coe187_nuttall.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast. It's been a busy week.

Speaker2: [00:00:29] It's been super busy.

Speaker1: [00:00:30] It's been, I'd say, one of the most busy and weird and unsettling and somehow also fulfilling weeks of my time on this planet. And I think we settle in.

Speaker2: [00:00:40] We didn't really have.

Speaker1: [00:00:42] We didn't really have a sense when we were talking to you last week that this week was going to be as big, but Glacier has had its 15 minutes of fame. Let's put it that way, right?

Speaker2: [00:00:52] All calculative and has its own hashtag now. Yes, because it has to be. Oh, and a GIF, someone did a GIF of little hooky. I know that's so cute. It's very sweet. So what happened? Well, I mean, I think many people listening to the Pod know that we have been working on this memorial plaque for a while, for a while, getting permission from the Icelandic government and working with Andre Snyder Magnusson on the words and getting it created by an Icelandic metal Smith. And we're going to put it up on a rock, a top awk mountain near where the glacier was.

Speaker1: [00:01:29] Yeah, I think we've covered that

Speaker2: [00:01:30] Part of it. Yeah. So but then so our PR department said, let's do a news release and throw it out there. And so we

Speaker1: [00:01:37] Did. That was last Thursday,

Speaker2: [00:01:38] And someone some someone started tweeting about it and got a lot of someone got a hold of it and started twittering a whole bunch. Well, OK, then it's yeah, that's what it was, not the timeline.

Speaker1: [00:01:49] I was like, Yeah, I'm just going to comment that I think two things happen around the same time. Credit to Gizmodo there. Earther blog picked up the story first, and somebody in Iceland who's got the handle Icelandic icon who we don't know sent out the story essentially about a glacier being the first one to melt and having this memorial plaque. And when we saw it, and I think this might have been Saturday and it had 4000 retweets and several thousand likes, we were like, OK, well, maybe this is going to be bigger than we expected it was going to be. And then by Sunday, the Huffington Post had it, and I think by Monday, the Guardian had it. And so then kind of all hell broke loose and then the next three days. So this is like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We've just been doing a lot of interviews, but it's been amazing because the story is obviously somehow hit a zeitgeist nerve. It has gotten everywhere, like literally everywhere from, you know, small broadcasters in Tennessee all the way to Vietnam and Malaysia and kind of everywhere in between. And we can't even really track how far wide it went, just because we don't have the linguistic capability and the orthographic recognition to even know kind of what you know, what the story looks like in Cyrillic. We've just been looking at for the glacier headline. And yeah, so it's been really wild. And in fact, Simone was saying a couple of days ago that it made her feel kind of like you were distributed into pieces. How do you put it?

Speaker2: [00:03:20] Yeah, well, I don't. Yeah, I don't know if that's what I said. Yeah, distributed. I guess I felt a little shattered, OK? And as though I have been cremated and scattered all over the world, I guess that was the sensation in a way. Wow. Because there's something odd about having your name and your words running around in the world in such a vast way in languages that you don't know and in places you don't know being seen. And I mean, it's great. It's good. I think the main point of the story here is that this story about OK is out there in a way that it never was before. And so I'm glad that we took the initiative to tell people about it. And more importantly, I'm glad that people recognize that the loss of Iceland's first name glacier is a real loss and not just something you know, to pass by and one's thoughts, but that this is something we ought to recognize.

Speaker1: [00:04:17] So I had a few. I've just assembled a few of my favorite moments from the past seventy two hours that I wanted to share. And Simone, I'm sure you have some. I'll try

Speaker2: [00:04:25] To join. I realize I'm trying to talk it out like we've been doing interviews for days and,

Speaker1: [00:04:31] Well, let's just hit it. Let's just hit it quickly. We don't have to dwell on any of this. Now, the first one is that although I would say 99 percent of what we received back was very positive, and indeed, the story is sometimes connected to us. And sometimes it isn't because some of the stories lead with like Iceland is doing this or Icelandic scientists are doing this. And it's interesting, though there have been a few pieces of hate mail that have come our way, and in one of them, this is one of my favorite moments. Simone is described as being an entitled Millennial. So do you want to tell us about that? Like, how did you get described as an entitled entitled Millennial?

Speaker2: [00:05:05] I don't know someone with an AOL email account. Found my email account. Would you say that they hate that they hate themselves more than they can hate me? That's what I said. No, I don't know. He was like, some rando was just, you know, you must be an entitled millennial with a Ph.D..

Speaker1: [00:05:21] Yep. That's how I wake up every morning and say, God, you're an entitlement.

Speaker2: [00:05:26] There was a, you know, there is a we did get on this denial website, OK, what's it called? The title is another heartbreaking story of climate doom. Yeah, that's another day. Another heart rending story about the coming climate. Doon Ocasio-Cortez dead. They said, we killed it. The story is bogus as usual, so we did make it onto. But it's a pretty comprehensive piece. It goes on and on and on.

Speaker1: [00:05:50] I mean, a couple of things that strike me about the hate mail is one, not just the fact that they they all have AOL.com, but also that, you know, they often come in a multiplicity of fonts and font sizes like as those they're like, weirdly were stapled together, like some kind of murderer's letter, kind of like kidnapper's ransom note or something like that.

Speaker2: [00:06:10] I got this. I'm still reading from this the the denial website. Yes, or this piece, as universities do these days, Rice put out a lurid press release. Yeah. And then he goes, the rest of the article read. Emphasis added academics in every field are joined in the climate publicity parade. And so that's why he's highlighted in red that were anthropologists. Oh, I see. Yes. I was like, Why is anthropologists highlighted in red? Because he wants to make sure this is this is what they're supposed to start throwing things at their computer screen as soon as they see those words.

