The history of the Arctic and the danger of environmental degradation. Life on the ice: sealers, trappers, oilers and the cold war. For millennia the lands within the Arctic Circle, from Canada to Greenland to the Soviet Union, were a world apart, protected by distance and climate from invasion and exploitation and amply supporting the Eskimos (Inuit), and Lapps (or Sami), and other tribes scattered across the huge expanse of ice, land, and water. Then, beginning hundreds of years ago, the white man came. First the whalers, explorers, traders, and missionaries, and now the oil men, the dam builders, the military, the bureaucrats. The result, for the Arctic and its people, has been devastation.