The Polar Eskimos do not tend to be intellectually curious. Seldom does anybody ask about the place I come from. However, sometimes I am asked how many people live in the United Kingdom. The Greenlanders are well aware that they inhabit the country with the lowest population density on earth, but I always feel embarrassed to admit that over 60 million people are crammed into our little island. Greenland is a country nine times the size of the UK, but the population of the UK is more than a thousand times that of this vast island in the Arctic. The subsequent question, normally, is how I could live in such an overcrowded, multicultural, polluted place where the bond to nature is not only severed, but no longer understood either. The reason for the embarrassment on my part is perhaps because I know that the industrialised country that I come from is a comparatively major polluter whose economy and thirst for economic growth jeopardises indirectly an ancient, simple way of life whose demands on the natural environment are almost zero.
Before coming to the Arctic, I was convinced that we needed a new paradigm for looking at the world. We have reached the point where the pursuit of economic growth at the expense of everything else can only lead to ruin for mankind. We need to develop a system which would turn this model on its head, forcing investors to allocate funds and reward companies, and indeed countries, not solely for their respective growth in earnings or annual percentage increase in GDP, but directly and quantitatively for their progress in having developed green, sustainable products and economies. Having spent much time talking to the Arctic hunters who bear the costs of environmental damage, I am convinced of the need for a new approach to assessing what we consider to be "economic success", and also for the introduction of urgent policies to curtail the world's population growth.