Greenland. Most people could tell you that it’s very beautiful, very far north, and maybe that its an autonomous territory of Denmark. But that’s as much as most could say of this vast and wild ‘Euro-American’ nation.
For the 56,000 Inuits and Danes who live there (a population equivalent to Royal Tunbridge Wells, or one-tenth of that of Alaska) Greenland lacks the attraction that it has for us. As more Inuits abandon traditional lifestyles and adapt to life in fishing towns with slow Internet connections and declining populations of animals and humans, they find that the country’s social and economic problems are ever growing. An episode of Borgen, the Danish political drama, summarised it nicely. It is very difficult to sustain a modern economy in such a remote, small and climatologically ‘challenged’ population.
Unemployment is a costly consequence. An unevenly educated population is another. Fortunately, the governing Social Democrats have a plan to give the nation the wealth it needs to fund modernisation. Unfortunately, it is the Greenlandic environment which will pay the price. As Greenland has just signed a contract with the oxymoronically named London Mining for the extraction of 15,000,000 tonnes of iron ore per year, for the next 30 years, from a vast ore deposit 90 miles along the coast from the capital, Nuuk.
London Mining will man the multi-billion project with 3,000 workers, mainly from China. It is not clear if the mine, which will be a gigantic scar on the Greenlandic landscape, will be powered by diesel or electricity.
I know it’s unrealistic to expect a country in desperate economic circumstances to sit on half a billion tonnes of valuable ore. I know that it’s probably unrealistic even to expect Greenlandic workers to form a majority of workers. I do, however, feel justified in asking that Greenland has a little more respect for an environment which they could turn into a major asset if they worked to develop a tourism industry, for example.
I suppose its hard to feel guilty about using fossil fuels for energy, or fuel inefficient vehicles, when the greatest risk that climate change entails for a town-dwelling Greenlander is a fall in the seal population and temperatures rising from minus 15 to minus 10 degrees. Nevertheless, we could all try harder, couldn’t we?
