By Hannah Buehler Cuisine cannot be separated from the environment. The culture surrounding food and the ingredients themselves are deeply rooted in the seasons, land, and ecology of a locality. In one of the harshest environments on earth, the Arctic, thousands of years of ecological knowledge, tradition, and adaptation have developed a unique cuisine. The

In partnership with the Arctic Yearbook, Arctic in Context is pleased to be running a series of interviews with the authors of the peer-reviewed articles that appeared in the 2016 edition. The authors with whom we will speak are among the Arctic experts whose research influences policymakers, business leaders, and media coverage. We encourage you to

By Chantal Bilodeau Certain species of fish spawn in different locations. Pods of gray whales no longer overwinter at the equator. Yellow cedars are moving north. Those observations were related to us, a group of artists engaged with climate change, while we were traveling through Southeast Alaska as part of the Tidelines Ferry Tour in

Last December, the team at Studio Olafur Eliasson brought nearly 90 U.S. tons’ worth of glacial ice from coastal Greenland to Paris. While politicians, bureaucrats, civil society representatives, and more debated global responses to climate change at COP21, the U.N.’s annual climate change conference, the 12 blocks of ice, arranged in a clock formation, melted

By Wilfrid Greaves The United States is an Arctic nation, but the Arctic has usually been an afterthought in the making of government decisions. U.S. security policy has traditionally viewed the region as a line of defense rather than a place to be secured in its own right. However, under President Barack Obama, the Arctic

When the Arctic Council came into being with the signing of the Ottawa Declaration on Sept. 19, 1996, its survival was far from a foregone conclusion. Now, after 20 years in operation, the time has come for reflection. Founded as a consensus-based forum for cooperation, coordination, and interaction between Arctic states and, significantly, with the

Introduced by Erica Dingman Twenty years since the signing of the Ottawa Declaration, formally launching the Arctic Council, the U.S. has reached the mid-point of its second rotation as chair of the Arctic Council. Momentous as the founding of the Arctic Council was at the time, after years of hard negotiations the event received little

By Joshua Glasser and Cody Chipp Raging wildfires. Large-scale die-offs of birds and marine mammals.  Invasions by disease-bearing ticks. Houses and water pipes collapsing as permafrost thaws. These occurrences are no longer future scenarios—they have become the daily experience of many people living in the Arctic, which is the fastest-warming region of the world. These

By Rosemarie Kuptana & Suzie Napayok-Short Inuit Ilitqusia, or the Inuit Way of Knowing (Inuit Qaujimaningit, IQ), is the vast body of scientific knowledge of the Inuit. What is this Inuit Ilitqusia? It is a living entity. As Jaypetee Arnakak explains,  “It is a means of rationalizing thought and action, a means of organizing tasks

By Ashley Chappo What is it about the Arctic that inspires such human flights of fancy? For the past several hundred years, writers and artists have turned to the region in their work, creating fictional and imaginative realms vastly different from the true Arctic. Perhaps the most well known of these daydreams was the tale