-You can find the whole article with more pics and links auch auf Deutsch here.-

Just a  couple of days ago I found the time to follow a link about Greenland’s recently granted expanded autonomy from Denmark. As Knut’s outpost in the Indian Ocean (Rodrigues) owns a certain status of autonomy too, granted by the Mauritian government in 2002, I have been reading everything with greatest interest, and sure, I hoped to learn at the same time more about the country itself, its inhabitants and especially its polar bear, displayed on Greenland’s coat of arm, reminding me a bit of Bearlin, Knut’s city and bear town already long before the final agreement about his whereabouts was reached recently…

From Home-Rule to Self-Rule

In folk festivals around the Arctic island, Greenlanders on Sunday, June 21, celebrated a new chapter in their history with expanded autonomy removing them a further step from Denmark’s colonial rule. Participating in the festivities in the capital Nuuk were Danish Queen Margrethe II and Greenland’s new premier, Kuupik Kleist, as Greenlanders celebrated the upgrading of their political status from “hjemmestyre” (home rule) into “selvstyre” (self-rule). In addition to that enhanced status for the 56,000 people, Greenlandic – which is closely related to the Inuit languages – became recognized as the official language. The government in Nuuk had enjoyed semi-autonomy from Denmark since 1979. In the future, Copenhagen will still, in principle, hold decision-making power for Greenland in security, foreign and monetary issues. But Denmark will in future abstain from any claims on Greenland’s huge but yet untapped, natural resources. Should revenues be forthcoming in the future from these resources, Denmark’s subsidies for Greenland would be reduced. At the moment, Denmark will still provide an annual “block grant” of 3.2 billion Danish kroner (595 million dollars) to Greenland, covering nearly half of all public expenditure. Kleist was swept into office by his sensational election victory earlier this month over the founders of Greenland’s autonomy movement, now decried as corrupt. Amid the festivities, Greenland still faces massive social ills including a high suicide rate, widespread domestic violence and alcoholism.The Arctic island’s chief economic pillar is fishing.

So, what about the island, reveled by Prince Henrik during a ceremony at Nuuk’s university, where he read two poems composed by himself, as “the crystal laughing of joy and in harmony with sea gulls and mischievous bears” and where “the lucidity of the stars inspires opalescent glaciers”?

During my brief virtual trip to the island crystal with the polar bear as icon, I haven’t discovered much that would have invited to laugh…instead of mischievous bear eyes, I found a considerable amount of photos, more likely displaying the bear pegged up for airing and as to the glaciers, it is looking too anything but optimal opalescent …

“In Greenland the polar bear lives and breeds in the northernmost parts of West Greenland and in Northeast Greenland, but is also occasionally seen elsewhere in Greenland, as it moves with the drifting ice. However, it is extremely rare for either local inhabitants or tourists to see a living polar bear. The chances of seeing a polar bear are greatest when sailing by ship along the coast. …The Greenlandic polar bear may only be hunted in quite special circumstances, but when an animal is killed there is – as with all other animals captured in Greenland – a tradition for utilising the whole animal. For example, the meat is eaten (after being cooked for hours to neutralise the trichinella sp.), the skull is used as a trophy, the claws as jewellery and the hide for trousers or kamik.

Due to the official Greenland Tourism website the polar bear is not threatened by hunting, but by environmental pollution. “So-called POPs (persistent organic pollutants) have been discovered in very high concentrations in polar bears from East Greenland and Svalbard. This has led to concern about the polar bear’s ability to reproduce. About one in 50 female bears on Svalbard has both male and female sex organs. In 2000 it was 1% in Spitzbergen.  A study in Greenland found out recently that there is also a correlation beween toxic waste caused by OHC pollutants and shrinking sexual organs in male and female polar bears. At the same time the effects of global warming mean that the Arctic ice is melting, thereby further reducing the polar bear’s natural habitat.

