Staring at the devastated shores and towns of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Laurence Smith had one thing on his mind: melting glaciers.
To this geography professor who studies melting ice sheets in the Arctic, the vast damage of the hurricane was a testament to global warming, rising sea levels and more violent storms throughout the world.
“If you walk anywhere along that coast, (the destruction) goes for miles and miles,” he said. “That moment made me realize how important faraway places like the Greenland ice sheet really are to modern civilization.”
Glaciers are important to future civilizations as well, Smith said in his new book, “The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping our Civilization’s Northern Future,” which was released today.
The book analyzes mathematical models of climate, population, energy consumption and globalization to give a glimpse into the future of what the northern Arctic world may look like 40 years from now, he said.
“I don’t think that most people think about the Arctic very much.
… It’s remote, and it’s very far away,” said Scott Stephenson, a graduate student in geography who worked with Smith and whose work was cited in the book. “This (book) is drawing attention to the fact that there is a whole, brand new arena to the world economy that is there.”
Beyond looking at mathematical models, Smith received a fellowship to see the northernmost countries of the globe for himself.
For 15 months, Smith traveled around the North, interviewing a variety of people, including Alaskan Inuits living in some of the most remote places on Earth to citizens of affluent, urbanized Scandinavian countries, he said.
While Inuit villages and Norwegian cities can seem worlds apart culturally, such places showed Smith that there was more to predicting the future of the Arctic world than just studying melting glaciers.
Talking to the president of the Norwegian Sami Parliament, for instance, showed him how population growth and land development for natural resources could also shape the world’s geographic future.
The Sami are aboriginal occupants of Northern Europe who are fighting for control over resources such as oil and gas that occur naturally on their territories, according to the book.
“My interview was about climate change, but what (the president) really wanted to talk about was … natural gas development,” Smith said. “How her people were getting cut out of the entire process with no voice.”
Smith’s travels also opened his eyes to the different ways of life in the North and how they might change in 40 years, like those of the Inuit elders of Barrow, Alaska, who hunt walrus, bearded seals and fish to make a living, he said.
“You walk through the town of Barrow, you see these animals lying in people’s driveways. … I think the immediate response as an L.A. urbanite is to recoil in horror,” he said. “But this is their livelihood and tradition, not sport and gun.”