Speaker1: [00:06:42] I love it. He described it as lurid, lurid, lurid. The right A. No, it's not.

Speaker2: [00:06:48] But yeah, but there's been there was a lot of sort of flaming going back and forth on that hill piece.

Speaker1: [00:06:53] Ok, so that was something else on my list. So we had, you know, one of the again early signals that this was going to be something that was going to break white is there was a very lively Reddit thread. And then also this when the Hill published their version of it. The Hill is, of course, a magnet for political news. And so immediately, maybe, unsurprisingly, people got to fighting over this story. So Simone has has got a couple of choice exchanges to give us the state of the art of political debate over climate change.

Speaker2: [00:07:23] And it's amazing, like how quickly it turns to questions of religion and God as I was scrolling through it. That's kind of, I don't know, about 30 percent of the content has to do with like whether you're a devil worshipper or whether you believe in Christ, how you got to your faith, whether you know, whether you're a believer or not. So it's really a kind of weird world out there, but it's also a world that I think temper tantrum having eight year olds would understand very well, because that's about the level of conversation. So here's some. Here's someone who says the trend is glaciers have been melting for thousands of years, and those pesky exceptions made the climate change boat full of holes. Someone else? Don't we wish it were so sadly not. Sure thing, honey. Are you a blonde by any chance? Question mark response? Hopefully, your offspring in this generation or the next are the first to die from heat stroke, more extreme hurricanes, wildfires, flooding infectious diseases or a loss of food security. All are expected to happen as a result of man made climate change, which every scientific organization, every major country, except the right wing idiots in the United States, and ninety seven percent plus of climate scientists endorse. I hope every one of your descendants die cursing your name. Quote our idiot. Great great grandfather claimed this was all a lie. Let him burn in hell end quote because they and the world will be right and you will still be an idiot. Oh my god.

Speaker1: [00:08:48] It's kind of wonderful. But yeah,

Speaker2: [00:08:50] Also, this is a good one. English among many. They're they're all melting you. We have to. We know that anthropogenic climate change is real. Someone responds, Worry about your souls. God will take care of his glaciers.

Speaker1: [00:09:04] Capital H.

Speaker2: [00:09:05] I guess that makes me response. My God told me that your God is an asshole and she doesn't lie about shit like that.

Speaker1: [00:09:12] She doesn't like

Speaker2: [00:09:14] The response to that. You know, 70 percent of the world thinks your God is fake. And there's this real don't give me, doesn't that give you pause or does your faith iron out all those kinks and the surreal how quickly it turns to?

Speaker1: [00:09:26] Well, it makes sense because you know, when you're talking about climate change and its worst scenarios, you're talking about apocalypse and extinction. And of course, it brings the people out of the woodwork who are just waiting for that to happen because that's what their sacred book has told them is already been foretold since the beginning of time. Now, shifting over to more positive news, we are going to give out our first ever cultures of energy. Climate Warrior Award. I feel like there's a way this should be for not just like people who are like, I want like, let's call it the Everyday Climate Warrior Award. Can we call it that? So in other words, not for people who are doing really high profile work, not for the Greta Thunberg's of the world, like who already are getting a lot of celebration. I'm talking about the people who are doing like really cool things in the shadows and making stuff happen behind the scenes. Does that make sense? Oh, totally. So our first ever Everyday Climate Warrior Award Cultures of Energy is going out to one. Daisy Hernandez, who is a writer for. Wait for it, popular mechanics who picked up this glacial melt story and put it,

Speaker2: [00:10:26] Put it, put it in between the new Corvette and the, you know how to add a supercharger engine story.

Speaker1: [00:10:33] I mean, I just my heart leapt to the ceiling, leapt to the left, to the skies. When I saw that, we made it into popular mechanics because like every single story in that in, there is about how cool the new Hemi engine is. Check out the size of the tires on this truck, you know, and then suddenly there's like and by the way, you know, by the way, sorry, you know, climate change is extinguishing our glacier.

Speaker2: [00:10:57] Oh, and here it says it actually that popular mechanics Daisy's story actually appeared in Yahoo News. Oh, wow. So her story made it over to Yahoo.

Speaker1: [00:11:06] Yes, that's great. Go Daisy

Speaker2: [00:11:08] As I see the cute little picture of her

Speaker1: [00:11:10] And we shouted her out on Twitter and I know that probably we don't want to get her in trouble with her employer, and this is probably already too much. But we were like Daisy or our hero. And then she tweets back at us just like a raised fist. She is so cool. Daisy Hernandez, you made our day, you made our week, you made our year. Yeah, it's been amazing, and we don't need to go on and on. This story is, as Simone said, as kind of talked to destroy already. But just to say thank you to all of you out there who have listened and retweeted and helped us to to get this story out, we got it high enough that the the winds of the stratospheric winds of of mass media took it from there. And it looks as though we are going to have a fabulous event in Iceland next month with this commemorative tour or walk up to the top and installation of the plaque. It's going to get a lot of media attention and as I think we said in one of the interviews, I think the hopeful sign of this is that, you know, so many people felt this in so many different parts of the world like that is the kind of sense of common identity and purpose we need if we're going to really turn the tides on climate change.

Speaker2: [00:12:22] Oh yeah. Well, put Dominic Boyer just listening to me now. I was just

Speaker1: [00:12:27] Checking her mentions.

