Beginnings of a Rural Sustainability Paradigm: The Arctic as Case in Point

Abstract

Developing sociocultural, economic, and environmental strategies for sustainability is a major challenge facing the world’s rural and urban populations alike. Rural areas lag severely behind their urban counterparts in addressing sustainability milestones yet, as nexuses of biological, cultural and ethnic diversity, they play a crucial role in planetary sustainability. Therefore, there is great need for rigorous research with rural communities to define issues, exchange necessary knowledge and synthesize nascent initiatives exploring rural sustainability. This paper lays a framework for one possible research approach by reflecting on insights from a comparative case, involving long-term research in two arctic contexts: Viliui Sakha settlements of northeastern Siberia, Russia and Nunatsiavut settlements in Labrador Canada. Despite their location on opposite sides of the Arctic, communities in both regions struggle with contemporary issues of a changing climate, an unpredictable economic basis, outmigration of their young people to the urban areas and issues of environmental contamination from past and projected resource extraction.