Greenland naked threatens the entire world. The self-governing island's loss of ice will raise global seas around 23 feet. Despite that consequence Greenland is presently swallowing the resource extraction industry's relentlessly destructive, corrupt and carbon-increasing development model. It's absurd. Beyond Kafka. Even beyond Trump. The rising seas will submerge heavily populated, affluent sea-coasts of the very countries that should be lining up to give Greenland a break. And the global media could be framing the island – which is three times the size of Texas, with 200 rivers and glaciers calving like corks popped out of icy bottles of bubbly – as the story to watch for decades to come to comprehend climate change. Watch it with fascination, without so much data, science jargon, political dallying and endless conferences, elements that have done in the public’s interest to the point of exhaustion.

There is no reason for Greenland to become an epic ruin rather than an epic of resurrection. Still pristine, its future under wraps, along with physical beauty and natural resources beyond calculation, it is scheduled to be figuratively raped by the mining industry. There are no global statutes outlawing the rape of an immature nation. And with recent political swings and us-first nationalism, the options for an emerging nation are few. I will argue that mindset change is possible, and help as well from wealthy nations, if the story of Greenland is framed better, personalized, and shown in a protracted stream of stories and events that could be the key that the world has lacked to galvanize attention and trigger action.

When Greenland is even partially disrobed, the global community that allowed it to happen will bare the consequences. The consequences will be harsh. Megacities like Mumbai, Shanghai and Boston (there are 136 port megacities in the world) will be accessible by raft and visible from the observation decks of tall buildings, shameful monuments to the era when collective action could have forestalled much of the damage. In 2100 the John Hancock Tower in Boston's Back Bay may still be standing, though Trinity Church next door will have crumbled. Brick structures don’t handle shifting, nor tidal beatings, very well. Maybe your grandchildren's children will visit the skyscraper, reached by tourist boat or kayak or a Tesla levitation craft. That is, if the world isn't wallowing in chaos.

Greenland’s Politics of Optimism

Last June Greenlanders stripped down like pole dancers during an unprecedented warm spell. As early as April climate researchers (an endangered vocational group) thought temperature gauges had busted. About 12 percent of Greenland's magnificent ice sheet seemed to be melting all at once. The temperature in Nuuk, the capital, kissed 75 degrees in June. Kids swam in the ocean; chunks of ice ten feet tall melted on the beach in the sunlight, nature’s performance art. Tourists were around for the endless daylight, taking pictures, selfie-shadow shots at midnight, smiling, elated to be in shorts and t-shirts. Not so happy, native hunters had given up the pursuit of whales and seals because of thin ice. It was too dangerous.

Not to worry, said Tonnes Berthelsen, deputy manager of Greenland's hunters and fisherman's association. Balmy weather was "no disaster." Fish not seen off the local shores for decades were returning, the melting ice revealing evermore possible deposits of zinc, gold, rare earth elements, iron and uranium. A ban against mining radioactive uranium had been repealed back in 2013. An open-pit mine was scheduled on Greenland's south coast, where farmers grew potatoes and greens by the town of Narsaq. All the digging and trucks and a new port to ship the resources might be bothersome to some natives. And the minke whales, harpooned in the open sea offshore, might not return if Kvanefjeld, the name of the mine overlooking Narsaq, the farm lands and the sea, glowed in a nimbus of radioactive dust.

Greenland Minerals and Energy, an Australian outfit, insisted that its mine, which will produce rare earth minerals and uranium ore, would be different. It would fit "the new global green economy." That is, provide raw materials for wind turbines, batteries, lasers – the sin qua non of capitalism in the communication and clean-energy age. "Everybody's looking for them," said the mine's operations manager, referring to the rare earth minerals. "Instead of Greenland being a passive receiver of global warming from the Western world, it could contribute to green technology."

