THREE
GREENLAND RISING
AN INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT HEATS UP
When I arrived in Greenland, the secessionists had gathered in a community sports hall halfway up the island’s west coast. Upernavik was a town of eleven hundred people at a latitude of seventy-three degrees on a treeless tundra six hundred miles north of the capital, Nuuk. From Devon Island, where I’d sat at the observation post with the Vandoos, it was about five hundred miles due east, across Baffin Bay. But Danish-developed Upernavik stood in great contrast with the emptiness of Devon. The town had a fish plant, a hillside cemetery with concrete graves that were covered with plastic flowers, a single paved street, and an unmarked liquor store in a converted shipping container. Its wooden houses were painted in beautiful primary colors. Its teenagers hung out in the streets, blasting hip-hop from their cell phones, and in the mornings those streets were lined with yellow bags of excrement waiting to be picked up by sanitation teams. Upernavik was, like the rest of Greenland, oddly, lopsidedly modern—Scandinavian by design but not always by disposition.
Greenland had been a colony of Denmark for three centuries, and now it was on the verge of an oil and mineral boom that could help it become something else: the first country in the world created by global warming. I’d come here to join the secessionists’ road show—and to witness the moment that some of the supposed victims of climate change began cashing in on it. Greenland’s was an extreme case of the dilemma facing many citizens of the developed world, many northerners: If climate change wouldn’t much hurt them personally—if it might even help—why not embrace it?
The road show was led by the Office of Self-Governance, and it consisted of half a dozen Greenlandic politicians—men and women wearing jeans, fleece, and tennis shoes—and dozens of town-hall meetings. In the run-up to a referendum in November 2008, they were trying to reach nearly all of Greenland: fifty-seven thousand people spread out in fifty-seven villages and eighteen towns across an area of 836,000 square miles, three times the size of Texas and fifty times the size of mainland Denmark. There are almost no roads connecting the island’s settlements; it has two stoplights, both in fifteen-thousand-person Nuuk. We traveled by prop plane, helicopter, motorboat, and foot.
In the sports hall, one of the politicians warmed up the crowd with a funny story about a whale. He’d been a policeman here in the 1990s. The story went something like this: The police chief gets a call from a citizen. The citizen is a fisherman. He’s caught a whale. He doesn’t know what he should do with this whale. The chief says to the citizen, “Put it in the boat. We’ll take care of it tomorrow.”
Put it in the boat! Take care of it tomorrow! The crowd, roughly sixty people, roared with laughter. Mininnguaq Kleist, the thirty-five-year-old head of the Office of Self-Governance and its principal PowerPoint presenter, doubled over. I pretended to laugh, too, but I had no idea what it meant.
When it was Minik’s turn to speak, he paced in front of his slide show wearing a headset, looking more like a televangelist than a revolutionary. Townspeople were sitting in red chairs below the basketball hoop, and out the window, in the bay near the fish plant, was an iceberg. Up for vote in a few months, Minik explained, was not full independence but a sort of half step, which was being called “self-governance”—“Namminersorneq” in Greenlandic, “Selvstyre” in Danish. Denmark, which gives Greenland nearly $650 million a year in subsidies—more than $10,000 a person—had signed off on it.
Greenlandic would become the official language if the referendum passed; Greenlanders would be recognized as a distinct people under international law. “We will take over policing,” Minik said, “and immigration, education, and the courts.” In the waters off Greenland’s northern coast, the U.S. Geological Survey had just identified the nineteenth richest of the world’s five hundred known petroleum provinces: an untapped Gulf of Mexico in the North Atlantic. To our south, near Disko Bay, Greenland’s first oil leases had just been sold to the likes of Chevron and ExxonMobil. Shell and partners would soon claim a lease a hundred miles from Upernavik, in Baffin Bay. Onshore, glaciers were pulling back to reveal massive deposits of zinc, gold, diamonds, and uranium. “Control of mineral and oil resources will also be taken over by Greenland,” Minik said.