Speaker2: [00:12:28] Oh no, I'm looking at because it showed up in MSN News in Saudi Arabia. Oh, OK. And then there's the one that was a language I didn't quite recognize, and I stuck it into Google Translate Polish.

Speaker1: [00:12:40] Oh, wow, that's cool.

Speaker2: [00:12:42] Anyway, I was just looking at some of these things, so it's cool. Forbes in Mexico. Oh yeah, there was a one one version of the story in Mexico where I changed gender somehow and became masculine. I became Senor howI and yeah, and I was used all the kind of proper grammar for a man. That's OK. As you said, it gives me more thought. It gives you

Speaker1: [00:13:04] More authority in Mexico, for sure. So let's turn now to our excellent guest for this week who is working on topics not unrelated to glacial loss in Iceland. The Marvelous Mark, not Nuttall from the University of Alberta, who's been doing field research in Greenland for, I don't know, three decades. He's probably the longest that I know of the longest serving anthropologist of Greenland that we that we could think of. We do a deep dive into Greenland today and starting with this new book he's co-authored with Klaus Dodds, called the Arctic What Everyone Needs to Know. That's out from Oxford University Press just this year, and it's a really great primer or primer. I can't remember what the pronunciation is. If you are just interested in a overview of what's happening in the Arctic today, that is extremely informative, but also like a good brisk read, I would recommend this book highly. It is a very efficient in telling you everything you need to know about the Arctic and all dimensions of life in the Arctic today. So we start there and we talk about obviously the complex politics of Greenland as this new resource frontier, a place that is on the one hand, aspiring to greater state sovereignty in the old classical model. But also there are movements to create transnational indigenous alliances that would kind of circumvent aspects of that statecraft. And we get into the the whole militarized history of the area and the U.S. building secret bases and all sorts of cool stuff. So it's a really interesting conversation. And Mark is I don't think there's anybody out there who I know who knows more about Greenland than Mark. So wouldn't you say?

Speaker2: [00:14:45] Yeah, that's my vote also.

Speaker1: [00:14:47] He's the guy, so we hope you enjoy that. The two of us are just going to curl up in a ball now that this is all subsided and think about, I don't know, what are you going to think about? What happens to you now, so many, how like you have been?

Speaker2: [00:15:00] I know I'm going to be on. I'm going to be on TV in India.

Speaker1: [00:15:02] She was going to be on TV in India today or tomorrow, maybe. Yeah. So that's her life is just becoming an increasingly telegenic popular media star.

Speaker2: [00:15:13] Yeah, telegenic is not a word I would use, I think. You didn't see that, they

Speaker1: [00:15:19] Said of the two of us. It's clear. It's clear. Who should be on TV and who should be on radio? That's all I have to say. So, yeah, so take us out. What do you think? And so

Speaker2: [00:15:31] Give us your I say

Speaker1: [00:15:32] Your moment of zen.

Speaker2: [00:15:32] Ok, I say go mark.

Speaker1: [00:15:53] Well, welcome back, everyone, to the Cultures of Energy podcast we are more than delighted to have on the line with us from the University of Alberta, which seems to just be a magnet for talent these days. The wonderful mark. Not all mark. So glad to have you with us.

Speaker3: [00:16:08] Hello. Delighted to be talking to you both.

Speaker2: [00:16:11] We're thrilled to have you here, Mark. We wanted to get you on the show for some time, not least in part because you have such a wealth of expertise in the Arctic and in the country of Greenland in particular, where you've been doing research for several decades now. I don't want to age you, but I think you've been spending quite a bit of time there and have really shown us some profound transitions and paradoxes there. And I wanted to bring up that term paradox because I think it's really important in this new book that you've written with Klaus Dodds. If I'm pronouncing his name correctly, it's called the Arctic what everyone needs to know. It's a wonderful book and very informative, but I came away from the book feeling that you're both working in this domain of thinking through the Arctic is kind of a paradoxical place that there's more and more interest in understanding. So by paradoxical, I mean, I think that, you know, you could come up with a dozen different paradoxes, but the ones that came to mind to me immediately were, on the one hand, it's this sort of pristine natural environment. Or at least it's portrayed in that way in many instances. But it's also one of the places on the planet that's being most affected environmentally by anthropogenic climate change. And so it's we really see the effects of that in this place. It's often stereotypically represented as an empty place, right, except for polar bears and the errant narwhal. But in fact, there are, of course, indigenous peoples and other peoples in the region. So it's both empty and then it's also full of resources. As we read in the book Hydrocarbons and other natural resources in the area. So I just wanted to open up as an invitation to kind of think through how you've been imagining the Arctic as a paradoxical space, if that's a fair way of putting it or whether if you, you know, whether you would maybe reject the idea that it's a paradoxical space at all, you know?

Speaker3: [00:18:06] Well, I think you're right. It's a place that I think when you're working in the Arctic and thinking about it and and writing about it, and when you you read about the Arctic in the media, you can never really get away from images that persist. And many of these historical images about emptiness, about remoteness and so on. And I think that, yes, this is what we try to do in the book is to really be a little bit provocative and try and draw attention to these images and to say, you know, the Arctic, for one thing, has has been connected to the wider world for centuries. It's not a place that is just immediately been discovered. But I think we we see these persistent images at play and influencing geopolitics, influencing ideas of a bountiful place that here is the Arctic. As a wilderness and last frontier, it's full of resources. It's one of the last places on Earth. And so, you know, these these images do matter. And I think that's that's really at the crux of the book. It's trying to sort of just examine these little bit and trying to sort of tease them out and talk a little bit about how we need to understand the Arctic as a place that has been connected to the rest of the world for a long time. It's not an empty space. Indigenous peoples do live there. We hear a lot about the new Arctic, and so in some ways we ask, Well, what is new about this? What is what is new about some of the issues that are taking place there? Right.

