Hands across the ice.(new Arctic Council formed)

OTTAWA

CANADIANS thought of their country stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific when they devised the Latin motto A mari usque ad mare-from sea to sea-for the nation's coat of arms. The third sea, the Arctic Ocean, was beyond their horizon. No longer. In Ottawa on September 19th, the seven countries bordering on that ocean-Canada, Denmark (it owns Greenland), Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and the United States-plus Finland, signed up to form a new Arctic Council.

The Arctic has been no ocean of brotherly love. In cold-war days, Soviet and American submarines stalked each other beneath its ice. Canada and the United States had diplomatic skirmishes when first a giant American oil tanker, and much later an icebreaker, went without Canadian permission through the Northwest Passage, which Canada considers internal waters. The Americans still do not accept Canada's sovereignty over its northern archipelago, and were wary of multilateral co-operation until recently. Only last year did President Clinton accept the idea of an Arctic Council, while stipulating that military issues should not be on its agenda.

Non-governmental initiative has played a big part in getting the council going. The native peoples in Alaska and Canada made a bridge to those in far- northern Europe with the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in the 1970s. An international council became a serious possibility after a speech by Mikhail Gorbachev at Murmansk talking of the Arctic as a "zone of peace". Canada's then prime minister, Brian Mulroney, visiting Moscow in 1989, pursued the idea. Inuit leaders and northern experts in the Canadian Institute for International Affairs fleshed it out.

The region's indigenous peoples will be fully involved: the Inuit conference, the Sami Council (based in Finland) and the association representing native peoples in the Russian north have the status of permanent participants. Mary Simon, an Inuk-that's the singular of Inuit-from northern Quebec, in 1994 was appointed Canada's ambassador for circumpolar affairs (till then a sideline of the West European desk at the external-affairs ministry). She will play a big part in shaping the new council.

At least at first, it will be built on modest lines. Its secretariat will move from capital to capital; for the first two years it will be housed in Ottawa, and Canada will pay its C$900,000 ($650,000) cost for those years. But its mandate is broad. Officials and scientists will advise governments on regional issues, including environmental protection, economic and social development, and the health, both physical and cultural, of the Arctic's aboriginal peoples.

A broad Arctic environmental-protection programme that began in 1991 and is now based in Norway will be folded into the council's work next year. Its findings exemplify why cross-border cooperation is needed: it has found contaminants that have reached the Arctic sea and coasts from as far away as East Asia. Local food sources, from seal meat to that of caribou and smaller animals, are at risk.

Ms Simon has long preached the gospel of sustainable development. She does not think development can or should be barred, but she foresees a difficult task of balancing oil, mining and industrial ventures with concern for the ecology. Discoveries of a huge diamond deposit in the Canadian Arctic and a fortune in nickel and cobalt in Labrador have pointed up the difficulty. She is also eager to build up trade between Arctic peoples. Cape Dorset, a hamlet on Canada's Baffin Island, boasts a higher proportion of working artists among its 1,200 people than anywhere else in the world. They are mostly stone-carvers. Could they also make traditional clothing for export to other northern peoples? Educational and cultural links offer much promise. Iqaluit, due to be the capital of Nunavut when this predominantly Inuit eastern half of Canada's Northwest Territories becomes a territory on its own in 1999, has launched the first Internet web-site in the Inuktitut language.