Extraction

Helen Mort

September in South Greenland has been disconcertingly warm, the mornings breaking over Qaqqarsuaq mountain with bronze clarity. I am following the edge of Tunulliarfik Fjord, not quite sure where to look: towards the rainbow-bright houses of Narsaq, out into the water where icebergs form their own, uneven horizon, or down towards my feet. I settle for an ineffective combination of all three, head pivoting, route meandering, feet stumbling on water-smoothed rocks. The waterline is strewn with white feathers. Then something else pale catches my attention and I stoop to reach it.

It looks like a globule of snow, a fat teardrop-shaped coldness, but it isn’t translucent enough to be washed up ice. When I touch it, it is not cool. In my palm, it is light and bobbled. A plum-sized piece of polystyrene, a little artificial berg. I hold it up between thumb and forefinger and take a picture on my iPhone: artificial iceberg in the foreground, real bergs in the blue distance behind. I am too pleased with my photo and its contrast, its inherent visual metaphor, the same way I was too eager to photograph the rubbish tip on the edge of town yesterday and the rusted car with its shattered windscreen. The ice is melting and we’re filling the planet with more stuff, more landfill, more mess.

Every Greenlandic town I’ve visited has a visible waste ground. In 2016, I stayed in Kulusuk, East Greenland, on an exploratory mountaineering trip in a small group which included the writer Robert Macfarlane. We quickly discovered that the best outcrop for watching the sun sink over the fjord also afforded the finest aerial view of the town dump. In ‘Underland’, Robert described it as an encroaching presence:

‘Thousands of bin bags, a slew of plastic crates, cracked kayaks, melamine cupboards and white fridges have all been heaved off the cliff edge here to make the midden. It looks, in the dusk, like a tongue of ice flowing down towards the waterline: a glacier in advance, not retreat.’

These village tips are a reminder that Greenland is a place where survival has always relied on pragmatism. It is a prevailing narrative: even Viking settlers couldn’t last here. In Kulusuk, there were always seal and porpoise carcasses in the harbour, and the town museum proudly showed how every part of each animal would traditionally be used for something. It is messy and effective. The presence of dilapidated quad bikes and prams and abandoned scooters outside modern Greenlandic houses offends only tourists, or researchers like me who wish to pretend we aren’t tourists, who come to examine the impact of climate change, our flights and our presence in the landscape contributing to the very phenomenon we claim to be so concerned about. There is no way to escape the paradox of the observer.

My stay in Narsaq is perhaps doubly problematic, because I’m not even a scientist. I’m here with quaternary science colleagues from my institution who are looking at sediment samples from the area’s surrounding lakes, testing them to see what they reveal about changing weather patterns and historic weather events. Day after bright day, they wade into the cold lake up to their waists, plunge a huge coring device into the sediment and push and heave to turn it. They never know what the bands of matter will show and won’t find out until they get the samples back to the laboratory.

I accompany them, put on waders, try my hand at using the corer, then retreat quickly to the safety of dry land where I spend the rest of the mornings scribbling in my bottle green pocket notebook, facetiously comparing the process of taking lake sediment cores to the work of the creative writer (the plunge down into the unknown! The thrill of never knowing what we might retrieve!). My ‘true’ purpose on the trip is to talk to people in the local community about their experience of change in Narsaq, particularly the effects of climate emergency, so I’m spending my days irritating a variety of residents with my questions and obtrusive presence, from teenagers at the secondary school to craftsmen whittling Tupilaqs (carved figures which protect their owners from enemy attack) from reindeer bone. Often when I go to their workshop, they produce guitars, drowning out my enquiries with sky-filling music, expansive as the Northern Lights.

Yesterday I learned the word for absent summer – Nipitartut, when winter runs into winter, nothing in between. Apparently, that’s what Narsaq has been experiencing lately, a strange flatness in the year. The owner of the museum told me, and corrected my pronunciation, showed me how to say it the South Greenlandic way. When I told him I’d been to the glaciers in the east, he raised his eyebrows. I wrote the word down in my field notebook Nipitartut, Nipitartut and then felt like I had stolen it. When I was a teenager, I wrote a poem called ‘Twenty two words for snow’, which was inspired by the notion of Inuit people having a plethora of snow-words. I feel embarrassed about that piece now, as if it was quietly exoticizing a culture I knew so little of. Besides, there are so many more than twenty two. Ice is its own vast library. I was taking something that wasn’t mine.

