Greenlands Quotes

(Media question to Beatles during first U.S. tour 1964) "How do you find America?" "Turn left at Greenland.

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.

I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.

Let it be sufficient to say that, on this night, he was still my lighthouse and albatross in equal measure. The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.

Like there's actually a need for Greenland. You can get ice at 7-Eleven.

Yes, I once was the toast of two continents! (...Greenland & Australia).

Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.

Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote ... can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past. That's why I wrote this book.

Turn left at Greenland....

On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values. For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible. Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light. While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.

Look again at the standard Mercator map and you see that Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, and yet Africa is actually fourteen times the size of Greenland! You could fit the USA, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe. We know Africa is a massive land mass, but the maps rarely tell us how massive.

To be sure, Wegener made mistakes. He asserted that Greenland is drifting west at about 1.6 kilometres a year, a clear nonsense. (Its more like a centimetre.)

In any case, the goal is the same: to connect.

My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.

Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe.

The Polar Intuit of northwest Greenland, the northernmost people, call February ‘seqinniaq’, “the month when the sun appears.

She raised her sad blue eyes to mine. "It's going to be so boring here without you. And I'm going to have to deal with Grandmother on my own! You need to e-mail, text, call, send smoke signals--whatever--and tell me everything you're doing." I laughed. "Yes, I know. Every day. I promise.

Sometimes he tries to catch her, wading frantically through earth that has turned to water, or sometimes through air. Sometimes she tries to catch him. They never catch each other, no matter what.

And she had gone off from her husband to live by herself with the priests, had she not? Does a man, seeing a trinket lying before him in the grass, fail to pick it up?

THE SPECIALISTS MODEL SPY: "Sorry," David mumbles right before crushing his mouth to mine. Oh my God, I'm sixteen, and I've never been kissed. Please let me be doing this right. Except . . . this is it? This is about as exciting as kissing my laptop.

Blue-shirt (Blauserk in Inuktitat, the Inuit language), or Mykla Jokull, now known as Gunnbjorn's Peak (12,500 feet)--the great metaphorical centerpiece in William T. Vollmann's saga-like novel The Ice-Shirt--is the great glacier in Greenland used as a landmark by Erik the Red in sailing west from Snaefellsness.

To reach Greenland, turn left at the middle of Norway, keep so far north of Shetland that you can only see it if the visibility is very good, and far enough south of the Faroes that the sea appears half way up the mountain slopes. As for Iceland, stay so far to the south that you only see its flocks of birds and whales. So, ROUGHLY PARAPHRASED, run the navigational directions in an Icelandic manual of the Middle Ages,

In front of us, the ocean stretched for eternity. Around us, reggae mussy floated through the air. In our drying clothes and still-damp hair, we ate junk food and talked. At some point we finished and went for a long walk in the sand. We picked up shells, laughed, and talked. Before I knew it, the sun was going down and we went back to the van. We lay side by side, stretched out on the blanket. When the sun dropped completely below the horizon, we let the moon illuminate us.

In Greenland there is no ownership of land. What you own is your house, your dogs, your sleds and kayaks. Everyone is fed. It is a food-sharing society in which the whole population is kept in mind--the widows, elderly, infirm, and ill are always taken care of. Jens said, "We weren't born to buy and sell, but to be out on the ice with our families.

In Greenlandic Eskimo, “I should stop drinking” is Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga

The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.

Cloaks are nice. You can wear a cloak and have nothing on under it at all. And you can go anywhere you want like that!

It was always and ever hard to tell with women why they chose one way and not another.

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors Many a frozen night, and merrily Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores: "At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush," said he, "I slept." None knew which bush. Above the town, Beyond `The Drover', a hundred spot the down In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps More sound in France -that, too, he secret keeps.

Plotting is like sex. Plotting is about desire and satisfaction, anticipation and release. You have to arouse your reader’s desire to know what happens, to unravel the mystery, to see good triumph. You have to sustain it, keep it warm, feed it, just a little bit, not too much at a time, as your story goes on. That’s called suspense. It can bring desire to a frenzy, in which case you are in a good position to bring off a wonderful climax.

Some would think the leader of a people should be a model of what to strive for. But maybe God knew trying to be perfect is just not healthy, or maybe God could not find any perfect human beings. Maybe it's just not possible to be perfect.

