The Fourth World: THE HERITAGE OF THE ARCTIC by Sam Hall (Knopf: $17.95; 240 pp.)

Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland, “There is no there, there” might accurately express the common understanding of the Arctic. Random images of glacial expanses, numbing cold, endless night are some of the ways we picture a land few of us will ever visit. Sam Hall’s “The Fourth World” goes a long way to provide a full sense of place, rich in history and very much a part of the modern world.

The North most recently came to public attention through two events of wide public interest. The first was the agitation of Greenpeace against the European fur market. By publicizing the annual Newfoundland harp seal hunt with a series of affecting pictures of seal pups looking with innocent brown eyes into the camera, they were able to get legislation limiting the “slaughter.” The second event was more menacing. The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl contaminated the air over Western Europe. Prevailing winds blew pollutants directly over the Samilands of Norway and Sweden. Radioactive fallout concentrated in lichens, poisoned the main food source for the large reindeer herds. More than 600,000 animals due for slaughter were destroyed and buried in 10-foot trenches because their bodies were too dangerous to eat. The Samis or Laplanders depend on their animal herds as their economic mainstay the way the Eskimos or Inuits (“Real People”) as they choose to be called, subsisted until recently on the hunting of seals and whales. Herding and hunting create the social network for these ancient peoples, direct nomadic descendants of the first African men and women nearly 300,000 years ago. They are our own living past and are as such certainly as deserving of attention as the piles of bones we reverently visit at museums of natural history.

Hall, a journalist for Reuters and documentary film producer, has written a book that satisfies renewed interest in the Arctic--the northernmost parts of Alaska and Canada, three-quarters of Greenland, one-quarter of Scandinavia and one-fifth of the Soviet Union--by presenting a readable ethnography of the native peoples of the North and an overview of the contemporary international political maneuvering over its strategic and commercial uses. His portrait of the Inuit reveals that the cost of development has been greater than the loss of baby seals. Soldiers and entrepreneurs are simply the last of a line of white adventurers from the South with plans to profit from this rich “wasteland.”

The first of these were the Vikings of Iceland who arrived in 984. They lived in Greenland for 500 years before a series of climatic changes blocked entry to the fiords in the south. Unable to be resupplied by ship from Scandinavia, they sailed from the colony in 1408. No news of them reached their homeland for three centuries. A Danish theologian, who had heard reports about “wild people and men” living in parts of Greenland, set sail in 1721. Finding no Norsemen or gold, Egede went ahead and tried to convert the Inuit, composing a glossary of native words and translating appropriate sections of the Gospel to aid their comprehension. “Give us this day the seal meat we need.” Egede’s son Niels carried on the work, having to resort to less poetic forms of argument. “When I had tried all I could by means of persuasion, without avail, I had recourse to my usual method, flogged him soundly and turned him out of the house.” An Inuk, baptized by Hans Egede wrote his impressions of the Christians. “I could have wished that we had never set eyes upon them lest they should corrupt our people.”

The lure of trade and whaling brought the white man north during the 18th and 19th centuries. What he found were native cultures left undisturbed until his arrival for more than 5,000 years. He built unique housing for his family out of the sod and stone and one for himself of ice when he was off hunting. His animistic religion provided an extraordinary intimacy with a world at its extremes. Through hunting, he learned to appreciate the balance of nature. “The most insignificant animal was important to those who lived in such difficult conditions. The Inuit killed Arctic hares for their fur, which was used for the socks and the inside of seal-skin boots and seal skins, which were prized for their suppleness, to make sacks for collecting birds and birds’ eggs.” He learned patience, standing silently for days waiting for a seal to resurface through a “blow hole,” and executed the kill in seconds. The Inuits produced songs and beautiful carvings. Men and women worked together in communal societies where private ownership was discouraged and self-sufficiency of the group was raised to an art. When the whalers and traders came upon these people, they looked upon them as unfortunate interference and dealt with them without thinking that there might be something to learn.

The whaling industry was the most profitable of the early commercial ventures. Whales were worth a fortune in oil. But it did not stop there. Whaling ships would also take back walrus who were valued for their skin, oil and ivory tusks prized for women’s toiletries. The whalers in turn brought the natives tuberculosis and venereal disease. “The carnage left Inuit hunters, who had been deprived of whales and were increasingly dependent on walrus for food and fuel, facing starvation. Many more died, and others lived their lives in misery.” The scarcity of traditional game, and the fear of outsiders, strained existing native institutions. Over time, public drunkenness, welfare and suicidal boredom have replaced a tightly ritualized life tuned to the seasons and customs. The Inuits are now “dependent on the very industrial mono-culture that threatens to destroy them. Its relentless advance has turned them into second-class citizens, in which other nations have shown little interest apart from the exploitation of its people and its resources.”

The Inuits and Laplanders are not the only human victims in Hall’s book. Those of us in the developed world are also at high risk. The mismanagement of resources and callous treatment of native peoples have led to general carelessness. Three years before the Chernobyl disaster, severe winds blew across the Kola Peninsula in the Soviet Union spreading particles of industrial waste from a notorious dumping site outside an ore-processing plant. The dump covered 1,375 acres and contained 300 million tons of pollutants. “For two days, clouds of stinging black dust blotted out the sun. In the city of Apatity on the shores of Lake Imandra, approximately 80 miles from the Finnish border, pedestrians were forced to protect their faces with handkerchiefs, hats, scarfs and newspapers--anything they could find to avoid choking.” Scientists fear that in addition to these dramatic incidents, there has been a steady erosion of the environment, creating a greenhouse effect. In 75 years, the temperature of the atmosphere could be raised an additional 5 degrees centigrade. These changes threaten to melt polar ice and thereby raise the levels of the world’s oceans and rivers. But these apocalyptic predictions are not the only reasons for concern. Increased industrial activity in the Arctic poses the real hazard of irreversible accidents. Blowouts at oil drilling rigs, difficult to prevent in more temperate regions like the Gulf of Mexico, create yet greater difficulties in the North where an oil spill might remain for decades in an environment that can “save” a candy wrapper for 20 years.

It is also at the Arctic where the great powers claim to preserve the peace. The Soviets and NATO have military bases and giant “listening posts” that warn of attack. As with high-tech Maginot lines, they fail to protect either side from the silent environmental disasters that only infrequently claim widespread attention. Hall helps us see that the Inuits were the first “early warning” of something gone wrong. The Alaska Native Claims Act has gone some way in paying reparations for past wrongs. But “The Fourth World” also addresses the future. The author argues that it is now time to move from narrow anti-sealing campaigns that are often insensitive to traditional native harvesting activities and toward a broader “Save the Arctic” policy.

This is a moving study of heroism, greed and loss: a complex set of motives and actions in an unusually full environment. “The future development of the Arctic cannot be halted. It is too late for that. Industrial man is here to stay, but the exploration and exploitation of natural resources cannot be allowed to advance unchecked. It should be subjected to stricter controls. Industry, too, needs to undergo a change of heart, and channel as much energy into the conservation of the environment, as it has, until now, into its rape.” Hall does not provide any specific solutions to the problems he raises. However, by reporting facts in a workmanlike way, he focuses attention on a condition that we best not continue to ignore.