They planned to drill themselves free. Under the agreement, the island would split mineral revenues with Denmark after keeping the first $15 million. As revenues went up, the $650 million annual grant from Denmark would go down. Eventually, over five years or ten, over fifteen years or twenty, if it warmed enough, if they drilled enough, the grant would hit zero, and Greenland would declare independence. In chemistry, there is activation energy: Add heat, get a reaction. In Greenland, there was global warming: Add heat, get a revolution. But this was secession at the speed of climate change, a slow burn.
When Minik was done, the mayor of Upernavik, a thin man with a few missing teeth, stood to pose a question. “Some of the money goes back to Denmark?” he asked, surprised. An old woman in a black sweater was next: “If we earn all that money, how much of it will stay in Greenland?”
But the politicians were banking on more than mining. Valuable fish stocks—cod, herring, halibut, and haddock—were migrating into Greenlandic waters, moving north as the oceans warmed. There was a rush of disaster tourists, people coming to see the glaciers slide into the sea: Cruise ship arrivals had jumped 250 percent in four years, and shops sold postcards showing melting ice with the label “Climate Change and Global Warming.” The expansion of the South Greenland agricultural season—already three weeks longer than it was in the early 1990s—meant potato farms and carrot gardens and more grass for more sheep. There were plans for a new aluminum smelter—360,000 tons a year, the biggest in the world—to be built by Alcoa and run on hydropower from the island’s gushing rivers. A pair of ships had just finished laying high-speed Internet cable across the Denmark Strait, connecting Greenland to Iceland and onward to North America, and there were plans for fields of server farms—warehouses of computer processors working for Google or Cisco or Amazon—to take advantage of the cheap electricity and high latitude. “They normally need a lot of air-conditioning,” Minik explained. There were even plans for the melting ice itself: water exports. “The Greenland ice cap has an estimated volume of 1.7 million km3, the world’s biggest water reservoir,” boasted a Web site set up by the Secretariat of Ice and Water. Investors could sell “two million years of history in a bottle!”
• • •
IT ISN’T ANYONE in Greenland’s fault, but the Maldives are probably doomed. Tuvalu is probably doomed. Kiribati is probably doomed. The Marshall Islands are probably doomed. The Seychelles are probably doomed. The Bahamas are probably doomed. The Carterets are probably doomed. Bangladesh, at least a fifth of it, is probably doomed. Large portions of Manila, Alexandria, Lagos, Karachi, Kolkata, Jakarta, Dakar, Rio, Miami, and Ho Chi Minh City are probably doomed. Water enough to flood them all is stored in the world’s biggest reservoir, the Greenland ice cap, the frozen inland mass that covers 81 percent of the island. The rate of the ice cap’s melt had been increasing by 7 percent a year since 1996. If someday it melts entirely, global sea levels will jump more than twenty feet.
In Alaska, villages such as Newtok, Shishmaref, and Kivalina were also endangered, made increasingly unlivable by coastal erosion, melting permafrost, and creeping salinity. Newtok’s elders had acquired a new town site on a new island to their south—one with a hill—and were lobbying the state and federal government for the $130 million to move their 315 residents to it. The Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition had chosen a new site on the mainland, a few miles away, and was also awaiting funds. The residents of Kivalina were the plaintiffs in a conspiracy case against eight energy companies, including ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Chevron, who were accused of stirring up climate-change skepticism so they could produce more oil. The case—which would eventually be dismissed by a Cal
ifornia judge—was being watched closely by American trial lawyers. As I heard one say excitedly at a conference, “This could really open up the floodgates . . . oh, probably not the right phrase.”
Small island nations also considered climate lawsuits—in 2002, Tuvalu had threatened to file one against Australia and the United States—but mostly they, too, were looking for someplace new: Seventy-five Tuvaluans and seventy-five Kiribatians a year go to New Zealand under immigration quotas; the first five of seventeen hundred Carteret Islanders moved to newly purchased land in Bougainville, also in Papua New Guinea, in 2009. In Australia, a Tuvaluan-born scientist named Don Kennedy was drumming up support to buy an island from Fiji for his people. In the Maldives, the charismatic president, Mohamed Nasheed, the “Obama of the Maldives” who became the face of climate change before he was forced out in a coup, declared that he was looking to buy land in Sri Lanka or Australia, just in case. This prompted an Indonesian minister to announce that his country had some spare islands to sell.