True, no doubt. But Narsaq and its farmers and fishermen would also breathe radioactive nano particles as a side effect rarely mentioned. Tourism would dwindle and the Narsaq region not likely get a World Heritage Site designation, which would boost it’s reputation and help reverse the region’s population decline.

Not to worry, repeated the mine's manager, a Dane named Ib Laursen. “Greenland is occupied by doing this right,” Laursen told the Guardian writer Maurice Walsh. "And I am sympathetic to doing a thorough job. You don't want to rush an industrial revolution."

And the radioactive dust? It would never rise, Laursen said. The tailings of crushed rock from the mining process would be sealed in perpetuity by an impermeable dam.

Fine words: perpetuity, impermeable. Absurd to apply to rare earth minerals and uranium ore extraction from an open-pit mine off the windy tip of Earth’s biggest island. Yet boldly put forth in a time when atmospheric science is attacked, lies labeled truths, and capitalism at the helm of public decision making. Meanwhile, Greenland's leadership sounds desperate and defensive about mining, albeit with inflated hopes of its own that the results will be different here.

Presently, the mining operators are lined up. As Walsh wrote, “there are currently 56 active licenses to explore mining... what the world sees as creeping ruination, local politicians see as an opportunity. The melting ice sheet will make some minerals more accessible and reveal others that are so far unknown.”

The politicians prefer to ignore the history of countries large and small (Greenland's population is around 57,000) who have opted to partner with the extraction industry at a terrible price and an inequitable sharing of the spoils. In their defense the leaders have put in place some safeguards. They include restrictions on foreign labor, much of it expected to be Chinese. And a fund for mining royalties has been established. It copies one used successfully in Norway to share the wealth that destroys the calm, mistakes profit for wisdom, and despoils the bowels of the earth for the good of investors thousands of miles away.

Greenland's shifting political scene, like the melting sea ice, is less than reassuring. Prime Minister Kim Kielsen is a centrist. His party, Siumut, tactically bemoans the end of tradition and opportunistically champions the new options. Some of which, like fishing for species not seen for ages off local shores – mackerel, cod, blue fin tuna, and herring – are really new chances at old vocations ruined by overharvesting in shifting ocean currents warmed by climate change and thus bringing the fish north. Kielsen is unlikely to lead anywhere meaningfully different than the present drift towards handing the keys to the kingdom to fishing fleets and mining royalties, albeit with a Norway-like fund to manage the new dough when it arrives. Which may be a while, given the depressed global market for resources, though not for fish.

Kielsen's predecessor, Aleqa Hammond, who resigned after spending government money for family trips, now sits in one of Greenland's two seats in the Danish parliament. She differs from Kielsen in gender, is a village-born Inuit, and remains popular. But no heroic newcomer has arisen and voiced a platform that would help Greenland lead rather then to kneel, facing backwards, at the totems of the late 20th century: environmental debacles, CO2 emissions unknown for about fifteen million years, inequality, capital to burn for the few and dirt to eat for the many.

Such a leader will need courage, insight and a touch of mythic potency, a phrase the poet Seamus Heaney used to describe Beowulf. Alas, like the rest of the world, Greenland's leaders now may be all too human. And how might a leader survive if she championed a mining-free future and indigenous rule, and acknowledged Greenland's obligation to the world that it recognize the dark link between the plight of, say, the Maldives, and the melting glaciers at the mouths of Greenland’s stupendous array of rivers and fjords?

Whatever Greenland does, it will be epic. A play of swords, as Old Norse poetry might put it. An encounter of spears. A web of women and men engaged in battle. Battle for independence, survival, and leadership as the rarest of phenomena, the birth of the newest place on Earth, gradually lifts before all of our eyes. And in doing so can provide a frame for sanity or one of the continued degradation of the future.

Either way the world should be watching. Climate change has Greenland in its grip like no other nation. And the relationship between the planet as a whole, and a single country, is unique in the annals of civilization’s history.

Greenland is Earth’s story. And it’s mythic.

The next column will be about the impacts of Greenland Naked on some locations around the globe.