Snow contains oxygen, which scatters light across the visible spectrum, making it appear white. Compacting squeezes out the oxygen, and the compacted ice crystals that remain absorb long light waves and reflect short waves. The shortest light waves are violet and blue. And so, the ice at the cold heart of Greenland is blue.

One of the conclusions that we saw emerging from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die.

The truth is a stranger...Not always welcome by daylight.

Our lives are lived with the illusion of control and then there are moments rare as wisdom when we abandon the pretense that we are masters of our fate.

This is true, at the least, that no veil of beauty hides the evils from our sight.

He was right; I was amazing.

even in difficult environments, collapses of human societies are not inevitable: it depends on how people respond.

even a modest dilution of the ocean’s salt content—from increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet, for instance—could disrupt the cycle disastrously. The

Nearly 90 per cent of the planet’s ice is in Antarctica and most of the rest is in Greenland.

Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees Celsius in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.

When you have seen the whole world, the old words said, there is always Greenland left.

It wouldn't bother me in the least if all the dogs in the world weere placed in a large sack and taken to some distant island - Greenland springs attractively to mind - where they could romp around and sniff each other's anuses to their hearts' content and would never bother or terrorize me again. The only kind of dog I would excuse from this roundup is poodles. Poodles I would shoot. To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help but lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of the, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect.

On his last voyage he had seemed on the brink of success and had stood in the prow reciting a grand poem of his own composition to a dim blue promontory in which he recognized one of the capes of Greenland. But it is idle to deny that the general feeling was dampened somehow, when they discovered it was the Cape of Good Hope. In short, the admiral was one of those who keep the world young.

It is brutal work, though not more brutal than that which goes onto supply every dinner-table in the country (Life on a Greenland Whaler, an article published in The Strand Magazine in january 1897)

Locally, changes have been even more dramatic. Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as fifteen degrees in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.

The Vikings could have been saved if they had borrowed survival strategies from the Inuit, but the only record we have of contact between the two peoples is the remark from a Viking settler that the Inuit bleed a lot when stabbed - an observation that hardly indicates a willingness to learn from their northern neighbors.

Plotting is like sex. Plotting is about desire and satisfaction, anticipation and release. You have to arouse your reader's desire to know what happens, to unravel the mystery, to see good triumph. You have to sustain it, keep it warm, feed it, just a little bit, not too much at a time, as your story goes on. That's called suspense. It can bring desire to a frenzy, in which case you are in a good position to bring off a wonderful climax.

Margret saw that this is how it is that folk are made to desire what they know they should not have, they are made to wait for it, so that when it comes, no matter how dark and full of sin and repellent it is, they are glad enough to welcome it.

The Spanish silver mines, for example, once part of Hannibal’s domain, were soon producing so much more ore that the environmental pollution from its processing can still be detected in datable samples extracted from deep in the Greenland ice cap.

So often we miss the whole-fabric aspect of where we live, and our own consciousness embedded within it. We are not interrelated but “intrabranched”: one branch wound around another and fused into a single embrace. Our lacelike nervations have overlapping frequencies. It’s what the Greenlanders simply call sila: consciousness, weather, and the power of nature as one. If nothing else, we are what the physicist Richard Feynman called “scattering amplitudes,” wholes within unbounded totalities.

The Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland were all found by accident when ships were driven off course in bad weather; nobody just set out for a far horizon. It is also important to remember that many of these Viking voyagers were simply never seen again.

And then he saw what he was, an old man, ready to die, pressed against the Greenland earth, as small as an ash berry on the face of a mountain, and he did the only thing that men can do when they know themselves, which was to weep and weep and weep.

Some days they would talk all morning about exactly how warm Heaven might be. It could not be warm enough so that souls went naked, or could it? If souls went naked, then why all the weaving, and if there was no weaving then how did souls occupy themselves?

The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. Actually, he can only move his eyes, as even the slightest move otherwise might mean game lost. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking.... Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls.

At a certain age, especially after certain hardships, you only want one thing: to be left alone! ...or better still, you'd like people to think you're dead! in a recent poll on 'what the young people think', they all thought I was dead... died in the Greenland! Not bad!

This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds- these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren't improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances... It's in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have to be assessed. Geoengineering may be 'entirely crazy and quite disconcerting', but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or take some of 'the pain and suffering away', or help prevent no-longer-fully-natural ecosystems from collapsing, doesn't it have to be considered?

