– it was the shipment of trans-boundary contaminants from
old Cold War nuclear testing, coal burning power plants, and
sources of heavy metals and organic pollutants. We helped re-
write the secret U.S. Arctic policy, shifting its emphasis from
being an under-ice battlefield for Russian and U.S. nuclear
submarines to looking at protection of the environment and
production of resources.
In those early days of Arctic cooperation, the delega-
tions were small and the policy makers were agile. I remem-
ber attending an Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy
meeting in Greenland in 1993, proposing the first Arctic
radiological response drill – necessary to prepare for another
Chernobyl-like nuclear accident or something worse – and
getting it approved by eight nations in a single day. Univer-
sity of Alaska, Anchorage (UAA) Professor Glenn Shaw had
educated me that the Arctic airmass in winter evenly spreads
pollutants. That explained the so-called Arctic Haze around
Denali, which actually comes from coal-burning power plants
in Eastern Europe. Had the late April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear
accident happened even a month earlier, people and wildlife
in Northern Alaska might have suffered the same fate from
fallout as Laplanders in Northern Norway, Sweden, and Fin-
land. Even 28 years later, some reindeer were so radioactive
they didn’t meet standards for the meat market.
Governor Hickel picked up his predecessor Steve Cow-
per’s pan-Arctic initiative and brought all the region’s gover-
nors together to form the Northern Forum. I was with most
of those governors on a ship in Norway when Boris Yeltsin
called them in 1991 to ensure they were with him against a
hard-liner’s coup attempt, which would have ended the new
Russia just as it was getting started.
Throughout the late 1990s and the first decade of this
century, I kept one foot in business and another in the think-
tank world, helping launch the Institute of the North. It was
Hickel’s legacy research program, originally part of Alaska
Pacific University. Our first Arctic studies focused on ways to
make Northern shipping routes a reality, and we worked hard
to focus the new eight-nation Arctic Council – successor to
the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy – on the infra-
structure needs of the North.
My friend and mentor Dr. Walter Parker, a member of
the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, worked with us to
create the Arctic Council’s Circumpolar Infrastructure Task
Force. Funding help from Senator Ted Stevens allowed us to
achieve better aviation cooperation between the FAA and our
neighbors in Russia and Canada. The U.S. military increased
cooperation on search and rescue, and even prepared human-
itarian aid missions to help flooded towns in Sakha (Yaku-
tia). We started the international conversation on shipping,
prodded by Northern Forum governors who saw the value of
Arctic seaways in reducing the cost of living in their regions
and helping get their energy and minerals – and maybe fish
January 2018
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