ABSTRACT
Sustainability is a multifarious concept, and in Greenland it is more than an environmentalist trope. To sustain the social and political institutions of Greenlandic society and achieve financial independence from Denmark, a seemingly paradoxical discursive relationship between sustainability and mining has been adopted by members of Greenland’s political elite. Buried masses of rock are sustaining visions of a prosperous mining future and, as this chapter aims to illustrate, the geological imaginaries upon which such visions rely are not simply an artefact of recent calls for resource-based development. Tracing a series of scientific practices of bringing order to Greenland’s underground, this chapter tells the story of how the commodity status of Greenland’s most famous site of possible uranium extraction, the Kvanefjeld, was first established during the 1950s. In doing so, it brings to light some of the challenges associated with constructing the productive fiction which current popular and political narratives of economic sustainability in Greenland now rely on as natural fact.