Some folk learned the nature of God, that He was merciful, having spared a husband or some cattle, that He was strict, having meted out hard punishment for small sins, that He was attentive, having sent signs of the hunger beforehand, that He was just, having sent the hunger in the first place, or having sent the whales and the teeming reindeer in the end. Some folk learned that He was to be found in the world-in the richness of the grass and the pearly beauty of the Heavens, and others learned that He could not be found in the world, for the world is always wanting, and God is completion.

Twenty years before, she had sailed west from Greenland off the edge of the known world. She was nineteen, newly wed for the second or third time and pregnant for the first. With her were her husband, Thorfinn Karlsefni, and three Viking crews in clinker-built boats. They were sailing to Vinland, a fabulous land that Leif Eiriksson, son of Greenland’s founder Eirik the Red, had washed up on a few years back, when he was caught in a summer storm, sailing west across the icy North Atlantic from Norway. It was Gudrid’s second attempt to get to Vinland. She meant to settle in this New World. At

I took quite an interest in polar expeditions. And I've been familiar with explorers who were still investigating polar zones, especially Greenland, with dog sleighs. What matters with dog sleighs is the guide. The guide is often a female dog, who is particularly subtle, and knows there's a crevice 25 or 30 meters ahead. Yet we can't see it under the snow. So we shall say she is violent because she warns the dog sleighs they're going to fall into the crevice, a 60 to 70 meter drop into a hole, and that will be it, death. Well, maybe I have the astuteness of a female dog leading dog sleighs, nothing more than that.

The peculiar other-world feeling of the Arctic regions - a feeling so singular, that if you have once been there the thought of it haunts you all your life - is due largely to the perpetual daylight. Night seems more orange-tinted and subdued than day, but there is no great difference. (Life on a Greenland Whaler)

To grasp the movement of the sun in the Arctic is no simple task. Imagine standing precisely at the North Pole on June 21, the summer solstice. Your feet rest on a crust of snow and windblown ice. If you chip the snow away you find the sea ice, grayish white and opaque. Six or seven feet underneath is the Arctic Ocean, dark, about 29°F and about 13,000 feet deep. You are standing 440 miles from the nearest piece of land, the tiny island of Oodaaq off the coast of northern Greenland. You stand in each of the world’s twenty-four time zones and north of every point on earth. On this day the sun is making a flat 360° orbit exactly 23½° above the horizon.

About 15,000 BC, the Ice Age came to an end as the Earth’s climate warmed up. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores suggests that average temperatures rose by as much as fifteen degrees Celsius in a short span of time. This warming seems to have coincided with rapid increases in human populations as the global warming led to expanding animal populations and much greater availability of wild plants and foods. This process was put into rapid reverse at about 14,000 BC, by a period of cooling known as the Younger Dryas, but after 9600 BC, global temperatures rose again, by seven degrees Celsius in less than a decade, and have since stayed high. Archaeologist Brian Fagan calls it the Long Summer.

By December an elastic skin of ice reached out hundreds of miles into the sea, rolling with every wave.

To bring him into such agonies as a man should never know, to deny him shrift, to tear his flesh shred from shred. And how will I ever be forgiven for such a lust as this?

Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man's table, or the child from a woman's breast, or the wife from a man's bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these goods in place. And others remarked to themselves how sweet these goods were, in spite of that, and saw that pleasure lost in every moment is pleasure lost forever.

I can’t tell you what I look like. I look in the mirror and see nothing but space. Space reflecting space, that’s what the mirror shows. It figures because Grandmamma said I was nothing but dirt. Dirt under her feet she’d say. Dirt she needed to keep kicking out of the way. Grandmamma said I wasn’t sweeping-up kind of dirt; I was the kind of dirt you needed to kick and scrape off the bottom of your shoes.

Most of the water that will drown Miami and New York and Venice and other coastal cities will come from two places: Antarctica and Greenland. Often you hear about the disappearance of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro or the glaciers in Patagonia, but in the context of drowning cities, land-based glaciers won’t contribute much. What really matters is what happens on the two big blocks of ice at either end of the Earth.

Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once. It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes. Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.

Cabin and cosmos, sun and home, and a garden full of radishes and Swiss chard. So much I hadn’t had for a long time, yet I missed Jens and the dogs and the feel of sea ice under me; I missed lions roaring and picking thorns from my feet in Africa. In both Africa and Greenland, I’d seen the two root causes of climate change: degraded and desertified earth caused by ineffectual rainfall, and the loss of albedo because of the disappearance of snow and ice.

