Abstract
Situated along a mountainous coastline between cold seas and continental ice, Greenland’s human populations face severe environmental constraints. Both individual and cultural survival have always depended upon flexible use of the available resources and, when these fail, relocation. The 20th century saw great transitions, notably from Danish colonial to Greenlandic Home Rule government; an almost fivefold increase in population (from 12,000 to 56,000); and from a seal-hunting subsistence economy to commercial fisheries in a new global marketplace. But throughout these transitions, the economy remained tied to renewable resources, and therefore could not transcend the underlying environmental constraints. Greenland’s 20th century history demonstrates anew the adaptive necessities of flexible resource use and relocation, in this tough and highly variable environment.
At the beginning of the 20th century, most Greenlanders lived by subsistence hunting and fishing. Seals were their staple resource. Seal populations were falling, however, due to overhunting throughout the northern Atlantic. Warming seas and retreating ice margins around southwest Greenland made the remaining seals less accessible to hunters there as well. At the same time the settlement populations, and their material needs, were increasing. The traditional seal-hunting livelihood thus grew untenable, and alternatives were urgently needed. Commercial fisheries—particularly for Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), which began to appear abundantly with warming waters off southwest Greenland during the 1920s—provided just such an alternative (Mattox 1973). Investment in commercial cod fishing, initially under the direction of Danish planners (especially following recommendations of the Greenland Commission of 1948, published in 1950) and after 1979 Greenland’s own Home Rule government, built up Greenland’s capacity to capture and market this resource as the basis for a new modern economy. Unfortunately, as with seals before them, cod populations fell under the combined pressure of over-exploitation and environmental change. By the early 1990s cod were gone, while other marine resources, especially shrimp, had become the export pillar of Greenland’s economy.
This repeated pattern of synergistic interaction between resource consumption and environmental variation, visible not just in the 20th century but in some earlier episodes as well (Amarosi et al. 1997), makes Greenland particularly interesting as a case study showing the human dimensions of climatic change. A striking feature of the cod-to-shrimp transition, well documented because it occurred so recently, has been its locally uneven effects. The overall value of the present shrimp fishery is comparable to the previous cod fishery, but it does not always benefit the same people or places. Some former cod-fishing communities have lost their economic foundation, while others, well-positioned for shrimping, have gained (Hamilton, Lyster and Otterstad 2000). The west Greenland municipalities of Paamiut and Sisimiut could be viewed as a loser and a winner, respectively, during the cod-to-shrimp transition. Even these relatively straightforward examples, however, well illustrate the complexity with which modern social systems mediate the impacts of environmental change.
This repeated pattern of synergistic interaction between resource consumption and environmental variation, visible not just in the 20th century but in some earlier episodes as well (Amarosi et al. 1997), makes Greenland particularly interesting as a case study showing the human dimensions of climatic change. A striking feature of the cod-to-shrimp transition, well documented because it occurred so recently, has been its locally uneven effects. The overall value of the present shrimp fishery is comparable to the previous cod fishery, but it does not always benefit the same people or places. Some former cod-fishing communities have lost their economic foundation, while others, well-positioned for shrimping, have gained (Hamilton, Lyster and Otterstad 2000). The west Greenland municipalities of Paamiut and Sisimiut could be viewed as a loser and a winner, respectively, during the cod-to-shrimp transition. Even these relatively straightforward examples, however, well illustrate the complexity with which modern social systems mediate the impacts of environmental change.
Department
Sociology
Publication Date
1-1-2001
Publisher
Roskilde University
Document Type
Book
Recommended Citation
Rasmussen, R.O. & L.C. Hamilton. 2001. The Development of Fisheries in Greenland, with Focus on Paamiut/Frederikshåb and Sisimiut/Holsteinsborg. Roskilde: North Atlantic Regional Studies (NORS).
Rights
Roskilde University, ©2001.
Comments
This is an author's draft of a book published by Roskilde University in 2001.