The biological nature of arctic ecosystems is different—they are far more vulnerable ecologically to attempts to “accommodate both sides.” Of concern in the North, then, is the impatience with which reconciliation and compromise are now being sought. Our conceptual problems with these things, with commercial and industrial development in the North and with the proprieties of an imposed economics there, can be traced to a fundamental strangeness in the landscape itself, to something as subtle as our own temperate-zone predilection toward a certain duration and kind of light.
