The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the development of a mining industry in Spitsbergen and its relationship to Swedish scientific polar research. The empirical focus is the history of Swedish coal mining on Spitsbergen between 1910 and 1934 and the mining activities at Sveagruvan 1917-1925. The aim of the thesis is to explain why this coal-mining project was started, why it was developed and why it was terminated. It critically examines a linear model that has been used to explain the development of this mining project, i.e. the idea that scientific research leads on to technological development and industrial activities in a linear sequence.

A theoretical and methodological framework called Actor Network Theory (ANT) is used to describe and analyse the Swedish coal-mining project. In the construction of an actor network human as well as non-human actors are involved, shaping the project and influencing its results. If an industrial project shall be successful, the project leadership must maintain control over both the local and global parts of the network and maintain a flow of resources between them.

The actors that initiated the Swedish coal-mining project on Spitsbergen in 1910 wanted it to fulfil both economic and political needs. Investors from the iron- and steel industry wanted Swedish coal for the production of coke for blast furnaces. At the same time the Swedish government wanted to stop Norwegian attempts to take control over Spitsbergen – at the time a no-mans land. By opening up Swedish coalfields on Spitsbergen, Sweden would strengthen its position in future international negotiations on the legal status of this Arctic Archipelago.

Over time, the motives for the project were changed. This was a result of shifting economic and political priorities. The quality of the coal resources was not suitable for coke production, but good enough for steam production. There was also a shift in focus from foreign policy to the politics of energy after the Svalbard treaty was signed in 1920.

With the use of the theoretical model of the thesis, an attempt is made to prove that the project failed for three main reasons. First, the actors financing the project did not deliver the necessary resources to maintain the industrial activities. Second, the Swedish coalmine Sveagruvan did not deliver enough resources to maintain the support of the politicians and the private investors. Third, the project managers failed to maintain their control over the project.

In the thesis it is shown that the linear model can be questioned, in this case with regard to the idea that the coal-mining project was a product of Swedish polar science. No doubt the input of geo-scientific knowledge from Swedish polar scientists was important, but so were other forms of knowledge and other actors. The linear model was a useful instrument, however, in the construction of history – a history valuable as a tool to enrol investors and to defeat political enemies. In the last-mentioned sense, the model was used to create a prestigious Swedish history of Spitsbergen – a history that gave Swedish citizens credit for the industrial development of the Arctic Archipelago.

A comparative perspective is applied in analyzing the large-scale utilization of Arctic natural resources driven by economies and agents outside the Arctic and subarctic regions. This paper focuses on whaling since the sixteenth century, and on the development of mining from the nineteenth century to the present. The European sector of the Arctic and subarctic regions including the high-Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen provides the main cases for this study. The social, economic and environmental contexts and consequences of northern industry are considered; as part of this line of research, the little-known symbolic and geopolitical uses of industrial field installations are considered. The northern transfer of Western technoscience, including scientific navigation, colonial geography, steam-propulsion and aviation, often failed initially despite much enthusiasm and underwent painstaking on-site modification. In this industrialists and other Arctic entrepreneurs attempted to control a complex combination of factors including the sparse local population, the lack of major infrastructure, and the environmental impact of their own businesses. This combined with the social problems of keeping peace among collaborators and competitors under isolated and lawless conditions. In conclusion, the greatest challenges to industry in the Arctic throughout modern history were local and social rather than climatic or geopolitical. Indigenous interests were long disregarded while Arctic seas and some land areas were exploited by Western nations as unregulated commons. Not only nature and local inhabitants but also the industry itself suffered from increased scales of operations. The record of Arctic extractive industries over four hundred years reveals a need to develop and share relevant environmental and socio-economic knowledge and to develop international regulations and instruments such as industry certification to guarantee sustainable northern resource utilization.

Interest in the future of the Arctic is running high, motivated in large part by belief that climate change will open new possibilities (and unleash new threats). Wealth from shipping and natural resource extraction features prominently in narratives about the Arctic in the media, and governance of the region has become a major concern as new actors demand influence. We use three components of current discourse about the Arctic to help reveal connections between how the region is constructed and how the right to decide its future is articulated. Voices are the actors who participate in the discursive construction of Arctic futures, with varying degrees of influence. Resources are objects upon which actors inscribe values, thus locating them in the discourse. Governance refers to the structural features through which action is regulated within spaces, restricting also the range of legitimate actors. We demonstrate the usefulness of these concepts through brief case studies of coal on Spitsbergen, hydrocarbons in the Barents Sea and whaling in the North Atlantic. We conclude by emphasizing the value of a historical perspective to understanding contemporary debates about the future of the Arctic.

This thesis documents the development and application of a unique database orientated software package, BugsCEP, for environmental and climatic reconstruction from fossil beetle (Coleoptera) assemblages. The software tools are described, and the incorporated statistical methods discussed and evaluated with respect to both published modern and fossil data, as well as the author’s own investigations.

BugsCEP consists of a reference database of ecology and distribution data for over 5 800 taxa, and includes temperature tolerance data for 436 species. It also contains abundance and summary data for almost 700 sites - the majority of the known Quaternary fossil coleopteran record of Europe. Sample based dating evidence is stored for a large number of these sites, and the data are supported by a bibliography of over 3 300 sources. Through the use of built in statistical methods, employing a specially developed habitat classification system (Bugs EcoCodes), semi-quantitative environmental reconstructions can be undertaken, and output graphically, to aid in the interpretation of sites. A number of built in searching and reporting functions also increase the efficiency with which analyses can be undertaken, including the facility to list the fossil record of species found by searching the ecology and distribution data. The existing Mutual Climatic Range (MCR) climate reconstruction method is implemented and improved upon in BugsCEP, as BugsMCR, which includes predictive modelling and the output of graphs and climate space maps.

