The 2011 Arctic Science Summit Week (www.ASSW2011.org) seems to be a real ‘no brainer’ for not only for us Arctic anthropologists, but for social sciences in general. There are many nice words among some science politicians about acknowledging that social sciences can importantly contribute to understanding Arctic change, but the hard sciences are still largely neglecting the role of humans, with some prominent hopeful exceptions, as I will mention below.

Karin Lochte, AWI Director, talked in her keynote about the need to understand not only the physical changes in the Arctic, but also ecosystem changes, e.g. what lives on the seabed of the Arctic Ocean, Acidity of the ocean etc. Then she makes the link of how this is going to impact the food chain, and refers to all these organisms from plankton to large sea-mammals. However, she does not seem to have noticed AT ALL that humans are actually the final users of this food chain. They are completely left out from any of her considerations. If we think about how much money a big European research power like Germany invests in an institute such as AWI, and these people can not even acknowledge that the Arctic is inhabited, this is a heavy drawback. We have written about this elsewhere (IASSA northern notes number 34, page 7-14).
The nice exception to this ignorance is Philipp Wookey, (Sterling, UK, also a member of the scientific advisory board at the Arctic Centre, Rovaniemi), taking a MUCH more advanced view on ecosystems. He incorporates both goods and services in to his analysis. Services are the things that satisfy needs of society. New literature also acknowledges that these are cultural, spiritual etc services. He argues that these servies are particularly vulnerable to change. So here we have somebody from global change science acknowledging the important role that humans have in the changing Arctic. He just uses a different language than we do in anthropology. I would call people in Arctic change both agents and victims, in an organically intertwined relationship in the one total environment including all social and spiritual dimensions too, which is constantly being re-enacted through peoples ways of moving in and knowing the environment.  Wookey puts it in terms of ecosystem goods and services, and Social-Ecological system, drawing on a recent paper by Bruce Forbes, myself and colleagues (2009, PNAS). He admits himself that he is not the expert to tell us the deep content about the spiritual and cultural consequences. But that’s not the point. What he does emphasizes is how important a research approach is that acknowledges the unity of the the social and the ecological in the environment. In fact, it is up to us Arctic anthropologists to be active and work with such people in natural science who are open to us.