Tripolarity provides news, analysis, and reflections on contemporary political, philosophical, and scientific issues in the Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine regions.
An idea in a long lineage of planetary social thought, Tripolarity arises amidst many brilliant treatises and experiments in political ecology to make kin among human and nonhuman natures. The writings offered here explore critical insights into the logics and discourses of the Anthropocene and ask how polar and cold-dependent communities can adapt and govern themselves in the midst of radical change.
About
Globalization is not just a process of technological and economic interconnection across planetary space but of the symbolic transformation of the nonhuman world into objects, a psycholinguistic operation often described as “resource-making.” While the air and seas warm and ecosystems collapse, it has become a thinly-veiled doctrine among the world’s capitalist nations that state control over and access to the once-denigrated and overlooked polar regions has become a geopolitical and economic imperative. Whether in the Arctic, Antarctic, or the Alpide Belt, the human relation to cold is understood as increasingly important and polyvalent, driven by anthropogenic state changes in the cryosphere itself and by localized contradictions of resource use and the market economy. An approach to accurately grasping the breadth and diversity of human perspectives, uses, and valuations of the cold (cryos) thus requires deep contextualization and a multiepistemic approach. Tripolarity aspires to a synthesis of disparate intellectual and spiritual traditions about the cryosphere, centering the knowledge and political sovereignty of the poles’ Indigenous residents, and working outward through other layers of more-than-human subject groupings and positions. This effort is conducted to record and organize not only my own thoughts, but to foster a transboundary community of practice dedicated to working theoretically and practically from the planetary poles to the metropoles to resist fragmentation and cultivate interregional solidarity.
Nicholas J. Parlato is a transdisciplinary researcher and political ecologist whose panarctic work concerns contested relationships among communities, governmental organizations, and the nonhuman world. He has lived and studied in Alaska, Canada, and the Russian Far East, collaborating with local and Indigenous leaders and organizations on issues of territorial protection, environmental governance, cryospheric change, and legal geography. He received his PhD from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in August 2025.
“No mortal thing has a beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration; there is only a mixing and then separating of what was mixed, but by mortal men these processes are named "beginnings.”
― Empedocles
