By The Arctic Institute
With all that’s going on in the High North these days, it’s easy to get fixated on one issue or another as the defining concern for the region: militarization, climate change, shipping routes, the list goes on. Sometimes, however, it behooves us to take a step back and clarify the basic issues at stake – particularly for the sake of the average person, who, unlike some of us, has not yet re-drawn his or her mental map of the globe to include the North Pole at center.
It’s often the seemingly benign, overlooked news stories that most effectively illuminate the multifaceted and complex nature of a changing Arctic. I submit to you here one such example. In the past few years, at least three companies have outlined plans for projects to lay undersea fiber-optic cables through the Arctic: