Climate, Society and Subsurface Politics in Greenland

Under the Great Ice

Mark Nuttall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351400282
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Once imagined as a place on the very edge of the world, Greenland is now viewed as being at the epicentre of climate change. At the same time, international attention is focused on opportunities for oil and mineral development, seemingly made possible as the inland ice melts and sea ice disappears, revealing geological riches and making access to remote areas easier.

In this book, Mark Nuttall takes the reader on a journey through landscapes, seascapes and icescapes of memory, movement and anticipation. Unravelling the entanglements of climate change, indigenous sovereignty and the politics surrounding non-renewable resource extraction, he describes how the country is on the verge of major environmental, political and social transformations as it aspires to greater autonomy and possible independence from Denmark. At the heart of this is discussion about how resources and the environment are given meaning and how they have become subject to intense political and ideological struggle.

Climate, Society and Subsurface Politics in Greenland: Under the Great Ice is a key resource for academics, practitioners and students of anthropology, geography, development studies, political ecology and polar studies.

1 Making resource spaces

A resource frontier of sorts is being imagined, made and pushed back in contemporary Greenland, and the subsurface is becoming implicated in everyday life in new ways. With this making of the frontier, particular spaces are marked out as zones in which processes and practices of deterritoriality and exploitation are enacted. The current trajectory of political and economic development involves embedding Greenland deeper within global networks and transnational circuits of resource extraction, commodity production, value chains, and venture capitalism. This is not necessarily something unique to Greenland, but it does throw up some challenges for how the country is thinking about how it should manage economic development and, at the same time, protect the environment. Narratives about the future of Greenlandic society are also embedded within discourses concerning geological strata. Subterranean resources are intertwined with discussions of economic and political independence and Greenland has been experiencing considerable interest from multinational corporations wishing to probe beneath the surface, excavate deep into mountains, and drill into the ocean floor in a search for minerals, oil and gas. These companies not only imagine, approach, and represent Greenland as a new resource frontier, they make promises of economic benefit for the country and talk of extractive industries providing job opportunities for local people living near sites of potential development.

In recent years, several plans for mines have been sketched out and oil exploration in offshore waters has been conducted in West and Northwest Greenland, with attention increasingly focused on seismic survey programmes off the northeast coast. Companies from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and several other countries have been active in setting up offices in Nuuk, often establishing Greenlandic-based subsidiaries. Some maintain a visible, daily presence in an urban place defined by civic leaders as an Arctic metropolis and dynamic capital city. It has become a site for speculative ventures, with directors and others in charge of Greenlandic operations appearing regularly in the local and national media. Nuuk is a growing, energetic Arctic city of some 16,500 people and it often seems awash these days with geologists, prospectors, engineers, scientists, consultants and entrepreneurs as it assumes a strategic role as a base supporting extractive industries in all aspects of administration, logistics and exploration. Local companies have emerged that provide a range of technical, scientific, prospecting, surveying, transport, and consultancy services. The airport is set to be developed and expanded. A new harbour is also under construction, anticipating perhaps increased shipping related to oil, gas and mining ventures, as well as container vessels plying West Greenlandic waters en route to and from what transportation planners hope could be a busy Northwest Passage maritime highway opened as sea ice continues to melt. Foreign workers transit to and from mining exploration camps, or to and from seismic survey vessels, and pass through other towns along the west coast, while oil companies send experts and consultants into small, remoter communities of hunters and fishers in the far north and on the east coast for brief stays to carry out social baseline studies and environmental impact assessments. Charter helicopter services – a lucrative business for Air Greenland, the country’s national airline – are increasingly in demand to fly teams of geologists and prospectors and their equipment deep into remote valleys and to the edge of the inland ice.