Speaker1: [00:19:37] And I think that that newness is a concern across the world, and it's made the Arctic into a kind of a magnetic object of attention, both for people who are interested in, as you said, this new perhaps last resource frontier on the planet in a place like Greenland, which has exceptional mineral resources, as well as those who are concerned about what the, for example, melting of ice means in terms of global sea level rise and destabilization of Earth's coastal communities and so on and so forth. So it is a place that has been receiving an exceptional amount of attention recently. I almost want to ask you how you first got interested in working in Greenland because as somebody said, it was many, many moons ago and at a time when I don't know, did you have the same sense of the Arctic as a world making space back when you first started?

Speaker3: [00:20:27] It just seemed quite a while ago, is the late 1980s. I suppose that is a few decades ago now, when I first went up to Greenland, I think I'd always had an interest in northern places through the histories of those places, through the geographies growing up in the British Isles, being interested in in the history of the British Isles, but also its place within a kind of North Atlantic. World, I was drawn as a teenager to places like northern Norway to Iceland, I had this interest in getting to Greenland, so when I started studying anthropology, it was it was a place that I felt that was somewhere I wanted to go and work in at that time. I suppose it was remarked to me by many anthropologists that, well, perhaps this is going to be a bad career move. A lot of a loss of anthropological theorizing hadn't really been informed to a great extent by anthropological work that had been coming out of the Arctic. Yes, there were a few studies that had been quite influential in on Inuit kinship that had been done. For example, in the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies. But most of the the models and the theories that anthropology had been developing, I suppose, have been informed by work that had been carried out in Asia and Africa and South America and so on. So it had always been a place that was on the periphery of anthropological scholarship as well. A few books were well known. I think Jean Briggs fabulous book Never in Anger was probably one of the few anthropological works that had really entered the anthropological consciousness.

Speaker3: [00:22:05] Work by others, such as Hugh Brody in the 1970s, had drawn attention to to social change in the Canadian East Arctic. But I did have a sense that things were beginning to to look very interesting in the Arctic. And what interested me about Greenland, or there are many things that interested me, but I think I started to reflect a little bit about this place that had also achieved home rule in nineteen seventy nine. And so when I went off to do work in Greenland, it had been eight years since home rule had come into being. And so there was this incredible sense of this new emerging nation confidence that people felt that they were beginning to to govern their own lives and so on. And yet at the same time, there were things going on in the mid late 80s, there was a, you know, an increased awareness of of contaminants in the Arctic. There was an increased awareness and awareness of the of the beginnings of of a warming climate impacts that the Inuit in Greenland, as well as Canada were experiencing, such as the the effects of the EU ban on the importation of seal skins or the EEC ban at that time. And so Greenland also was a place in which you could see all kinds of contested ideas about the environment, about human animal relations and human environment relations and so on. And so to me, it appeared as a as a fascinating place to to want to go and actually spend some time doing anthropological work.

Speaker1: [00:23:29] I wanted to ask you, Mark, just on this topic of already being able to see in the late 1980s the effects of climate change, which obviously are very much one of the main foci people have for the Arctic today. I'd be very interested to hear about when you first felt you were aware or when you first felt that in your engagements with the indigenous Inuit communities that you were working with it, people really began to feel that something was shifting in terms of the local environment.

Speaker3: [00:23:56] Yeah, I think the late 1980s, you know, we probably weren't aware too much of what was happening immediately, but there were beginning to be some observations that local people were making and even people were talking then and in the late 80s, early 90s about, well, there's something going on with the ice. It doesn't seem to be as forming as early as it usually does, and it breaks up a little bit later. But I think critically, this is also being borne out by scientific research as well, is that it was probably the late 1990s and sort of around about 1998 1999 when people began to really see some changes that were taking place, particularly in the in the in the sea ice regime, for example, up in northwest Greenland. And scientists have said, yes, you can see this was the beginnings of what we see now as current trends, or at least we can begin to observe these. And so I think what's interesting is the way in which indigenous or local knowledge is also is quite consistent with what scientists have been noticing as well.

Speaker2: [00:24:55] I wanted to ask you to mark as someone who has been working in and observing the Arctic for some time and you have a really wonderful synthetic view of something that I noticed recently with the National Science Foundation and for the humanists who might be among our listeners who are among our listeners. I just wanted to point out that the NSF has now 10 big ideas that they're prioritizing for funding for research within the United States scientific community. And I think it's really fascinating. I want to ask your opinion about this. So among these 10 big ideas are, for example, work the future of work and human technologies convergence research, data revolution, infrastructure, quantum leap, the rules of life, windows on the universe, the one sort of geographically marked domain among. 10 big ideas. It's called navigating the new Arctic, and it goes on to talk about what they're trying to establish in terms of a set of research protocols and directions forward around the Arctic. So as someone who's been observing this, I wanted to ask you why it is. You think that among all these things that NSF is prioritizing the one place, the one demarcated place that we can see represented is the Arctic. So the question is why? Why is that? What do you say at the roots of these priorities for NSF, but even just more generally, what's happening with the Arctic that now it's become such an important place to observe and understand?

