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| While glaciers melt around the port of Ilulissat, its fishing industry is thriving. Colin Woodard |
In Greenland, potatoes thrive as seal hunting wanes
Global warming is a boon for farmers and fishermen but a hardship for ice-dependent Inuit.
By Colin Woodard | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the October 1, 2007 edition
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Qassiarsuk, Greenland - In this village of 56 people in southern Greenland, history has come full circle. It was here, in about 985, that Erik the Red, leader of a medieval Norse colony, built his farm and raised sheep, cattle, and barley.
But about 300 years later, the climate changed. The Norse's agrarian lifestyle began to unravel when the Little Ice Age arrived, dooming the colony.
Today the hillside overlooking Erik's Fjord is lush and green again. A crop of young potatoes and radishes await harvesting. The plot is surrounded by tall grass – food for thousands of sheep – blowing in the cool winds coming off the melting glaciers to the north and east. In a nearby village, residents have started growing broccoli.
"Spring is coming many weeks earlier now, and the last five winters have been very short and rainy," says Tommy Maro, mayor of Qaqortaq, the region's principal town. "It will be exciting to see how the land will change in the next 20 years. Maybe we will have more sheep farmers, more green areas, more things we can grow."
Perhaps nowhere else in the world are the effects of climate change as obvious as in Greenland, where warming temperatures have brought a mixed blessing to the 56,000 residents that live on this island, a self-governing territory of Denmark. As winter sea ice disappears, the traditional means that the indigenous Inuit people have developed to survive in the Arctic – sled dog mushing, seal hunting, ice-hole fishing – are rapidly becoming obsolete. Farming, an occupation all but unheard of a century ago, has never looked better.
"As we know, [Erik the Red's colony] disappeared mostly because the weather turned cold and under those conditions only the Inuit culture could survive," says Erik Rode Frederiksen, an octogenarian whose father, Otto, was the first Greenlander to try a hand at farming and named his son for the Norse leader. "It is the opposite we now see happening under our own eyes: here in south Greenland we are now approaching the climate conditions of northern Europe."
In the capital, Nuuk, 200 miles north, potato farming is a new thing. Price disputes between local farmers and retailers have even been front-page news. "If somebody had proposed potatoes for the front page 15 years ago, everyone would have thought it was a hilarious joke," says Nuuk native Minik Rosing, one of Greenland's most renowned scientists. "There's a whole new world opening up."
As it does, other worlds are closing down, particularly in central and northern Greenland where people traditionally traveled atop the frozen sea with dog sleds. (With staggeringly difficult terrain, none of Greenland's towns are connected by road.)
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