Around Greenland’s coasts, some people appear overwhelmed by the number of public information sessions organized by companies about mining and oil exploration ventures; and they often seem no clearer about these projects even after executives, planners and consultants have visited their communities to speak about their plans. Moreover, many people do not know such public meetings have even been held at all until the company representatives have left. And, as I shall show later in this book, not all communities are visited or have access to sufficient information, meaning local people are often unaware of project plans in the first place. Seats on Air Greenland’s one Airbus A330, that flies on weekdays between Copenhagen and the international airport at Kangerlussuaq just above the Arctic Circle on the west coast, seem increasingly harder to book as the aircraft transports more and more business travellers, contract workers, conference delegates and tourists into a land that the Greenland Employers’ Association markets internationally as “a key player in the Arctic”. The Employers’ Association, which calls Greenland “the land of opportunities”, has also organized biennial business conferences in Nuuk since 2009 under the banner of “Future Greenland”. These consider visions for the country’s future in terms of business prospects, resource development, and the architectural design and reconstruction of Greenlandic buildings, housing and public spaces that would erase traces of colonial construction and signify a more cosmopolitan identity for a place embarked on a process of state-formation.¹

In these kinds of events, and through the development of business plans and marketing strategies, Greenlandic élites (politicians and business leaders) and international companies (largely those involved in extractive industries, tourism and other forms of commerce, as well as those concerned with the built environment) are engaged in a collective enterprise of conceiving, imagining and actualizing the future. As I sat in the offices of one consultancy company in Nuuk during a rainy September afternoon in 2013, I listened to its technicians (who are Danes and Greenlanders) talk of the tremendous possibilities for the development of hydropower. “The inland ice is melting and this means so much water that will just be going to waste,” said one. “Imagine what we could do with it; the possibilities for power and industrial development are huge. There are so many valleys here that can be flooded and so many rivers that can be harnessed. There’s enough land to hunt and many places to fish. People won’t be affected.” Meanwhile, Danish media carry alarmist stories about the impacts of climate change and extractive industries, and a possible influx of Chinese labourers into Greenland seeking work in the construction and operational phases of large-scale projects, inciting moral panic about a rush to exploit rare earth minerals, the mining of uranium, and the smelting of aluminium.

Greenland, of course, is not the only region in the Arctic where resource exploration is taking place, or where major non-renewable resource projects are going through the design stages or are on the verge of being implemented. The Circumpolar North more broadly is being imagined and marked out as a new frontier for oil, gas and mineral extraction that optimistic scenarios suggest would supply global energy needs and go some way to meeting the world’s increasing consumption demands. Although tempered somewhat over the last couple of years or so by a downturn in commodity prices for minerals and in global oil and gas markets, and the withdrawal for the time being of some companies from the exploration of northern waters and lands, political and corporate discourses about natural resource extraction nonetheless continue to have significant influence over the planning and trajectory of economic development in many parts of the Arctic. The subsoil and the strata that constitute the deep temporal underworld have assumed a new significance in the way they configure the political economy of circumpolar regions. And as the Arctic becomes entangled in a new geopolitical scripting, the subsurface becomes an object of governance as excited talk of the region’s future emerging from the extraction of hydrocarbons and minerals prompts greater international interest. The very idea of the frontier remains a seductive one, despite shifts towards thinking about renewable sources of energy and planning for post-carbon futures. While many commentators increasingly talk of a “new” Arctic, it is one that is being made from processes beginning in deep time.

Discussion of the possible benefits and impacts of extractive industries has begun to dominate the circumpolar geopolitical agenda. This has gradually become more focused on business and commerce opportunities over the last decade, as opposed to previous prioritized issues related to conservation, pollution, contaminants, and climate change that had set the scene for how international circumpolar cooperation should proceed under the auspices of the Arctic Council and other regional institutions since the mid-1990s (Dodds and Nuttall 2016). The imagining of the Arctic as a resource frontier, whether this concerns plans for mining in Canada’s Yukon and Nunavut territories, oil and gas development in other parts of Canada such as the Mackenzie Delta and the Beaufort Sea, or in Norway’s Lofoten Islands, Alaska’s North Slope, Northeast Greenland, or the Russian parts of the Barents Sea, or as a space where resources and goods can be transported through its sea lanes as the ice melts, is a process reminiscent of what some critiques focusing on neoliberal natures and environments have identified as an acceleration of “the ongoing commodification of natural things” (Heynen and Robbins 2005: 6). Talk of opportunities, potential, abundance and accumulation in frontier spaces acts, as Timothy Luke has written, to transform “nature” discursively into “natural resources”; a necessary first step before technology turns nature’s matter and energy into products (Luke 1995: 8).