“In Greenland, restrictions for the species were first introduced in 1994 and expanded by executive order in 2005. Until 2005, Greenland placed no limit on hunting by indigenous people. It imposed a limit of 150 for 2006. It also allowed recreational hunting for the first time (here is a contradiction to what I have found in an official report issued in March 2009). Other provisions included year-round protectionof cubs and mothers, restriction on weapons used, and various administrative requirements to catalogue kills.”

The discussion about hunting rights for the Inuits is not a new one and it is not my interest to add more fuel to the debate, I just want to share some Greenland specific observations, reflections , known and less known facts…Concerning the hunting, the question is still what is a sustainable amount of polar bears killed, especially as no reliable figures have been recorded in the past in Greenland.Observations of increased numbers during recent years may be attributed to the fact that the ice is receding, bringing the bears just closer.

- “Each year, some 700 bears are killed in Canada, Greenland and Alaska out of a total population of 20,000 to 25,000 — a level that scientists generally deem sustainable.”

-”Added to the Greenland Inuits’ taking of about 100 bears from the same population, the Nunavut decision has endangered the survival of the species in the area, according to scientists who said a sustainable quota to be shared by the two countries was 93.”(read more
here)

- “While Greenland may now have quotas set with rigorous methodology, Canada has been using quotas since the 1960s. The United States and Norway introduced quotas in the 1970s. Greenland’s failure to impose quotas in the 1970s resulted in the overhunting of polar bears, which caused declines in 3 populations. It is going to take time for the Baffin Bay population to recover from the previous overhunting.”(read morehere)

- “Indeed according to Bjorn Lomborg, in his second book ‘Cool It – the Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming’, we have a choice: we can save 49 polar bears a year by banning hunting or 0.06 bears by subscribing to the Kyoto Protocol.”(read more here)

Extract from: “Greenland Is Ice And Iceland Is Green”

“This is a country (or rather, an autonomous state within the Kingdom of Denmark) with 56,000 people spread across an island the size of the European Union.Most of the country (85%) is covered with permanent ice and apart from 14,000 people living in Nuuk (previously known as Godthab), the capital, the rest of the population lives in 60 odd towns and villages in the small strips of non ice-covered land along the coast.Only 4,000 people live in the remote eastern half of the island that is cut off by ice for 9 months in a year.

Seal skin products, primarily by-products of the Inuit subsistence hunting, used to be the largest source of export income but that had long collapsed (together with tanneries and skin processing factories). 60% of Greenland’s GDP comprise of direct subsidies from Denmark (US$410m) and the largest (85%) source of export earnings is that of fish and seafood products. The latter are mainly in the form of licensing fees earned from foreign fishing fleets, although some of these earnings are made by the Royal Greenland Company, Greenland’s largest company, also owned by the Greenland Home Rule Government. There is some mining (which is actively encouraged by the Government) but they are hardly significant. On top of that, 20% of the population are not born in Greenland, i.e., mostly Danish who work in branches of the civil service, education and various technical or professional positions. As such, a relatively small portion of the GDP relate to economic activity that involves the indigenous Greenlander. About two-third of those employed work in the civil service. If you are cynical, you can say that the bulk of the employed Greenlanders work to distribute Danish subsidies to the population. This is hardly surprising, as this is a land hardly conducive to any form of economic activity or human habitation.

Agriculture and animal farming is hardly possible given the climate and natural environment. Industry is out due to the small population (try putting out an advert for 2,000 electronics factory positions in a country where the capital has only 14,000 people) and high transportation costs (the port is frozen today and will be for the next 6 months – can we ship the semi-conductor chip in summer time?) arising from weather and remoteness. Mining has been actively encouraged by quantities found so far has been small or simply uneconomical considering extraction costs (try digging for gold in permafrost! They can’t even bury dead bodies in winter.) and remoteness. Even retailing can be difficult here – how do you supply goods to 56,000 people who live across a country the size of western Europe ? The cost of doing so must be extraordinarily high, just considering transportation costs. Indeed, there is only one supermarket chain, and it’s state-owned. For the goods to be affordable (at prices slightly higher than in Europe), even the goods in the chain are subsidized.

