Departmental News

Posted:  Oct 17, 2018 - 12:00am

Dr. Les Field, Professor and Chair, has been awarded an EAGER (Early Concept Grant for Exploratory Research) from the National Science Foundation, to begin a project entitled “Accelerating Anthropogenic Climate Change and Contemporary Agriculture in Southern Greenland.” The project will start in Sept. 2019 and will fund two exploratory trips to Greenland. On the basis of these exploratory research trips, Field will write another NSF proposal to conduct extended fieldwork and research.  This project would look at environmental change in Southern Greenland through sociocultural lenses, in collaboration and conjunction with scholars from Greenland using the tools of sociocultural anthropology.  

Sporadic journalistic accounts that report environmental change in Greenland have hinted at expanding possibilities for Greenlandic agriculture. However, environmental change in the Arctic, including in Greenland, Canada, and Alaska is not straightforward in the sense of simply creating opportunities that enables the production of more food and other crops for the Greenlandic population, much less for export.   

If the changing environment may make it possible to expand some kinds of agricultural production, agricultural history in Greenland goes back over 1,000 years and understanding contemporary agricultural changes must be contextualized by a deeper historical inquiry. 

Because environmental change is an important issue, what is going on in Greenland offers compelling windows into present-day and historical processes of change.  Read the full UNM News article here