Figure 1.1 Nuuk is Greenland’s growing, bustling capital.

Re-imagining Arctic frontiers

Perhaps, however, it is more accurate to think about this current interest in northern resources as part of a re-imagining of the Arctic as a frontier, as discourses on Arctic frontiers are certainly not new and have dominated much political and economic analysis of the last few decades. The articulation and representation of Arctic places as indigenous homelands from the 1970s onwards, both by indigenous peoples themselves and as a result of public hearings processes such as the Berger Inquiry carried out for the Mackenzie Valley pipeline project in northern Canada in the mid-1970s, and the move towards land claims and self-government negotiations in Alaska, Canada and Greenland – which must also be seen to a considerable extent against the backdrop of major resource development projects or disagreements over access to and ownership of resources – did much to counter the prevailing view at the time of the Arctic as empty space, wasteland, wilderness and frontier. The Arctic came to be increasingly understood and recognized as an inhabited, lived-in region with a diversity of cultures, a region of indigenous homelands where both indigenous and non-indigenous livelihoods flourished. Yet there appears to be a return to such a perception of the Arctic as largely empty, vast and wide open for development as the global gaze settles on the Circumpolar North and as “Arctic” becomes synonymous with the Arctic Ocean and the horizons and depths of far northern maritime spaces (Dodds and Nuttall 2016; Nuttall 2010a).

Frontiers are not easy to define, locate and study. A frontier can be elusive, and identifying where it begins and ends can be a fraught geographical and theoretical task. The relevance and applicability of the frontier to understanding the imagining, formulation and representation of space and place is controversial, difficult and contested. Yet the very idea of the frontier, and of the emergence of frontier regions and their place in settlement, development and national economies, continues to inform the global imagination about northern places and spaces. This idea influences political and corporate perspectives on economic development and resource extraction at high latitudes. Doreen Massey (1993: 6) argued that places are “constructed out of a particular constellation of relations, articulated together at a particular locus”. And so too are frontiers, which, however elusive, can be approached in the same way as many relational spaces are, as objects of study in and of themselves (Gustavson and Cytrynbaum 2003). In his work on the production of the resource frontier in Laos, Keith Barney (2009) talks of how frontiers are conceived as relational zones of economy, nature and society; they are spaces in which processes of capitalist transition occur, leading to new forms of social property relations and legal systems which become established quickly in response to market demands and imperatives. Similarly, De Angelis (2004) has argued that resource frontiers are particular and very specific spatial forms considered essential for the successful functioning of global capitalism and economic systems, while Walker (2006) sees frontiers as expanding borderlands, created and driven by economic investment and development which may prove short-term and are often characterized by cycles of boom and bust. Peluso and Lund (2013) point to the importance of understanding how the making of frontiers is bound up with territorialization as a practice of claiming, managing and controlling places, resources and people. As such it differs, they argue, from the production of space; territorialization furthermore encloses spaces and employs a range of mechanisms and powers that impose and ensure restrictions of access. Tania Murray Li (2014: 13) argues that frontiers “are coveted places, envisaged by various actors as sites of potential” and that images and notions of wilderness, wildness and emptiness are “deployed by contemporary development planners, who see frontier spaces as ‘underutilized’ resources that should be put into efficient and productive use, and devise schemes to attract corporate investors”. To understand a frontier, though, necessitates an understanding of what constitutes resources and definitions of abundance, availability and scarcity. Resources – and the idea of the reserves in which they are situated or emplaced – are also, as Gavin Bridge reminds us, created by changing societal demands and can be discovered because of changes in markets or the costs of extraction. In the case of minerals, for example, reserves are not “static products of geological and mineralogical processes, but are dynamic phenomena derived through continual socioeconomic appraisal of physical matter” (Bridge 2004: 416). In this way, exploration and new cost-reducing technologies can “create mineral reserves in places where, to all practical purposes, none previously existed” (ibid.) and investment in each jurisdiction is determined to a considerable extent by perceived risks rather than by geology alone. Resource spaces, then, are made not discovered.