I walk back towards the museum now along winding, quiet roads. Its proprietor, Oolarak, has given his time generously, telling me about the history he’s writing of the area and the families who live here, or were displaced here. Between 2007 and 2017, the population of Narsaq fell by 10% and it suffered the highest unemployment of any town in Greenland. Traditionally, fishing was a major industry – and from the window I can see two men in blue overalls untangling their nets – but with cod and then shrimp numbers dwindling, hunting and fishing became less sustainable. When we arrived, one of the area’s most respected hunters had just been killed in a tragic, mysterious accident. Then in the early 2000s, the local shrimp processing factory closed. As many municipalities around Greenland were merged, Narsaq lost its social services, which were transferred to a bigger town nearby. Heavy reliance on subsidy from the Danish government became a way of life.

Everything is entangled here. Climate change threatened subsistence, but it also created a strange, unprecedented economic opportunity in the area of Kvanefjeld, mineral-rich mountains looming over Narsaq town, more and more of those minerals surfacing due to milder weather. In 1957, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr – a proselytiser for the use of atomic energy – visited Narsaq and was given honourary citizenship. In the weeks before Bohr arrived that summer, Danish geologists had taken samples from Kvanefjeld containing promising levels of uranium. Their dream was that Greenland’s uranium could support a nuclear power programme in Denmark, but sixty years later, some began to wonder if it could provide the key to Greenland’s financial independence, with mining potentially becoming big business in towns like Narsaq and bringing investment from large companies abroad, like China and Australia. In 2013, Greenland’s parliament narrowly voted to repeal a 1988 ban, which would allow the extraction of uranium and minerals that have uranium as a by-product.

Narsaq has a history of struggle and resistance. Oolirak is proud to tell me how residents fought the uranium mining plan and won (or won for the time being), campaigning tirelessly to draw attention to the impact it could have on Greenland’s fragile environment and on the livelihood of farmers around Narsaq. He shows me photos of the placards and marches. After the Inuit Ataqatigiit party came to power in April 2021, Greenland's parliament passed legislation to ban uranium mining and cease development of the mine. But the issue divided people in the town and it remains contentious even now. Some folk don’t like to speak of it. They have been left with intensely difficult questions. What is more important, protecting Greenland’s ecosystem or gaining full independence from Denmark through financial stability? Are there other alternatives to mining?

I am from an ex-mining community in North East Derbyshire, on the fringes of the north of England, just shy of Sheffield where I now live. My thoughts can gesture towards some understanding of the necessity of industry which also damages, the void left by that industry’s absence. I grew up with landfill sites and open casting, incongruous as the tip on the edge of Narsaq town. I know there are urgent demands that are impossible to reconcile. The men who huddle with their cans of Tuborg outside the supermarket remind me of men of my parents’ generation and older in Shirebrook and Carr Vale, the friend’s grandad who used to plant himself on the bench opposite the park every day at sunset and sit in silence, only breaking it to cough up dust-damage from the pit. Who has the right to make decisions for a community? Who can?

When I think about Greenland as a landscape in flux, I’m thinking of Arkwright Town, five minutes’ drive from my childhood house, the place where my parents still live. Like so many pits in the UK, Arkwright colliery was closed in 1988, leaving many locals jobless and disenfranchised long after the media spotlight had moved on to new stories. But in North East Derbyshire, the subterranean continued to make itself known, continued to dominate the imaginations of those whose houses rested above the silent mine.

One evening in November 1988 – just six months after the colliery closed – a flash of blue flame in what should have been an unlit fireplace caused one of the Arkwright villagers to call out British Gas. When the technician arrived to examine the source of the problem, there was an unexpected and chilling discovery. Methane was seeping up through the rock strata beneath the village and was building to potentially explosive levels in people’s living rooms. Immediately, half of the 174 houses in the village were evacuated.

Also known as coal gas, methane is produced by carboniferous material, and when mixed with air in confined spaces can become explosive. Mines are regularly monitored for methane and carbon monoxide – the notorious ‘canary in the coal mine’ comes from this vigilance, since the creature's rapid breathing rate, small size and high metabolism led birds in dangerous mines to succumb to gases before the miners, thus giving the miners time to take action. At Arkwright in 1988, suspicion about the cause of the seepage soon fell on the workings under the village, now lying dormant. There was outcry, righteous anger. And when British Coal refused to accept liability, the villagers, supported by their local MP, Dennis Skinner, began moves to claim compensation.