He stretched his arm above my head, and my heart skipped a beat. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot.” “This?” David toyed with the hair on top of my head. “This.” “K-kissing?” He pressed his body against mine, and I stopped breathing. “Speaking of which.” “I haven’t brushed my teeth,” I blurted, then realized what an extremely stupid thing that was to say. His eyes crinkled. “Hmmm, did you brush them this morning?” “Yes,” I croaked. “Good.” He tilted his head. “Bu—

Thus, Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society. Yet the society’s values were at the root of its strengths as well as of its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe’s most remote outpost.

If you believe that astronauts have been to the moon and that the world is not flat, then you probably believe the satellite photos showing the Greenland ice sheet in full-on meltdown. Much of Manhattan and the Eastern Shore of Maryland may join the Atlantic Ocean in our lifetimes. Entire Pacific island nations will disappear. Hurricanes will bring untold destruction. Rising sea levels and crippling droughts will decimate crops and cause widespread famine. People will go hungry, and people will die.

Greenland, the world’s largest island, is a cold and desolate place, all but a tiny coastal strip of which is covered by an ice cap 5,000 feet thick. In winter, with temperatures down to -9°F (-23°C), the sun does not rise until ten in the morning, and sets again at two in the after-noon. Few crops grow, and only a few sheep graze the scrubland in the extreme south. Storms with winds of up to 150 mph frequently sweep the frozen wastes, and it is often so cold that a man’s breath freezes on his beard.

OKU NMA, THE PRINCESS OF LIGHT "And behold, all I see is mercy and grace" cried out the King over the Crown of the Princess of Light. As a bearer of good tidings, I turned to the King and cried out "Behold the peace of the Kingdom of Light". Ada Di Oma, the beauty from the land of the Kings. Oh Princess of Light, the bird through which goodness is spat into the hearts of men. The Bride to the perfect Groom. Let your reigning be heard across the Greenland. Poem by Victor Vote for Philomena Ndu Ezechukwu @©️2021 by VVF

The ultimate reason behind that conservative outlook of the Greenlanders may have been the same as the reason to which my Icelandic friends attribute their own society’s conservatism. That is, even more than the Icelanders, the Greenlanders found themselves in a very difficult environment. While they succeeded in developing an economy that let them survive there for many generations, they found that variations on that economy were much more likely to prove disastrous than advantageous. That was good reason to be conservative.

All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Greenlanders paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, “We are Europeans, we are Christians, God forbid that anyone could confuse us with the Inuit.” Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. That would have been innocent if the ties had expressed themselves only in two-sided combs and in the position in which the arms were folded over a corpse. But the insistence on “We are Europeans” becomes more serious when it leads to stubbornly maintaining cows in Greenland’s climate, diverting manpower from the summer hay harvest to the Nordrseta hunt, refusing to adopt useful features of Inuit technology, and starving to death as a result. To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. The Greenlanders’ clinging to their European Christian image may have been a factor in their conservatism that I mentioned above: more European than Europeans themselves, and thereby culturally hampered in making the drastic lifestyle changes that could have helped them survive.

Very few eighteenth-century slaves have shared their stories about the institution and experience of slavery. The violence required to feed the system of human bondage often made enslaved men and women want to forget their pasts, not recollect them. For fugitives, like Ona Judge, secrecy was a necessity. Enslaved men and women on the run often kept their pasts hidden, even from the people they loved the most: their spouses and children. Sometimes, the nightmare of human bondage, the murder, rape, dismemberment, and constant degradation, was simply too terrible to speak of. But it was the threat of capture and re-enslavement that kept closed the mouths of those who managed to beat the odds and successfully escape. Afraid of being returned to her owners, Judge lived a shadowy life that was isolated and clandestine. For almost fifty years, the fugitive slave woman kept to herself, building a family and a new life upon the quicksand of her legal enslavement. She lived most of her time as a fugitive in Greenland, New Hampshire, a tiny community just outside the city of Portsmouth. At