As historian of the American West Walter Prescott Webb put it in his classic work The Great Frontier, which was first published in 1952, the frontier “is not a line to stop at, but an area inviting entrance” (Webb 1964: 2), and so lines are crossed, frontier lands are stepped into, and people, ideas, labour and technologies move into the spaces beyond and bring them into being as productive zones of capitalism through material transformation, cultivation, logging, and resource exploitation. Webb’s thesis rested in part on understanding the relation between the great frontier and the metropolis. “The mere act of looking at the whole frontier on the one hand,” he said, “and the whole metropolitan region on the other reveals relationships which are not apparent in examining fragments” (ibid.: xvi). In this way, the frontier remains “in part a metaphor for national development in its material and ideological senses, as well as in terms of spatial expansion and delimitation” (Fold and Hirsch 2009: 95). This stands, I suggest, for many circumpolar regions currently experiencing the planning, construction and operation of minerals and energy megaprojects. However, again, the history of extractive industries in the far northern reaches of the globe tells us that this is nothing new. Regions and peoples throughout the northern circumpolar world have long experienced the economic, environmental and social impacts of extractive industries. Memories of such projects, as well as their environmental marks, scars and toxic legacies, persist in a number of northern communities and residual spaces. This is certainly true for those parts of Greenland in which mining activity has taken place. What is new in the case of Greenland, though, is the use of the “frontier” as a spatial and development metaphor for re-thinking and re-imagining Greenlandic territory as comprised of places of abundance, opportunity, possibility, and potential, and for materializing space, resources and neoliberal environments.

While frontiers are often associated with economic development in the form of resource extraction, Alice Kelly (2011) argues that setting aside places for designation as national parks or special habitats for conservation can be seen as new frontiers of value. While extractive industries, for example, may be prohibited in protected areas, she points out that these areas are often exploited in non-material ways even if their resources are not dug up. This is especially so in the case of ecotourism, but also because of environmentalist action and conservation ideas which lead to the enclosure of spaces and the designation of them as unique places. In seeking to protect such spaces, environmental NGOs often accrue considerable donations from the public through national and global campaigns and from the very imagery they project about the special qualities and values of ecosystems and animals. They are still spaces transformed into commodities for consumption in the global marketplace. As I shall discuss in Chapter 6, this is illustrated by the work of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in promoting the designation of a vast part of Northwest Greenland and Northeast Arctic Canada as the Last Ice Area, a space in which sea ice, glaciers and polar bears constitute such a new frontier of value.

What are thought of as frontiers, though (unless they are deep ocean spaces, for instance, including areas such as the Arctic Ocean), are seldom empty of human presence before capital, technology and practices of exploitation and resource utilization are moved across and into them, and so they also emerge as fraught contact zones, which Mary Louise Pratt defines as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination-like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (1992: 4). Greenland has for long been such a contact zone, a meeting place for various encounters; between different Inuit cultures moving across from Arctic Canada and mingling with those already established in Greenland, between Inuit and the Norse, between Inuit and explorers, between Inuit and missionaries, traders and whalers, between Inuit and colonial administrators, military personnel, and incomers, and now between Greenlanders and different actors with different ideas of space, place and resources, such as biologists, glaciologists and geologists, conservationists, environmentalists, tourists, and entrepreneurs. Much has been written about Greenland’s history as well as the social, cultural and political situations and events leading to Home Rule in 1979, and Self-Rule in 2009, and it is not my intention to reiterate this history in detail here. Nonetheless some brief account – while acknowledging I am glossing over a richness and complexity of social, cultural, economic and political events – is necessary as context for understanding what follows in later chapters.

Society, economy and change

Greenland’s coastal areas have been inhabited by Inuit groups for about 4,500 years since the first Paleo-Eskimo migrants arrived in the far north of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Preface
• 1 Making resource spaces
• 2 Under the great ice
• 3 Living in a world of becoming
• 4 Shifting worlds and changing livelihoods
• 5 An exceptional place
• 6 Uncertain weather and the last areas of ice
• 7 Seismic lines in the water
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index