Greenland Ruby Update
For the next few articles, we will again be focusing our attention on Greenland, bringing you up to date on the latest developments.
The post below is a brief summery of the issues;
For those who are new to my blog and this issue, you can review 17 past posts under this link
https://fairjewelry.org/archives/category/greenland-rubies
~ Marc Choyt, Publisher, Fairjewelry.org
SITUATION BRIEFING–GREENLAND RUBY
The situation in the Eastern Arctic today concerns a group of native Inuit Greenlanders who are being systematically prevented by their government from forming a small-miners association to prospect for ruby.
According to the native Greenlanders, their local government is acting in collusion with a foreign national mining corporation, True North Gems (TNG) to create a ruby monopoly to the exclusion of all native Greenlanders.
TNG holds that it is simply obeying the law and has worked to benefit the Greenlandic people through its programs.
The central conflict is over who has sovereign rights over the resources found on land that has been held communally by citizens of Greenland, the Inuit (“eskimo”) people, for many hundreds of years.
Until the recent discovery of high value rubies, Native Greenlanders have had native mined ruby freely, and these rights were enshrined in Greenlandic constitutional law. Inuit have centuries of collecting and utilizing ruby enshrined and built into their customs and religious expression.
Greenland’s government is a relic of colonial Denmark, with the Home Rule Parliament of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) now negotiating the terms of devolution with the European Monarchy.
This devolution of an independent Greenland is twenty years in process, now behind schedule, and delayed indefinitely by the recent discovery of off-shore oil and gas in the Davis Strait.
Greenlander’s feel that the small-scale mining of ruby would be a positive economic asset during times of drastic cultural transition attending global climate change. They seek assistance.
Their initial outreach has been encouraging, with positive feedback from the World Bank’s Community and Small Mining Project, as well as from the International Association for Responsible Mining.
The effects of global climate change are most pronounced and most clearly evident at highest latitudes, towards either pole. The Arctic and Antarctic are the “canaries in the coal mine” of global warming.
In 2007, the maximum summer sea-ice retreat was the farthest north ever recorded; a quarter of the Arctic sea-ice debauched into the Denmark Strait and melted away; the Northwest Passage was open.