Before the Danish came, the Inuits live by just hunting seals, polar bears and whales. They probably die young with disease and lack of nutrition. Now, they live till 68 years old with the benefit of modern health care, and acquired a more varied diet which include imported vegetable, pork, beef, lamb, cheese, bread and all the things that we find in the supermarket. All of these have to be imported, and little of these can be supported by the fragile environment and scarce natural resources they live in. Hunting of seals and granting of fishing licenses, even in the best years, can hardly support an economy that has to pay for all these modern amenities and new necessities. As such the Danish welfare state steps in and provides the cash gap. That’s why many are unemployed and live by collecting unemployment benefits, and suffering from the accompanying loss of morale and depression. As I have mentioned earlier, alcoholism has become a common abuse and people die from suicides and alcohol-related disease (Alcohol consumption per capita is double that of Denmark, and suicides and homicide account for an amazing 11% and 3% of all deaths respectively.)

There is no easy solution. Tourism may bring additional income – this has been increasing over the years. However, the number of tourists remains small. The lack of flights and high cost remain obstacles to tourism development. The former is a chicken and egg story – if there are few flights, tickets are expensive and tourists are deterred from coming. But if there are few tourists, few airlines have the incentive to fly there. Maybe Greenland can learn from Iceland (which has succeeded in diverting America-to-Europe air traffic to stopover in Iceland and that spark off Icelandic tourism industry), but again that might be an exceptional case and difficult to emulate.

I suspect all these point to one main point – given the harsh environment, Greenland simply cannot support its current population size. If Denmark decides one day to abandon Greenland and to stop all subsidies, most of the population, who in any case have Danish citizenship, would choose to emigrate to Denmark. It would be a sad thing. A destruction of an ancient lifestyle, which in any case have been supported by artificial non-market forces for many years.”

(posted by Tan Wee Cheng in August 2001)

Ever heard of Thule?

‘Thule’, in Gemany vaguely known by a children’s song or by Goethe’s poem, houses since 1951 the world’s far northest US military base in Greenland, responsible not only for the eviction of Inuit people originally living there but also for a nuclear bomber crash which happened in 1968. Only in 1995 it became known that the Danish government allowed the Americans to store and to transport nuclear weapons there. And only since last year, due to research by BBC journalists, crucial proof was found that one of the 4 bombs had never been found after the crash, as always maintained as fact by the Pentagon. The Inuit people who had not only lost their houses and who had also helped, rather unprotected, to clean up the nuclear debris, tried to gain some compensation. (Please find more really interesting articles in the link list at the bottom of the original posting.)

More Global Warming & Pollution

Since 1995, Greenland’s vast ice cap has lost 7 percent of its mass and 300 feet in height, according to the European Environmental Agency, a European Union body based in Denmark.An American study last summer showed that climate change had melted 60 square miles of surface area from the UNESCO-listed glacier Ilulissatfrom 2001-2005.

While working on this posting, a new report came in, concluding that dangerous levels of chemicals are in material dumped in the sea and now authorities are working to recover the rubble. A toxic substance was found to be on building material that has been dumped in the sea off the coast of  Greenland’s capital, Nuuk…(source here)

Believe it or not, after all the disturbing infos about Greenland, I found this beautiful photo (above) showing a glacier coming close to the poem’s descripton by Prince Henrik…As to the mischievous bear eyes I wasn’t successful but who knows, maybe I will write to Santa Claus this year, sending him a long list of wishes for the Greenlanders and their polar bears …

Please find the whole article with all references used and related articles in the K-files.

Ein großer Teil des Artikels kann in den K-files auf Deutsch gefunden werden. Dort gibt es auch eine lange Liste von Quellen-und Artikeln zum Thema.

Photo credits:Tan Wee Cheng (polar bear bank note), Wikipedia (arm of coat), Larry Rodrigues (Inuit trousers) Nick Cobbing (iceberg), Gelu Sulugiuc/Reuters (Santa Claus post-box),others unknown sources