The dispute lumbered on for almost two years. Then, in October 1990, British Coal made an unprecedented offer. While still not accepting any liability, it offered to build an entirely new village with a selection of modern bungalows and semi-detached houses, fit them with mod cons, pay all moving expenses, and even give each household an index-linked ‘relocation fee’ for their troubles. In return for providing these new homes – a programme rumoured to cost fifteen million pounds – British Coal wanted planning permission for a ten-year programme to opencast mine four million tons of coal from the areas immediately around both the new and old Arkwright. Much of the proposed site was open fields. I have vague memories of the expanse of them, the edgelands environment where I was born, low hedges, the occasional punctuation of pylons.

Dennis Skinner – an ex-miner himself, known as ‘The Beast of Bolsover’ for his vociferous opinions and tenacity in a political fight – refused to support the application. As in Narsaq, with the issue of Kvanefjeld, opinions were divided. But most of all, the villagers were tired. They wanted a safe place to live, a sense of permanence. They accepted the deal. I would have been barely five or six years old when the new village was built and the settlement began to migrate across the road. My sense of that time is like a distorted fairy tale. I remember my dad mourning the loss of three stately trees from one of the fields which was to be developed, how the branches looked like forked lightning. I remember him crying about it on a bus, or at least I think I do. I remember the ground opening, the diggers and the noise, the artificial hills slowly appearing. Was there noise? I might have grafted some of this. I recall there being just one of the old houses left eventually, a single building where the village once stood, proud and alone.

My family weren’t miners and my connection to the pits is indirect, but I do know something of what it is like to grow up with silence and division, subjects nobody in town likes to raise, the shouts of ‘Scab’ that echoed across town every time Chesterfield FC played Mansfield or any of the Nottingham teams. I know what happens when things begin to seep up from underground.

Living temporarily in Narsaq, I think endlessly about the word extraction. Extraction of rare minerals. Extraction of information. Extraction of stories. Every conversation I have, every line I scribble in my notebook is tinged with a familiar sort of guilt. I dislike the feeling of purposeful research when it makes other people subjects of study. I become more and more reticent. I hang around in the town hotel and bar and wait for people to approach me. I climb the mountain alone. I go to the school to give the class I’ve worked with biscuits and branded Manchester Metropolitan notebooks and I laugh when one boy throws his on the floor and stamps on it – I’d forgotten how many of the teenagers here are diehard Liverpool fans. I hear myself starting to explain: ‘No, not Manchester United, I promise!’ but then I just giggle along with them instead.

I do not write any of the things I am supposed to. I am tentative in my questions, not wanting to be pushy. I am supposed to be generating data of a kind, but can poetry ever really be usefully quantified? And does its pursuit justify freighting every encounter with the pressure to ‘gather material’? Besides, the most talkative people I meet are always those who have settled here, foreigners working in bars or running the local brewery or, like me, on a research trip. A British professor of design has coffee with us and tells us a story about a hunter near Nuuk, the Greenlandic capital who stalked a walrus on the ice. When the creatures breathe in, they can’t hear, so every time she saw its great flank rise she risked a small step forwards. She kept this up for two hours until she was in killing proximity. I imagine that this is how artists must approach the idea of truth, right before we murder it.

I realise I am tired under these vast skies. So very tired, when I have done so little. Later that night, I prop myself up in the town bar and watch an elderly woman with short hair who has been perched on the same stool for hours, talking to nobody and to everybody. She wears an olive-coloured padded jacket and her whole body seems to ripple with the music from the three-piece band.  I sip my Qajak lager. It is crisper, purer, than any beer I’ve ever tasted. It is iceberg cold. Suddenly, decisively the woman gets to her feet and sways to the front of the stage. She begins to dance alone, joyfully, singularly, beckoning others to join her, but nobody does. So she swoops back to the bar and picks up a bar stool. It must be heavy, but she bears it lightly. She begins to dance with it in her arms, like a partner.

Outside, the Aurora Borealis are moving in the same way – unpredictable, with grace, brighter than anyone expected, purple and green, their frequency almost audible. The woman dances on. A Danish man in a red down jacket lurches over and tries to take her stool away and she almost charges towards him, ready to attack. Nobody can take her dance from her.  She is necessary in this place, on this night. She is a fixed point in time. She dances out of the door with the stool still in her arms and – at last – the others follow her. The sky is full of uncanny green light, green and lilac and as it moves it seems to reach out and down to Narsaq. I don’t know what I think I’m doing here, but for a moment, it seems to be the only place in the world I could possibly be.

Originally published in Issue #30

Helen Mort is a poet and novelist, and a Senior Lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and her most recent book is Ethel, a biography of Ethel Haythornthwaite.