DIAMOND RUSH BORN DESPERATION FREE

She also acted in Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. In 1984, she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play for Michael Frayn's comedy Noises Off. She has worked in television, film and on Broadway. Less than 500 of the whole population can now survive only by hunting.Deborah Rush (born April 10, 1954) is an American actress. They cannot find enough food for themselves and their dogs. It is like an employer taking away three months of your pay without notice. “The hunters wait one month later for the ice to form and it melts one month earlier in the spring. “The fact is we cannot go on as we are,” she said.

Mrs Hammond’s government has introduced education programmes so that native hunters can retrain to prepare for new lives and independence. We need to avoid conflict and assess exactly what the resources and options are before we make decisions.” We do not want to rush into these things. “Frankly I think it is still a long way off. We should be cautious of suddenly finding ourselves in the minority.”Īqqaluk Lynge, an Inuit leader and former chairman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, is also cautious about independence. “With such a small population we could be overwhelmed by people coming to work here. Much better to stay with the friend you know.”Ī major mineral find could be catastrophic, he said. “As everybody gets more desperate for that commodity you do not want to be a very, very small, very independent country, very far from anywhere else. “We hope it will happen soon.”īut Professor Minik Rosing, of the University of Copenhagen, who was born in Greenland, believes it would be a disaster if his country had a big oil find and used the revenue to buy independence. A referendum in Denmark had shown a majority in favour of granting Greenland home rule.

It was ironic, she says, that climate change had melted the ice sufficiently for prospectors to move in, and that might in turn give the nation its independence. No contract has been signed but the minister hopes this project will provide 3,500 much-needed jobs.

DIAMOND RUSH BORN DESPERATION FREE

The vast lakes and melting ice cap provide enormous potential for electricity free from fossil fuel and the Greenland government is negotiating with Alcoa, an aluminium company, to built the world’s second largest smelter. The United States is strengthening its air base at Thule on the extreme north of the island and the Russians have already planted flags on the sea bed.īut rather than putting her faith in mineral wealth, Mrs Hammond believes that her country’s best prospect of buying its independence lies in hydro-electricity. Greenland is the land mass closest to the North Pole and has rapidly assumed greater strategic importance as its much more powerful and populous neighbours vie for a slice of the Arctic’s supposed mineral wealth. “Then, we could not strike out alone because we were so heavily dependent on Danish money, and we still are, but we can change that by exploiting our natural resources to achieve financial and political independence.”īut some argue that independence has dangers. My mother’s generation fought for Greenland homeland government and achieved it in 1979, leaving only foreign affairs and defence in the hands of Denmark.

We do not feel ourselves part of Europe – we are an Arctic people – but our way of life is changing and we have to change with it. “It is natural for a country to want to be independent. The island has internal self-government but Denmark is responsible for foreign policy.Īleqa Hammond, the foreign minister in Greenland’s home-rule government, hopes that the oil and mineral companies moving in will create sufficient wealth for her country to break from colonial rule.

With its 56,000 population scattered over an area almost the size of Europe, Greenland is heavily dependent on a subsidy from Denmark for survival. The dash for minerals is fuelling another debate in Greenland: whether the country should go for independence from Denmark.

Diamond rush born desperation