In the Alps, melting glaciers around the Matterhorn had shifted a border in place since 1861—it followed a ridge of snow that was no longer there—causing Italy and Switzerland to sit down and start negotiating a new one. In Kashmir, experts worried, the accelerating melt of the Siachen Glacier would further provoke the India-Pakistan fight. The world’s shifting political map scared just about everyone. The NGO Christian Aid estimated that by 2050, a billion people would be pushed from their homes by global warming. Friends of the Earth said there would be as many as 100 million such climate refugees. The IPCC said 150 million. The Stern Review, 200 million. The International Committee of the Red Cross said there were 25 to 50 million already.
The implications of the melt were so bad for so much of the world that it seemed almost rude, even in Upernavik, to consider how good they were for Greenland. Since 2003, the ice cap had shrunk by more than a million tons, so much that the underlying bedrock rose four centimeters each year, like a ship slowly unweighted of its cargo. In Greenland, the land was rising faster than the sea.
• • •
MINIK LIKED TO GRAPPLE honestly with consequences. On the way to Upernavik, in the Kangerlussuaq Airport, a building on the tundra of western Greenland that felt like a ski lodge in the Alps—lounge chairs, huge windows, a cafeteria with trays, rich tourists in Gore-Tex—I heard his life story. He told me that after becoming Greenland’s national badminton champion, he’d gotten his master’s in ethical philosophy at Denmark’s Aarhus University. His thesis, “Greenlandic Autonomy or Secession: Philosophical Considerations,” was a work of secession theory, the study of whether one country has, or doesn’t have, the moral right to break free from another. One early revelation, he said, had come from what he called “my first philosophical crisis,” after he’d tried to apply the Aristotelian ideal of the good life to every little thing in his real life: not every action can be moral.
He was straightforward about the life being wiped out by climate change. “It’s a problem for hunters,” he said. “Dog sledges fall through the ice. Or there is no ice.” It was harder to get seals. It was harder to go ice fishing. In the north, it was hard to do anything but move to the larger towns.
Minik was equally straightforward about the Danes: They’d been mostly benevolent colonizers. In his thesis, and later in the self-governance talks, he’d used their own moral arguments against them. In only one place did his philosophy significantly break with that of the father of modern secession theory, Duke University’s Allen Buchanan. “According to him, you have to be wronged to justify it,” Minik told me. “Denmark has to wrong Greenland in a really bad way before we break away. I don’t agree with that part. Sometimes you have to view this as a marriage: adults, consenting people, divorcing of their own free will.”
Greenland had become part of Denmark in 1721, when the Lutheran missionary Hans Egede showed up and started saving souls. The first Danes taught the Inuit that hell was very hot rather than very cold, as they had previously believed. The Danes taught that communal living—shared food, shared hunting trips, shared wives—was sinful. They taught that rocks and birds were not endowed with spirits. Greenlanders had no bread or concept of bread, so Egede had translated another pillar of Western belief—the Lord’s Prayer—to fit Greenlandic reality. “Give us this day our daily harbor seal,” the Inuit prayed.
In the Danish colony, the crown had declared as early as 1782 that the Greenlanders’ welfare should “receive the highest possible consideration, [overriding] when necessary the interests of trade itself.” The Danes had harvested whales and fish and some coal, but they gave back homes and schools and hospitals. In 1953, they gave full Danish citizenship to every Greenlander. They gave students like Minik a free education at the university of their choice in Europe or North America. In Canada in the 1940s, meanwhile, Inuit were given numbered dog-tag-like IDs because they had no surnames, and they were moved to barren islands to reinforce sovereignty claims. In the United States, Inuit, including a boy named Minik, were put on display in the American Museum of Natural History by Admiral Robert Peary, the explorer who later claimed, probably falsely, to be the first to reach the North Pole.