There is nothing that the media could say to me that would justify the way they’ve acted. You can hound me. You can follow me, but in no way should you frighten those around me. To harm my wife and potentially harm my daughter—there is no excuse that could put any of you on the right side of morality. I met Rose when I was fifteen and she was fourteen, and through what she would call fate and I’d call circumstance of our hobbies, we’d cross paths dozens of times over the course of a decade. At seventeen, I attended the same national Model UN conference as Rose, and a delegate for Greenland locked us in a janitorial closet. He also stole our phones. He had to beat us dishonorably because he couldn’t beat us any other way. Rose said being locked in a confined space with me was the worst two hours of her life" They look bemused, brows furrowing. I can’t help but smile. “You’re confused because you don’t know whether she was exaggerating or whether she was being truthful. But the truth is that we are complex people with the ability to love to hate and to hate to love, and I wouldn’t trade her for any other person. So that day, stuck beside mops and dirtied towels, I could’ve picked the lock five minutes in and let her go. Instead, I purposefully spent two hours with a girl who wore passion like a dress made of diamonds and hair made of flames. Every day of my life, I am enamored. Every day of my life, I am bewitched. And every day of my life, I spend it with her.” My chest swells with more power, lifting me higher. “I’ve slept with many different kinds of people, and yes, the three that spoke to the press are among them. Rose is the only person I’ve ever loved, and through that love, we married and started a family. There is no other meaning behind this, and for you to conjure one is nothing less than a malicious attack against my marriage and my child. Anything else has no relevance. I can’t be what you need me to be. So you’ll have to accept this version or waste your time questioning something that has no answer. I know acceptance isn’t easy when you’re unsure of what you’re accepting, but all I can say is that you’re accepting me as me. I leave them with a quote from Sylvia Plath. “‘I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.’” My lips pull higher, into a livelier smile. “‘I am, I am, I am.’” With this, I step away from the podium, and I exit to a cacophony of journalists shouting and asking me to clarify. Adapt to me. I’m satisfied, more than I even predicted. Some people will rewind this conference on their television, to listen closely and try to understand me. I don’t need their understanding, but my daughter will—and I hope the minds of her peers are wide open with vibrant hues of passion. I hope they all paint the world with color.

that there is such pleasure in enmity that after a while it cannot be left off even if one would will it. Another thing is also true, that when a quarrel is new, one’s friends hold one back, and give cool advice, but when it is long-standing, folk put off its end and goad the rivals.

How did the Vikings survive in greenless Greenland and earthless Scotland? How did they have enough provisions to push on to Woodland and Vineland, where they dared not go inland to gather food, and yet they still had enough food to get back? What did these Norsemen eat on the five expeditions to America between 985 and 1011 that have been recorded in Icelandic sagas? There were able to travel to all these distant, barren shores because they had learned to preserve codfish by hanging it in the frosty winter air until it lost four-fifths of its weight and became a durable woodlike plank.

Slig jubel og henrykkelse har Kristiania vel aldrig før været i, som da Grønlandsfarerne kom tilbage. Sexti Tusing Mennesker modtog dem på Bryggen, femti Tusind fulgte dem til hotellet, ti Tusind raabte niti Tusind hurra, en gammel pensjoneret Oberst fra Kampen skreg sig simpelthen ihjel på Stedet.

If observing Trump’s schoolboy act in relationship to North Korea felt like watching a disaster movie, then witnessing his Greenland bid and subsequent tantrum was more like seeing a guest at a fancy dinner party blow his nose in an embroidered napkin and proceed to use a silver fork to scratch his foot under the table. But not only did most journalists cover the debacle with restraint—many also provided historical and political context. Explanations of the strategic and economic importance of the Arctic proliferated; many media outlets noted that President Harry S Truman had also wanted to buy Greenland. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, a consistent Trump critic, tried the opposite approach and wrote a piece explaining why the United States needs a tiny country like Denmark to be its ally. The media were doing what media should do—providing context, organizing relevant information, creating narrative—and this too had a normalizing effect, simply by helping media consumers to absorb the unabsorbable. It was as though the other dinner guests had carried on with their polite conversation and even handed the disruptive, deranged visitor a clean fork so that he wouldn’t have to eat dessert with the utensil he had stuck in his shoe.

On a flat surface with just the normal x and y coordinates, any high school algebra student, with the help of old Pythagoras, can calculate the distance between points. But imagine a flat map (of the world, for example) that represents locations on what is actually a curved globe. Things get stretched out near the poles, and measurement gets more complex. Calculating the actual distance between two points on the map in Greenland is different from doing so for points near the equator. Riemann worked out ways to determine mathematically the distance between points in space no matter how arbitrarily it curved and contorted.