Speaker3: [00:26:31] We can see the severity of global ecological crisis that may be in full view in the Arctic, as we just talked about with climate change. It's also emerged as a very, very significant geopolitical region. Again, thinking back to when I started doing work in Greenland in the late 1980s and being told at home, this may be a bit of a bad career move for you. It was still a sense that the Arctic was this kind of remote place at the edge of the world and so on. And yet we've seen since the ending of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and onwards, the Arctic as a region move center stage in international politics. And so there's been a lot of attention that's been drawn to the Arctic as a region. Again, the discourses and the narratives that underpin a lot of this interest and drive much of this interest tends to suggest that this is a new space. This is a place where we might find the last reserves of conventional oil and gas, and it's a new space for minerals and for mining and so on. But there's also a sense in which the Arctic is open for business, and we see a lot of this actually in discussion at the international level.

Speaker3: [00:27:44] I see a move certainly in the last decade or so away from a discussion of the Arctic as this place that is undergoing melt. There used to be, well, certainly still are. But you know, you could look at every kind of major scientific conference and political conference that might be happening on the Arctic in a given calendar year. And most of these conferences would have change or the changing Arctic in the title and the kind of move away from just looking at this region as a space of environmental change and environmental crisis to one which is perhaps a space for new kinds of opportunities. And so geopolitically, that I think drives much of the interest that NSF have and also used as a major funding source. But also this this this awareness that the Arctic is also probably a resourceful space that perhaps new innovations in science and technology perhaps are happening or can emerge in the Arctic as well. So that's probably one of the reasons I think why there is this kind of new interest in the Arctic as a new space.

Speaker2: [00:28:57] Mm-hmm. I'm glad you brought up the resources because this is clearly a really, really important element and theme that we see throughout the kind of public commentary on the Arctic and and through your book as well. So we learn in the book that, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, there may be about 13 percent of the world's yet undiscovered oil in the Arctic and 30 percent of its undiscovered natural gas. So there are significant resources still in the ground. And you and your co-author, I think, are suggesting that we keep it in the ground, which we're in favor of, too. But there's been some interesting turns to, I think, in terms of recognizing claims for sovereignty or the ability to move, for example, Greenland away from the colonial powers of Denmark. And part of the arguments that have emerged out of that conversation have centered on resources. So I'm wondering if you could tell our listeners a bit about those conditions and the question of more sovereign rights for the country of Greenland itself vis a vis the crown and how resources are folding into those political debates and conversations right now.

Speaker3: [00:30:15] So 1979 was an important year because that's when Greenland achieved home rule within the Kingdom of Denmark. And so Greenland is a self-governing territory of the Danish realm. In 2009, Greenland achieved greater autonomy in the form of self-rule is greater self-government and essentially home rule has been a process of devolution. So it wasn't a rejection of all the institutions and the modes of governance of Denmark. It was simply a transfer of the bureaucracies of government, the offices from from Copenhagen to nuke. That differs quite significantly from some land claims movements in, say, Arctic Canada. Much of the debate prior to the referendum on self-rule, which took place in November 2008, centered on what Greenland's ownership of subsurface resources would mean for greater autonomy and possible independence. Now, the subsurface had been at the heart of a lot of the discussions between Greenland and Denmark in the mid nineteen seventies, but the Danes refused to budge on that whole issue of Greenland ownership of the subsurface and said, No, not now. But when the in 2004 there was a Danish Greenland self-rule commission that was established and that was all about negotiating the terms of greater self-government. What would self-government mean? What would it look like and self self-rule? This greater form of self-government allows Greenland to take on a number of areas that Denmark still has control over. And, as I say, home rule being a process of devolution essentially by two thousand nine home rule had basically done everything it could taken over the Greenland ice to take over control of the economy, the health, service, education and so on.

Speaker3: [00:32:06] And now under the conditions or the circumstances of self rule or self-government, Greenland could take over responsibility for the judiciary, for the Coast Guard of possibly foreign relations in the future. But at the heart of of all of this and this, Danish Greenlandic Self-rule Commission considered Greenland's claim to mineral rights and its own to subsoil resources and the right to the revenues from non-renewable resource development. And there was a very, very kind of emphatic conclusion that minerals in Greenland subsoil do belong to Greenland and that the country does have a right to their extraction. One of the significant things about self-rule the Self-rule Act recognizes Greenlanders as a nation with the right to independence if they choose it. And that's not what the Home Rule Act recognized. But interestingly, the Self-rule Act in the Self-rule Agreement has really tied the issue of subsurface resources and their possible extraction and development to the whole trajectory of Greenland's kind of move forward to greater autonomy so subsurface resources have become under the jurisdiction and the ownership of of of Greenland. Now Greenland essentially relies on Denmark for artificial respiration in the form of an annual block grant that's about three point five billion Danish kroner. It's about four hundred and seventy euros. I can't kind of translate that or convert that into US dollars at the moment, but it's still a lot of money. It's about 60 per cent of its of its revenue. But that was frozen 10 years ago with with self-rule. And so essentially under the self-willed agreement, imagine Greenland begins to kind of really have some substantial income generation from subsurface resource development.

