, Tyler quipped, “I mean, at the end of the day, we just want the McDonald’s open again.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union spurred the closure of the unlikely fast food joint in the middle of the North Pacific. Since serving its last customers in 1994 after six years of operation, Adak’s former McDonald’s has become a destination for ruin porn fetishists. For those looking for something fresher, the world’s current northernmost McDonald’s opened in 2024 in Tromsø, Norway, where it competes with Burger King just down the block. Previously, the world’s northernmost McDonald’s used to be across the border in Murmansk, Russia. Yet all of the burger joint’s nearly 850 outlets in Russia were sold in May 2022 and rebranded as “Vkusno i tochka” (“Tasty, that’s it”).

The McDonald’s in Tromsø. It even sells postcards, which can be purchased through the self-ordering kiosk.

The Murmansk location seems popular enough. But things have lately gone downhill in the eyes of a certain Larissa Miller, who left a review on Yandex, a Russian online platform, last summer complaining that her child only received one cucumber. Another reviewer, Elizaveta Blinova, lamented that the restaurant is often so crowded and noisy with Chinese visitors “that it’s impossible to squeeze through.” In the city where former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed in 1987, “Let the Arctic be a zone of peace,” little calm can be found where Golden Arches once stood.

In 1996, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist and author of The World is Flat, every globalist’s favorite book, came up the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.” He surmised that no two countries with a McDonald’s had ever gone to war with one another. Economic integration and a growing middle class, he argued, helped keep things civil. The theory fell apart in 2008, however, when Russia invaded Georgia, and again in 2022, when it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia no longer has a McDonald’s, making its next move all the harder to predict.

Arctic Encounter might have left me scratching my head as to what unites the circumpolar north. But at the very least, reading the reviews of Russia’s copycat McDonald’s has reassured me of our continued shared humanity. Whether in Murmansk, Tromsø, or Adak, all that many people want is simply to eat their burger in peace. Even more just want to be heard.

A pelmeni postscript

After the last night of the conference, I went with some friends to Pelmeni, a nondescript Anchorage restaurant offering freshly boiled Russian dumplings served with toppings like curry powder, cilantro, and sour cream. Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ reverberated out from the record player. Customers could put on any record they liked from the hundreds of options available, many of which were LPs printed by Melodiya, the Soviet state-owned record label, which held a monopoly on the media.

Intrigued by the whole operation, I asked the cashier, who had a heavy southern drawl, if the restaurant owner was Russian or if they perhaps traced their heritage to the Russians who settled in Alaska beginning in the 1700s when the state formed part of the Russian Empire. “No,” she said. “The whole thing is just a big joke – the owner though it would be funny,” she deadpanned.

I felt a bit deflated to discover that the cultural diffusion I imagined was a farce. Yet in the corner were two Alaska Native kids playing chess. Even if the restaurant started out as a parody, it had succeeded in creating a space where cross-cultural exchange thrived. The Arctic may be fracturing regionally, but ties persist, even when unintentional. I suppose these are the kind of lower-case encounters that give me hope that things in the Arctic will be alright. So, too, will the kids.