Upernavik was seasonally frozen out of all ship traffic, possessed of no trees to cut or road links to deliver supplies, and two thousand miles away from Denmark. Yet it had this: a beautiful gym with a digital scoreboard, a hundred-foot-high ceiling, and long wooden beams five feet thick. The local hospital was staffed by Danes and Swedes, the Pisiffik supermarket price-subsidized, the cell phone signal strong, the street paved—not the mud tracks I’d seen in Inuit towns in Canada and Alaska. Nearby, a mountaintop had been lopped off, turned into a mesa: Upernavik’s airport, its link to the world. The airport had a handicapped-accessible toilet.
From up here, the Danes, who got a fifth of their electricity from wind power, who just agreed to give up 98 percent of their territory, who would soon host the Copenhagen climate conference—dubbed “Hopenhagen” until the talks let everyone down—seemed oddly idealistic. Easy marks. I had to wonder at their motives. Did they plan to keep Hans Island? Did they plan to keep the Arctic Ocean seabed claimed under the Law of the Sea? But Minik didn’t wonder, and he didn’t much wonder if he was scorning the wrong people.
The day after the sports hall meeting, the politicians set out for the tiny whaling village of Kangersuatsiaq, where they would sit in a red community center and discuss the referendum with another audience. Minik and I followed in a twenty-two-foot fishing boat piloted by Upernavik’s gap-toothed mayor, who pointed out a halibut trawler and told us that in the 1970s waters here were ice covered from late December until May; now they were open year-round. Shrimp trawlers had started coming to Upernavik, following their prey north, and so had herring—a fish that had freaked locals out when they first caught them. He told me about a new contest run by the Greenland Bureau of Mines and Petroleum: Send in rocks from your community. “If your sample is the best,” he said, “you win 125,000 Danish kroner!”—more than $20,000.
We motored inland, cutting through waves at twenty-five knots, moving closer to the ice cap, and the temperature dropped ten degrees. We skirted a sheer, three-thousand-foot-high cliff of dark basalt that dropped straight into the fjord, staying away from its base to avoid rockfall.
Minik, bundled in a black Arc’teryx ski jacket, pointed out young guillemot birds—relatives of the puffin—floating in the water. They’d just left the nest. They were too fat to fly, so they had to just bob there for a few more hours or days until they’d lost weight—as easy prey for hunters as might be, for instance, a fledgling country for foreign oil and mineral concerns. But Minik thought the birds were hilarious. Every time we weaved around one, he pointed it out, then giggled like a madman as it vainly flapped its wings.
• • •
MY LODGING IN UPERNAVIK was a yellow two-story house just off the paved street. I’d found it by e-mailing a villager
who told me to call another villager, who’d sent a silent Inuit woman to meet my flight. She put my bag in a taxi, drove me to the house, wrote down the number of kroner I owed her (450, then about $90), and handed me a key and left. A few hours later the door opened again, and the woman ushered in my surprise roommates: a young Dutchman and an older Dane, both scientists with GEUS, the Danish geological survey.
The scientists had come to retrieve an instrument left on the ice cap at seventy-six degrees north—some two hundred miles and two hours of flying time away. It was a ten-foot-tall metal tripod with a hard drive, a solar panel, and various sensors meant to track glacial melt. It had stopped working, but this patch of the otherwise shrinking ice sheet wasn’t moving particularly quickly. GEUS was nevertheless spending tens of thousands of dollars to get it back, and because they had extra seats, I, too, was given a chance to benefit from Denmark’s largesse. Helicopter charters in Greenland were otherwise expensive and near impossible to find: Oil and mining firms had booked them all up.
The helicopter was a single-rotor Bell 212, immaculately red like the rest of the Air Greenland fleet. One morning, just after dawn, we climbed in, and it lifted us above the town, above the fjords. Out the window were fog banks and empty islands, then a single iceberg in a windswept bay, then hundreds of icebergs, then thousands. The pilot, a Norwegian, flew between them, yards above the water. Then we climbed again and followed the ice cap north. Where glaciers were calving, spilling into the ocean, the seawater had frozen over during the night. On the ice cap itself, the surface was heavily crevassed and endless, a pattern of thousands of parallel cuts. I saw blues and grays and whites and browns, the red of the rocks, the orange of the rising sun. What I didn’t see were people: On various islands were remnants of villages, stone walls and abandoned buildings, but the landscape had been further emptied as hunters moved to the cities.
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