Hovering around this feel-good story about growing vegetables for the first time in hundreds of years in Greenland is a damn gloomy aura.
A Greenlandic supermarket is stocking locally grown cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage this year for the first time. Eight sheep farmers are growing potatoes commercially. Five more are experimenting with vegetables. And Kenneth Hoeg, the region’s chief agriculture adviser, says he does not see why southern Greenland cannot eventually be full of vegetable farms and viable forests.
Farther north, Greenland’s great ice sheet, a vast white landscape of 0.695 million square miles covering 80 percent of the island’s land mass, is melting rapidly, alarmingly, with repercussions not only for the traditional way of life on an island of 56,000 people, but also for the rest of the world. The more the ice melts, the higher sea levels will eventually rise.
Finally! The Little Ice Age is finally ending, and Greenland will be as fertile as it was when the Vikings first colonized it and named it Greenland.