Speaker3: [00:33:59] It's going to be administered by Greenland, but the level of the block grant would be reduced by Denmark, essentially. And then ultimately, in the future, the block grant would be eventually phased out. So that said, Greenlandic politics has been closely influenced by the role and the extent of the extractive sector. And so in some ways, the challenge for Greenland is as it moves forward and it's it takes over responsibility for all these other areas that it could possibly have control of from Denmark. It has to essentially pay for these for these areas, it has to pay for the economy and so on. And so diversifying the economy, forging a sustainable economy, enhancing Greenland's agency in international politics. All of these things matter. And so extractive industries tend to be very much at the centre of debates about the development of Greenland's economy. Yeah. So in a sense, the subterranean and the ocean depths, they remain critical for Greenlandic notions of nation building and state formation. But recent assessments and reports have examined the question and question. The feasibility of relying too heavily on extractive resource projects has been a bit of a dip in global markets. In some ways, that's throwing some cold water on the enthusiasm of some international companies to work in Greenland. But nonetheless, the development of a mining industry and the encouragement of oil and gas exploration. These remain stated aims of the various permutations of the Greenland self-rule government over the last few years

Speaker2: [00:35:29] And what kind of mining is being done or proposed. Is it rare earth minerals or uranium or what? What are they looking at in terms of the mineral resources?

Speaker3: [00:35:39] There are a number of projects being scoped out and sketched out, and despite this seeming, you know, this flurry of activity, the the this kind of sharpened global gaze that seems to be resting. In Greenland, the interest that there is expressed in Greenland subsurface by international companies, there are just two mines currently in operation. There's a ruby and a pink sapphire mine in southwest Greenland, just south of Newark. There's another mine, which is an author site, which is just really started a modest production and that's just southeast of a town called Susumu. But there are exploitation licences that have been granted to other projects. Uranium has perhaps the whole question of uranium, and earths has been at the heart of a very contested debate about the extraction of resources in Greenland. There are a couple of companies that are operating in South Greenland that are moving forward with the permitting process haven't quite got exploitation licences yet, but the uranium mine in South Greenland and the rare earths projects are also done in the south are some of the biggest projects. There's another large project way on the far north coast of Greenland. Up in Greenland, you really can't get further north beyond beyond hitting the Arctic Ocean, which is a lead zinc mine and an exploitation licence, has been given to that. And then another. Some other smaller mines illuminate, which is a kind of black sand and up in the north west of Greenland. So oil and gas is also something that the government, or, excuse me, the self-rule government wishes to to develop as well, even though there hasn't been very much movement there.

Speaker1: [00:37:18] So Mark, I wanted to ask you to kind of circle back to something we were talking about a few minutes ago to talk about the current state and fate of indigenous communities and life ways in Greenland, especially perhaps in northwestern Greenland, where you've done much of your your fieldwork. I'm curious how how that plays into this discussion about or this idea of Greenland is open for business and it's changing dramatically. You mention in your book that a melting Arctic means indigenous homelands are in danger of being changed dramatically. And I guess I just like to hear a little bit more about what some of those changes are that you've noticed and how people are responding. Are we looking at a wave of urban concentration because of the disruption of sea ice, for example? Or are people finding ways to adapt their life ways in situ?

Speaker3: [00:38:04] So if we take the northwest of Greenland, where I have done much of my work, this is a place where the surface of the sea breezes. Though for several months of the year, people have been used to sea ice and you travel on sea ice in northern Greenland. While snow machines snowmobiles are used for transportation, hunting and fishing has to take place through the use of dog sledges and so on, so people are still using dog sledges. But this sea ice environment has been undergoing quite significant changes over the past, say, to two decades or so. And this marine ecosystem, this ice ecosystem does support the livelihoods of these small communities up in the northwest coast. And any changes in sea ice do have far reaching effects for hunting and fishing activities and and for mobility and for the local economies there and sea mammals. Marine mammals are changing migration routes and so on. And the projections that there are a future sea ice development in the region point towards a continuing decline of that sort of that ecosystem and the decline and the continued thinning of of ice. So one of the things that I suppose simplifying culture in some ways that we can see is that to respond, adapt and anticipate to the changes that people experience around them has been a hallmark of of of Inuit culture. And this anticipation of the possibilities of successful engagement with the changing environment, I think is inherent in a culture in the northwest and in local socio economic practices. But I think these rapid changes do bring different kinds of of challenges, quite significant ones as well.

Speaker3: [00:39:53] So climate change is having noticeable effects. I think it does hinder the effects of some communities towards achieving and maintaining sustainable livelihoods. They are seeking ways of having to adapt to changes in the way that they're experiencing and seeing and the availability, the abundance and the distribution of of of living resources. For example, we can look at Greenland halibut, which are moving further north. Seals are becoming scarce in some community waters. One of the things that interests me, however, when we look at adaptation is the importance of trying to understand climate change in a broader context. People often say to me, Yes, we can see these tremendous changes that are happening around us in the sea ice and so on. We try to get around those and as best we can. But there are other kinds of barriers. For example, everyday life, like anywhere else, is circumscribed by the institutions of a wider Greenlandic society. There are. Relations and quotas implemented wildlife management systems for living marine resources going out to hunt narwhal, for example. Norway is a tightly regulated species in terms of hunting, but there are also restrictions on the on the international export, for example, of products from from Norway, such as tusks, under CITES and so on. So these these regulations, these quotas for living marine resources tend to combine with environmental and climate change. And so they do restrain and constrain the abilities of local people to travel, move around the locality. And so people often say to me that navigating one's way around a quota system or a wildlife management regulation system is often more difficult and often more frustrating than it is to seek out alternative travel routes on a shifting the shifting pack ice.