The evaluation of the software demonstrates good performance when compared to existing interpretations. The standardization method employed in habitat reconstructions, designed to enable the inter-comparison of samples and sites without the interference of differing numbers of species and individuals, also appears to be robust and effective. Quantitative climate reconstructions can be easily undertaken from within the software, as well as an amount of predictive modelling. The use of jackknifing variants as an aid to the interpretation of climate reconstructions is discussed, and suggested as a potential indicator of reliability. The combination of the BugStats statistical system with an enhanced MCR facility could be extremely useful in increasing our understanding of not only past environmental and climate change, but also the biogeography and ecology of insect populations in general.

BugsCEP is the only available software package integrating modern and fossil coleopteran data, and the included reconstruction and analysis tools provide a powerful resource for research and teaching in palaeo-environmental science. The use of modern reference data also makes the package potentially useful in the study of present day insect faunas, and the effects of climate and environmental change on their distributions. The reconstruction methods could thus be inverted, and used as predictive tools in the study of biodiversity and the implications of sustainable development policies on present day habitats.

BugsCEP can be downloaded from http://www.bugscep.com

This dissertation explores the early digitalization in Sweden. As host to the first summit on the environment in Stockholm 1972 (UNCHE), as leading procurer of computer equipment as well as initiator to the world's first national Data Act of 1973, Sweden pioneered domains that have since emerged as critical to our age: environmental challenges and digital technology. Both products of the 1970s, environmental monitoring and population surveillance have typically been studied as separate phenomena. This thesis insists that they belong to the same lineage of procedures. In an effort to move beyond both celebratory and repressive discourses of technology, it turns to the infrastructural and operational aspects of histories of data. Crucially, the investigation traces a series of changes within the cultural techniques of modelling, linking and reuse. In so doing, it positions itself at the intersection of environmental and digital humanities, and contributes to both research fields. The aim of the investigation is to demonstrate how the handling of data shaped the environment and the population as objects of knowledge and to examine its consequences for state administration. By "following data" – noting how they were collected, transformed, played with, transferred, encrypted, stored and erased – the material and procedural elements of historical undertakings are emphasized.

The investigation is organized in three parts: environment, population, and administration. Seeking the system dynamics origins of the 1972 Stockholm conference and the cybernetic principles of the systems ecology within the International Biological Program (IBP), the first part attempts to look past the politics of environmental movements and turns, instead, to modelling as a critical operation. The second part questions the generic surveillance studies approach to the 1970 census taking (FoB 70) and privacy debate in Sweden by considering these as part of the longer history of linking. Centering on an archival statistics system (ARKSY), a newspaper coupon campaign and the "deep map" of early computer cartography, the thesis here locates a shift from privacy as a vulnerable trait protected by law to a matter of database administration with citizens as managers of their own data. The third and final part is framed by operations of reuse. Such operations, the dissertation maintains, materialized as instrumental not only to household waste management but also to the handling of data in offices and archives. Scrutinizing test environments for word processing in the Swedish Parliament and the work of the Data Archiving Committee (DAK), the investigation argues that they should be understood as sites of reuse and recycling rather than as locations of paperless exchange.

With early digitalization, the environment and the population started to emerge as "problems of data". Data were typically demanded in "raw" format and routinely portrayed as a new type of natural resource. In this setting, infrastructures of reuse proved more fundamental than imperatives of surveillance. Markedly, the manual aspects of "automatic" data processing (ADB) were downplayed even as they remained indispensable. Cycles of data appeared in many guises: in the natural environment, in models, in mapping systems, in archives. Guided by the analytical power of cultural techniques and drawing on a wide range of materials, this investigation is a prehistory of our data-driven world.

The Arctic—warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet—is a source of striking imagery of amplified environmental change in our time, and has come to serve as a spatial setting for climate crisis discourse. The recent alterations in the Arctic environment have also been perceived by some observers as an opportunity to expand economic exploitation. Heightened geopolitical interest in the region and its resources, contradicted by calls for the protection of fragile Far North ecosystems, has rendered the Arctic an arena for negotiating human interactions with nature, and for reflecting upon the planetary risks and possibilities associated with the advent and expansion of the Anthropocene—the proposed new epoch in Earth history in which humankind is said to have gained geological agency and become the dominant force over the Earth system. With the Arctic serving as a nexus of crosscutting analytical themes spanning contemporary history (the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century until 2015), this dissertation examines defining characteristics of the Anthropocene and how the concept, which emerged from the Earth system science community, impacts ideas and assumptions in historiography, social sciences and the environmental humanities, including the fields of environmental history, crisis management and security studies, political geography, and science and technology studies (STS). The primary areas of empirical analysis and theoretical investigation encompass constructivist perspectives and temporal conceptions of environmental and climate crisis; the role of science and expertise in performing politics and shaping social discourse; the geopolitical significance of telecoupling—a concept that reflects the interconnectedness of the Anthropocene and supports stakeholder claims across wide spatial scales; and implications of the recent transformation in humankind’s long duration relationship with the natural world. Several dissertation themes were observed in practice at the international science community of Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard, where global change is made visible through a concentration of scientific activity. Ny-Ålesund is furthermore a place of geopolitics, where extra-regional states attempt to enhance their legitimacy as Arctic stakeholders through the performance of scientific research undertakings, participation in governance institutions, and by establishing a physical presence in the Far North. This dissertation concludes that this small and remote community represents an Anthropocene node of global environmental change, Earth system science, emergent global governance, geopolitics, and stakeholder construction in an increasingly telecoupled world.