Greenland

One evening, in the cultural centre in Nuuk, along with the town’s intellectuals, professionals and politicians, we were served reindeer fillet and musk ox, smoked salmon and halibut tartare. Two choirs sang Greenlandic songs in a Moravian a capella style imported by Danish missionaries. A middle-aged actress told a story of how happiness came to the people of Greenland, a thin man played the guitar. The entertainment had a quality of self-conscious innocence that was belied by the conversations around the buffet, where rumours of Danish intransigence over future mineral rights in the independence negotiations were traded, contradicting the public declarations of goodwill from Copenhagen towards Greenland’s ambitions.

In the bars of Nuuk, Greenlanders who had not been invited to the reception fell to drinking in less elegant fashion. They are on the front line of the gathering emergency, their physical world shifting around them, their melting landscape a magnifying mirror of the planet’s changing state. For them, a new cycle of adaptation has begun. In the quiet of the Arctic night sky, aurora borealis traced a ghostly luminescence, whispering of cosmic energy. Human settlement never seemed so fragile.