This sense of instability is reinforced when we look within the last ice age at shorter-term climate fluctuations. There were repeated, incredibly rapid climate changes that were at least hemispheric in the extent of their impacts. As the last ice age ended, our record of these abrupt climate changes comes into sharper focus, revealing that warming of up to 10°C in Greenland has occurred within less than a decade. This reinforces the idea that the present climate system is unusually unstable—at least on relatively short timescales—providing an important backdrop for thinking about our own planet-changing activities as a species.

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?

Nine out of every ten people the first time they meet me ask, “How did you stand the cold?” As a matter of fact, the cold of the Arctic regions to a well man, properly fed and properly clothed, is no more serious than is the cold of our own winters to us here. But the darkness, the months-long winter night! That is different.

This is my thought, that for every soul, something must come to pass, and for everything that does come to pass, every soul can imagine many things that might have come to pass, all of them less evil than what actually fell out. Folk must have something to think on, or they would be unable to hope for Heaven or remember Paradise.

Of the 3 percent of Earth's water that is fresh, most exists as ice sheets. Only the tiniest amount- 0.036 percent is found in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, and an even smaller part- just 0.001 percent - exists in clouds or as vapor. Nearly 90 percent of the planets ice is in Antarctica, and most of the rest is in Greenland. Go to the South Pole and you will be standing on nearly two miles of ice, at the North Pole just fifteen feet of it. Antarctica alone has six million cubic miles of ice- enough to raise the oceans by a height of two hundred feet if it all melted. But if all the water in the atmosphere fell as rain, evenly everywhere, the oceans would deepen by only an inch. p273

For example, he looks at 21 different hunter-gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Tauade of New Guinea to the Ammassalik of Greenland to the Ona of Tierra Del Fuego and found that the average number of people in their villages was 148.4. The same pattern holds true for military organization. "Over the years military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb which dictates that functional fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men." Dunbar writes. "This, I suspect, is not simply a matter of how the generals in the rear exercise control and coordination, because companies have remained obdurately stuck at this size despite all the advances in communications technology since the first world war. Rather, it is as thought the planners have discovered, by trial and error over the centuries, that it is hard to get more than this number of men sufficiently familiar with each other so that they can work together as a functional unit." It is still possible, ofcourse, to run an army with larger groups. But at a bigger size you have to impose complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to try to command loyalty and cohesion. But below 150, Dunbar argues, it is possible to achieve these same goals informally: "At this size, orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups this becomes impossible.

Then humming thrice, he assumed a most ridiculous solemnity of aspect, and entered into a learned investigation of the nature of stink...The French were pleased with the putrid effluvia of animal food; and so were the Hottentots in Africa, and the Savages in Greenland; and that the Negroes on the coast of Senegal would not touch fish till it was rotten; strong presumptions in favour of what is generally called stink, as those nations are in a state of nature, undebauched by luxury, unseduced by whim and caprice: that he had reason to believe the stercoraceous flavour, condemned by prejudice as a stink, was, in fact, most agreeable to the organs of smelling; for, that every person who pretended to nauseate the smell of another's excretions, snuffed up his own with particular complacency...

You said write something “fun” we did over summer to get our “grammer mussels flexing” again, so ok, Mrs Tweedy, this summer scientists announced that in the last 40 yrs humans have killed 60 percent of the wild mammals and fishes and birds on earth. Is that fun? Also in the past 30 yrs, we melted 95 percent of the oldest thickest ice in the arctic. When we have melted all the ice in Greenland, just the ice in Greenland, not the north pole, not Alaska, just Greenland, Mrs Tweedy, know what happens? The oceans rise 23 feet. That drowns Miami, New York, London, and Shanghai, that’s like hop on the boat with your grandkids, Mrs Tweedy, and you’re like, do you want some snacks, and they’re like, Grandma, look underwater, there’s the statute of liberty, there’s Big Ben, there’s the dead people. Is that fun, are my grammer mussels flexing?

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it. When I start talking about Qaanaaq, to myself or to others, I again start to lose what has never been truly mine.

