We can't find the internet
Attempting to reconnect
Something went wrong!
Hang in there while we get back on track
Mining for Greenlandic self-government: Fractal islands in the Anthropocene
Summary
This anthropological study explores Greenland's emerging identity as a modern resource economy through fieldwork at a decommissioned gold mine. While focused on political and cultural themes, it touches on how industrial and extractive activities in the Anthropocene affect remote environments, including through pollution.
This article explores the emergence of Greenland as an Anthropocene island through anthropological fieldwork in and around the decommissioned Nalunaq goldmine in the south of the country. The article takes off from the idea that Anthropocene activities are characterized by the invention, movement, and marketing of seemingly mobile resource units that can be identified and invested in regardless of landscape specificities, and explores how the production of Greenlandic gold complicates this idea of extraction. In particular, the article discusses how Greenlandic post-colonial independence and ambitions for mining both go together and undermine each other, creating new dependencies and relationalities along the way. Through analyzing parts of Nalunaq’s political context, infrastructural challenges, the gold that came out, and eventual closure, the article presents Greenlandic gold mining as a set of partly congruous, partly contradictory practices and ideas. The article thus specifies an extractive project that both is and is not possible on the world’s biggest island, and brings this to bear on how we might understand the Anthropocene.
Sign in to start a discussion.
More Papers Like This
Greenland in the Anthropocene: an archive of microplastic pollution
Researchers investigated whether glaciomarine sediments from Greenland's melting ice sheet contain microplastics that could be released as the ice retreats. The study developed purification methods to extract microplastics from fine glacial sediment. The research suggests that ice melt in Greenland may be releasing microplastics previously trapped in glacial deposits back into the ocean.
Anthropocene
This work examines the Anthropocene through historical case studies connecting industrial coal extraction in Wales with ecological observations at the poles, illustrating how human industrial activity has reshaped planetary systems and providing a narrative framework for understanding the scale of anthropogenic environmental transformation.
The Governance of Waste in Iqaluit, Nunavut
This thesis examines waste governance in Iqaluit, Nunavut, where the remote Arctic city lacks sophisticated waste management infrastructure and faces unique challenges from colonialism and neoliberal governance. The study is an anthropological and governance analysis rather than an environmental science study of microplastics.
Anthropocene Ouroboros
This ethnographic study explores how plastic objects on an Indian Ocean island shatter and disperse into microplastics, complicating our understanding of geological time. Researchers argue that because microplastics can migrate through sedimentary layers and infiltrate earlier geological strata, they disrupt the very framework used to delineate the Anthropocene. The paper examines the cultural and temporal implications of plastic pollution as a defining material of the modern era.
Climate change? Archaeology and Anthropocene
This archaeological perspective uses marine debris on drift beaches in Norway and Iceland as a lens for thinking about how human activity shapes environments across time. It connects archaeological methods to contemporary Anthropocene concerns, including plastic pollution.