ABSTRACT
A remote and deserted landscape covered with ice and snow in the winter, Greenland – the world’s largest island – becomes a lush, green territory in the summer. Southern Greenland, where long stretches of coast and fjords mark the landscape, is also where we find Ipiutaq Guest Farm, which featured on the New York Times’ list of ‘52 Places To Go In 2015’. On a farm owned by FrenchGreenlandic Agathe Devisme and her husband Kalista Poulsen, agritourism and sheepherding exist side by side. Guests fish in some of the country’s best waters for catching char nearby. For dinner, the char is often added to Agathe’s famous Greenlandic version of bouillabaisse soup, and the evening coffee can be enjoyed beside cakes baked with berries collected from the surrounding pastures. But all here is not idyllic. Close to the guest house, enormous deposits of rare earth minerals (including uranium, fluoride and thorium) have been discovered by miners. If mined, these extremely lucrative deposits hold enough financial potential to help secure Greenland’s independence from Denmark and create a new and prosperous future for its 57,000 residents. Not surprisingly, the uranium find has catapulted Greenland from the global margins to center stage in the international quest for energy resources, and in the process, tourism and nature have come to occupy precarious positions alongside one another. An article entitled ‘Pantry or Uranium?’ in the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen on the Ipiutaq Guest Farm problematizes the establishment of the mine in the vicinity of Ipiutaq. The journalist writes on the prospects of catering for tourists if the mining activities proceed; she contends that ‘it is uncertain whether the prestigious paper (the New York Times) will still recommend southern Greenland as a tourist destination in a few years, because, as the author rhetorically asks, “how many tourists would like to fish with a uranium mine in the back garden?”’! (Andersen, 2015).