Miss Boyd’s voyages to Greenland were conducted during a transitional period in polar exploration between “the Golden Age,” in which conquering the poles was accomplished by overland routes and by sea, and the modern technological era heralded by early polar flights by Amundsen, Ellsworth, and Byrd. Gillis wrote that Louise Arner Boyd “represented one of the last revivals of a Victorian phenomenon the wealthy explorer who poured a personal fortune into expeditions aimed at advancing science and satisfying profound personal curiosity.” [3] In rejecting a sedate and sheltered life as a wealthy wife and mother, she defied societal expectations. But she also challenged the ideal of a polar explorer as defined by manliness, stoicism, and heroism. Her seven daring expeditions to northern Norway and Greenland between 1926 and 1955 paved the way for later female polar explorers,

       If this isn't a guidebook, what is it? A book of sermons, perhaps.        I preach that air travel be scaled back, as a start, to the level of twenty years ago, further reductions to be considered after all the Boeing engineers have been retrained as turkey ranchers.        The state Game Department should establish a season on helicopters — fifty-two weeks a year, twenty-four hours a day, no bag limit.        Passenger trains must be restored, as a start, to the service of forty years ago and then improved from there.        The Gypsy Bus System must not be regularized (the government would regulate it to death) but publicized cautiously through the underground.        I would discourage, if not ban, trekking to Everest base camp and flying over the Greenland Icecap. Generally, people should stay home. Forget gaining a little knowledge about a lot and strive to learn about a little.

Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don't suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!

Climate change doesn’t always take on such dramatic forms. More often, it’s insidious. Bugs can survive in places they couldn’t before, greatly increasing the threat of tropical diseases, even as far north as Alaska and Greenland. In search of cooler weather, trees, birds, mammals, and other species are creeping up mountain slopes and toward the poles. Spring green-up occurs earlier every year, shifting the timing of thousands of species’ interactions and rapidly shifting growing zones, which throw entire ecosystems dangerously off-balance. Heat waves have become prolonged and deadlier. Wildfire smoke is aggravating chronic illnesses hundreds of miles away from the flames. Air pollution, worsened by fossil fuel burning, kills more than nineteen thousand people a day, making it one of the leading causes of death in nearly every country on Earth. Young people growing up today are seeking treatment for mental health issues in numbers never seen before, in part because they are not always sure they’ll have a livable future.

Da den arvelige Synd blev forklaret for nogle, sagde de: Hvi lod GUD ikke Adam og Eva strax omkomme og skabte andre Mennesker i deres Sted, som kunde have forplantet reene Børn og Efterkommere? Videre, da dem blev sagt, at Dievelen forfører Mennesker til at overtræde GUds Bud, hvi GUd da ikke dræber eller indspærrer ham og derved befrier Menneskene fra Fristelser, som styrte dem udi evig U-lykke? Videre, naar dem siges, at de, som ikke kiende GUd og troe paa ham, blive fordømte, svare de, hvi haver da GUd tøvet saa længe med at forkynde os Troen?

In 2014, we learned that the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets were even more vulnerable to melting than scientists anticipated—in fact, the West Antarctic sheet had already passed a tipping point of collapse, more than doubling its rate of ice loss in just five years. The same had happened in Greenland, where the ice sheet is now losing almost a billion tons of ice every single day. The two sheets contain enough ice to raise global sea levels ten to twenty feet—each. In 2017, it was revealed that two glaciers in the East Antarctic sheet were also losing ice at an alarming rate—eighteen billion tons of ice each year, enough to cover New Jersey in three feet of ice. If both glaciers go, scientists expect, ultimately, an additional 16 feet of water. In total, the two Antarctic ice sheets could raise sea level by 200 feet; in many parts of the world, the shoreline would move by many miles. The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, as Peter Brannen has written, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher. There were palm trees in the Arctic. Better not to think what that means for life at the equator.

It’s not a serious project,” Laurence said as they crossed Castro Street. “Milton doesn’t think the human race will still be here in a hundred years, much less a few thousand. This is just his way of hedging his bets. Or assuaging his conscience.” “It’s gotten me three free trips to Greenland,” Isobel said. “Honestly, I think Milton’s opinions depend on how many interns he’s killed today.” She half-winked, to indicate this was a joke and Milton killed no interns. During the dinner, Isobel talked more about her career transition, from rockets to Milton’s Ten Percent Project. “I used to dream about rockets.” Isobel scooped a corn chip into the communal pico de gallo. “Every single night, for months and months. After we pulled the plug on Nimble Aerospace. I had these weird dreams that there was a rocket launch going up any minute, and we’d misplaced the final telemetry. Or we were sending up a rocket, and it looked beautiful and proud shooting up into the air, and then it collided with a jumbo jet. Or worst of all was the dreams where nothing went wrong, rockets just soared for hours, and I sat on the ground watching with tears in my eyes.