Greenland has the highest suicide rate in the world — one in five Greenlanders tries to commit suicide at some point in their lives.
Everybody in Greenland (all 56,000 of them) knows this. In fact, everybody knows quite a few people who have tried to commit suicide — and one or two who succeeded. So, it is really a good idea to subject this population to an experiment in high-speed cultural and economic change?
Greenland is not fully independent.
Denmark still controls its defence and foreign affairs and subsidizes the population at the annual rate of about $10,000 per person. But, Greenlanders are one of the few aboriginal societies on the planet that is dominant (almost 90 percent of the population) on a large territory, which is the world’s biggest island.
And it is heading for independence.
So, the debate in this soon-to-be country is about for what to aim.
Do you go on trying to preserve what is left of the old Arctic hunting and fishing culture, although it’s already so damaged and discouraged that it has the highest suicide rate on the planet?
Or, do you put the pedal to the metal and seek salvation in full modernization through high-speed economic growth (while keeping your language and what you can of your culture)?
What’s remarkable about Greenlandic politics is how aware the players are of their dilemma and their options.
“If you want to become rich, it comes at a price,” said Aqqaluk Lynge, one of the founders of the Inuit Ataqatigiit (Community of the People) party that ran the government until recently.
Lynge doesn’t want to pay that price and, under the Inuit Ataqatigiit administration, all mining in Greenland was banned. Quite apart from the environmental costs of large-scale mining operations, Lynge said, the many thousands of foreign workers they would have brought in would have had a devastating impact on what is already a very fragile Greenlandic culture.
But, the Siumut (Forward) party won October’s election and new Prime Minister Aleqa Hammond sees things very differently.
Essentially, she thinks modernization has gone too far to turn back now.
Better to gamble on solving the current huge social problems (like suicide) by enabling everybody to live fully modern, prosperous lives. If you’re no longer marginalized and poverty-stricken, you’ll feel better about yourself.
With this in mind, she has issued more than 120 licences for mining and petrochemical projects, including a huge open-cast iron-ore mine that would ship 15-million tonnes of high-grade iron concentrate a year (mostly to China), drilling platforms for offshore oil and gas exploration and even mines to produce uranium and rare earths.
She has made her choice and she understands it.
In a recent interview with the Guardian while she was visiting Norway, Hammond said: “The shock will be profound. But, we have faced colonization, epidemics and modernization before. The decisions we are making [to open the country up to mining and oil exploitation] will have enormous impact on lifestyles and our indigenous culture. But, we always come out on top. We are vulnerable, but we know how to adapt.”
Brave words, but few Greenlanders have the technical and managerial skills to get senior jobs in these high-risk, high-cost enterprises ($2.5 billion for the iron-ore mine alone) and most of them will not want the hard, dirty, dangerous jobs of the workers in the mines and on the rigs.
If all goes well, they will no longer depend on the Danish subsidies that currently keep their society afloat, but they will just be shifting to a different source of subsidies.
To the extent a sense of cultural marginalization and defeat, and a life without meaningful work, is responsible for the Greenlanders’ problems, it’s hard to see how more money from a different source will help — or how adding tens of thousands of foreign workers from places like China to the social mix will help, either.
Hammond is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t — leaving the people in their current predicament is not a good choice, but going flat out for modernization doesn’t feel like such a good option either. It would be a good time to call in the cultural engineers, if such a profession existed.
Gwynne Dyer’s columns appear in publications in 45 countries. His website can be found here.
