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Arctic Seminar Series: Past (and Future) Greenland? Making Sense of Cold War Environmental Legacies

With researcher Ronald Doel

Welcome to the sixth installation of our Arctic Seminar series, co-hosted by the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory and KTH Climate Action Centre! We will hear from Ronald Doel, historian at the Smithsonian Institution and Florida State University, USA. Doel will in his talk provide a historic context to the current geopolitics concerning Greenland.

Time: Fri 2025-01-24 12.15 - 13.00

Location: Climate Action Centre, Teknikringen 43

Language: English

Participating: Ronald Doel, Smithsonian Institution and Florida State University

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Event description

Greenland–the world’s largest island–has returned to the world stage, as U.S. president-elect Donald J. Trump declared Greenland vital for America’s “national security purposes” (7 January 2025). Subsequent international reactions and turmoil have focused primarily on ultimate control of Greenland’s strategic mineral resources and access to sea routes as Arctic warming accelerates. But Greenland–and the Arctic as a whole–has been a globally strategic region since the start of World War II, and central to military planners in the West and East by the start of the Cold War. What insights can we gain about our contemporary geopolitical tensions by looking at how the United States government handled diplomatic relations with Denmark and Canada amid the Cold War era? What might we gain by looking at the experiences of Western settler and indigenous communities in Alaska, which became the 49th U.S. state in 1959? What can we learn by putting key Arctic developments at this time within the larger global experience of decolonization?

Time: 12.15-13.00 24th January 2024

Location: Teknikringen 43, KTH Climate Action Centre

Sign up here for a vegan sandwich: www.kth.se/form/arcticseminar

Ronald Doel is currently Charles Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Institution. He served as Project Leader of the nine-member, seven-nation team “Colony, Empire, Environment: A Comparative International History of Twentieth Century Arctic Science” (BOREAS initiative, European Science Foundation) and helped direct “Exploring Greenland: Science and Technology in Cold War Settings” (Carlsberg Foundation, Aarhus University, Denmark). He has published widely on the physical environmental sciences and international relations of science in the twentieth century.

The Arctic Seminar Series

Advancing Sustainability in the Arctic and Beyond: Opportunities and Challenges in the Swedish North is a seminar series organized by the KTH Climate Action Centre and the Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment together with the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory.

Through a series of public seminars involving an array of leading experts and key stakeholders, Advancing Sustainability in the Arctic and Beyond will explore the opportunities, complexities, and possible conflicts associated with the sweeping economic, social, and environmental transformation taking place in the northern reaches of Sweden and other parts of the Arctic. While the Arctic is the place on Earth where the effects of climate change are most dramatic, it is also a region of ambitious new industries and abundant natural resources, including renewable energy and strategic minerals badly needed for the green transition, and the home to indigenous people with longstanding claims to lands that are closely tied to their cultures and ways of life. As the seminar series will explore, this convergence of different values and stakeholders in the Swedish North—that are sometimes in direct conflict with one another—makes the Arctic a region of great relevance for the implementation of sustainable development on a local, national, and global level

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