Speaker3: [00:41:46] And so this tends, I think, to be often unexamined in political discourses and economic narratives about sustainability in the future of Greenland's small villages. And then added to this, there's the presence of exploratory activity related to these extractive industries and brings different kinds of pressures and anxieties for local people, as well as hopes for the future. To answer your question about a drift away, yes, people do move from these small communities. There is an incredible contrast between life and small villages in the north of Greenland, and certainly over the last 30 years or so. I mean, yes, you notice changes that have taken place, but not as rapidly as some of the towns along the southwest coast. Nuuk, Greenland's capital, for example, is changing dramatically and rapidly. And so it's a draw. People move often from these these smaller communities, and this is a very busy city relative to its size of over about 17 and a half thousand people. One of the plans that Greenland has the Greenland government, as well as the municipal authorities for York, is for Nuk to be an urban Arctic metropolis that could have a population of around about 30000 people within the next 10 15 years or so. And so it becomes quite difficult to resist some of these, these these developments that take place in the capital.

Speaker1: [00:43:09] That's right. And it raises a question. I mean, I imagine so much is changing in Greenland at the moment, but it is still one of the maybe the only Arctic country that's still majority indigenous. And so I'm thinking of the article you did also with Klaus Dodds disassembling narratives of sustainability in Greenland, where you really explore the complexities of what Arctic sustainability might mean, and it might mean different things in southwestern Greenland that it might in in northern Greenland. And I guess my larger question would be as this discourse on sustainability as the imagination of sustainable futures unfolds. Do you feel as though the indigenous modes or the indigenous imaginations of sustainability gain greater purchase in Greenland because of its population than they might elsewhere in the world? Say in Canada, Alaska, other places where indigenous communities are much smaller?

Speaker3: [00:44:02] I think indigeneity matters in Greenland. Home rule and self-rule are public government, and what I see is a process where we can think of home rule. Being a process of nation building and self-rule is a process of state formation, and Greenland is a curious place in which the discussion of indigeneity is quite often absent within domestic politics. There was no land claim that preceded any discussion of of home rule, as there was, for example, in Nunavut, in the eastern Canadian Arctic, where the territorial boundaries of Nunavut had to be established and were based on long term Inuit occupancy of the Arctic. And so land became quite central and crucial to a lot of indigenous self determination movements in the North American Arctic. But that wasn't quite the case in Greenland. The Danes recognized a geographically distinct place called Greenland, and looking back to the 19th century, certainly into the mid, possibly early 19th century, we begin to see the earlier discussions of a Greenland nation, a sense of of nationhood, a sense of a common Greenlandic identity, which really informed Greenlandic politics through the mid and late 20th 20th century. So small communities occupy, in some ways, a kind of uneasy place within a discussion of the future of Greenland, where, on the one hand, the hunting way of life, the idea of the Greenland sustaining themselves and their families based on hunting and fishing has.

Speaker3: [00:45:50] He'll because that sustains some kind of discussion about Greenlandic identity, Greenlandic values. But then there's this other Greenland, a modern, dynamic, urbanizing, cosmopolitan place, and the divides between these small communities and these urban places, such as New York and other Greenlandic towns is quite stark. And so in many ways, the place of the small community is troublesome for a modernising Greenland because the small community hunting way of life doesn't really contribute to this economy of this, this this modern nation in the making. And there are politicians, many of whom probably wouldn't say so in public would probably be quite happy to see the closure of some of these very small communities and populations moving to New York and so on. Hmm. So the anticipatory politics concern concerning a future Greenland play out in York in very, very interesting ways where discussions about urbanization, a modern nation, the place of Greenland within a broader global politics as well kind of has some very kind of interesting sort of consequences, I think, for how sustainability and what is exactly is to be sustained is discussed in Greenland. Small communities tend to be problematic in many ways.

Speaker2: [00:47:14] Mm hmm. Yeah. It's interesting that you point out that the question of ingenuity does not resonate loudly within kind of national or local politics within Greenland, because it also seems to be the case that there is a substantial amount of indigenous voice that's heard in international contexts in organizations that are either state based or nonprofit based sort of working within the Arctic space that that indigenous peoples recognition and and claims of sovereignty and directions for future sustainability have been quite important, and there have been elements built in to different kinds of agreements. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, like if if there's a way in which indigenous the influence of indigenous politics kind of exceeds the boundaries of Greenland as a as a nation state or as a country, yet is allowed to have quite a bit of influencers given quite a lot of voicing outside of the context of Greenland itself in these international agreements, organizations and movements for for change or sustainability in the Arctic.

Speaker3: [00:48:27] Yeah, I mean, one example is within the International Whaling Commission, where you see the discussion of Greenlandic indigenous and Aboriginal rights being articulated as ways of making claims for increased quotas for for whale hunting, for example. So that's that's one way. You have the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which is an indigenous organisation that represents Inuit across the Arctic from the eastern coast of Siberia through to Greenland. And there's an ICC Greenland branch, which is very, very active. It's often asked within Greenland, Why do we need an indigenous NGO when we have self-government? Mm-hmm. And our ability to represent ourselves on the international stage, there is always a little bit of a tension between ICC Greenland and the self-rule government and and ICC Canada in Alaska, working very, very different contexts in Canada, in the United States, from from ICC Greenland. There was a time about about 10 years ago when politicians did say, well, Greenlandic self-rule is a de facto implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, something that Inuit Circumpolar Council disagree with. And so in some ways we can we can we can look at these kind of problematic projections of such issues, such as indigeneity. But Greenland is is aspiring to greater autonomy in the way it can represent itself internationally, and it's opening up consular offices. Obviously, there's a Greenland representation in Copenhagen. This one in Washington, DC, there's one in Brussels, and there's one that recently opened in Reykjavik. So there's a range of very, very different issues and matters that are talked about. Of course, indigenous rights do matter in certain cases, but a lot of the time it's about an ability for Greenland to actually represent itself internationally and to be able to make its own decisions within these wider international fora. And the central government says that's the that's the way to do it. It's not through an indigenous organisation.

