Motzfeldt knows that breaking this pattern is critical to Narsaq’s future and to Greenland’s. But she passionately opposes the government’s proposed solution: an open-pit mine for rare-earth minerals and uranium near town financed by a pair of Australian and Chinese mining companies. She fears that the mine will poison South Greenland’s pristine environment with radioactive waste and open the tiny nation of 56,000 to foreign meddling. “We need money, but we can’t sacrifice the land for money,” she said.

While the world focuses on the potentially disastrous effects of Greenland’s melting ice cap, Greenlanders themselves are struggling to solve a very different problem: how to tap their wealth of natural resources without inviting the environmental and political problems that have devastated other developing nations.

With a territory larger than Mexico and a population that could fit inside a football stadium, Greenland badly needs new sources of income to provide jobs and combat chronic social ills. Its economy leans heavily on one major export — shrimp — and is propped up by an annual block grant of more than $500 million from Denmark.The question is what to do about it. Many in Greenland, including Prime Minister Kim Kielsen, view resource development as the nation’s best chance for self-sufficiency. The issue is tightly intertwined with Greenland’s fervent movement to win independence from Denmark, which began colonizing the sprawling territory almost 300 years ago. Greenland negotiated the right to self-rule in 1979 and has since built the institutions of a modern democratic society.