Speaker2: [00:50:50] We've been talking about the kind of fascination, what appears to be a more recent fascination all over the globe with the Arctic and its processes and what infrastructures will look like there in the future, the resources that will be extracted or not, indigenous sovereignty and questions of rights and governance. But in this more recent article that you shared with us called Cold Science, you actually demonstrate that some of this fascination and indeed scientific inquiry predates our contemporary times by quite a bit. And here you track back to just after the Second World War and the kind of early Cold War to show how these northern seascapes and sea ice and calculations about ice and depths and the sea floor became really important sites of geo military exploration and the production of scientific data and in scientific exploration. So I wanted to invite you to share a couple of thoughts on that. And you know, in that in that chapter, we hear about Camp Century and I don't know if, although don't

Speaker1: [00:51:55] Forget Project Ice Worm

Speaker2: [00:51:56] Without this, that's it. It's the ice worm, right? So, you know, I mean, I think some listeners will have heard of this quite surreal phenomenon, but we'd love to hear your take on it, Mark. What is this the ice worm camp century?

Speaker3: [00:52:10] It's a fascinating part of Greenlandic history, but also Arctic history. And yes, I mean, I've actually also been very interested in the history of Greenland, but also in the more recent positioning of of Greenland within a discussion of contemporary security issues. But to understand that we also it's very important to kind of to know a little bit about the history too of where Greenland has always been, how it's been looked upon and where it's been positioned as a matter of kind of geo strategic significance. So Greenland was had become an American protectorate during during the Second World War, when when Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany and there had been a US Denmark defense agreement signed in nineteen forty one and Greenland was a very important place. It was a stepping stone route across the North Atlantic from North America for bombers and troop movements and so on. So the American Military and Air Force established a number of air bases on the island. But it was also very, very important for weather forecasting because it used to be said, you know, whoever could understand the weather and have access to weather data and understand what the weather was going to be like in the North Atlantic would basically be able to control the outcome of the Second World War. So Greenland was very, very important for that reason. The Cold War didn't diminish the significance of Greenland whatsoever. That defense agreement was extended and elaborated upon in nineteen fifty one, which allowed the US to construct an air base actually in the northwest. There's a long story about to air base, including the kind of exclusion and the dispossession of of of indigenous people from the the air base area.

Speaker3: [00:53:56] But the camp century project ice worm issue has to be obviously seen within this context of the Cold War because essentially post Second World War until the early nineteen nineties there we could have we could see the Arctic is essentially divided between two kinds of Arctic. There was the Soviet Arctic very closed. Not many people knew much about it from outside the Soviet Union and a North American Arctic, and this was a region that was a zone of potential hostile military confrontation. The shortest way for your missiles to reach the United States from the Soviet Union and vice versa was over the North Pole. So, of course, the Arctic and Greenland in particular had that very important geo strategic military significance. So to the airbase was was central to this. But in the late 1950s, the Americans started to construct something called Camp Century, which was within a larger project called Project Ice Worm. Very little about Project Ice Worm was really known until documents were declassified about ten years ago or so, but essentially this was the the kind of tunnelling and the excavation of all of this glacial ice on the ice. It was positioned kind of southeast of Tullio base on the inland ice. It was a nuclear reactor placed in the in the ice. This was a a large complex, a military complex, housing 400 military and scientific personnel in the end. But it was talked about and positioned by the Americans as a place that was really a scientific base. It was all about unlocking the mysteries of the ice and so on, and there was nothing really secret about the construction of camp century.

Speaker3: [00:55:45] There were films that were were made about its construct. And which you can actually find on YouTube, the city under the ice is a fascinating one in particular. But this was a covert operation. Camp century was really going to be the nerve center, the control base for this larger project ice worm, which would have been a number of missile silos also built and positioned beneath the ice and an ice worms were missiles. They were intercontinental ballistic missiles that it would be could be launched at the Soviet Union from Greenland. How far the Danes really understood the reasons for camp century. The jury is little bit out in that there's obviously scholars working and looking at the the now declassified documents, but a fascinating story because I think it was around about nineteen sixty six when Camp Century had to be abandoned because while there was this large scale infrastructure built under the ice, really, there wasn't as much knowledge that we have today about the dynamics and the movement of glacial ice. So, of course, the end of the ice moves and it began to move and it began to crash the buildings and so on. So the abandoned camp century, it has a contemporary significance because of the the thinning and the melting of the Greenland inland ice, which is beginning to reveal structures such as Camp Century now and so local concerns about what would what's the toxic legacy of something like that century? What else was going on? What else did the to the U.S. military build and so on? But nonetheless, a fascinating story within the history of Cold War Greenland.

Speaker2: [00:57:23] It's really fascinating. Quite surreal. So you could actually one could visit Camp Century.

Speaker3: [00:57:29] I think it would be a pretty expensive tourist trip to get up there.

Speaker1: [00:57:34] Well, Mark, the time has flown by. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you. And this is just an example of how many fascinating stories lie in Greenland's past as well, obviously, as in its future. And it's it's a it's a good thing for the world that we have ethnographers of your talent and long term commitment to tell those stories. So just to thank you again for taking the time to talk with us. I think we've learned a tremendous amount about a place that if it were once a remote, you know, part of the world, it's certainly becoming increasingly central to our thinking about our environmental future. Yes.

Speaker3: [00:58:05] Well, thank you so much as well. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to both of you.