Greenland???

Madness in the North Atlantic

As I settled into my middle seat recently, preparing for a nonstop haul from San Francisco to Frankfurt, Germany, the flight attendants issued their warning—the plane was fully booked. A few hours earlier, I had checked the seat map and saw the seat to my left was still empty. Could I be so lucky?

Alas, not even close. A large man loomed in the aisle and made his way beside me. I later learned he was a former professional basketball player from Bosnia—six-foot-six, broad-shouldered, and very kind. He now works in tech investing and lives in Sweden with his wife and young son. He had spent a lot of time in the States.

He, and the polite, diminutive German man to my right, were both baffled by the state of affairs in the nation they were departing. The latest headline at the time was about shutting down the Department of Education. Remember that? It already feels like a distant memory, sinking beneath new waves of outrage. But it was only a little over a week ago.

I had no words; it’s getting harder and harder to find them. 

I shared my faint hope that millions of Americans were steeling themselves for the fight. I do believe there will be a reckoning. But my Bosnian seatmate, who had fled his home country as a child during its civil war, was less convinced. His verdict— a troubled global future with Europe forced to contend with a rogue United States hung in the air. I couldn’t refute it. 

We soon moved to our shared love of documentary films and spent most of the flight in friendly conversation, though I never had quite enough room for my shoulder to fully rest against my seat back. I landed in Germany strained—physically and mentally.

Frankfurt was only a transfer point for my final destination of Copenhagen, Denmark. Our flight had been delayed and I had to rush from deplaning on the tarmac to a bus to get us to the next gate. We stopped along the way to go through passport control. As I pulled that iconic blue booklet out of my pocket, it hit me. My passport now felt very different than it did the last time I travelled out of the country just a few months ago.

As I handed it to the agent behind the plastic window I felt a pang of shame, and wondered what he was thinking. 

I was traveling to Denmark in a spirit of anxious celebration—Observer, a film we have been working on at the Science Communication Lab for years, was premiering at a lovely documentary festival that has a special category for science. Directed by my longtime friend and colleague, the wonderful Ian Cheney, the film is a poetic exploration of observation as an essential element of both science and human endeavor. 

I’ll share much more about the film in future posts, but in short, Observer unfolds in a series of distinct chapters, each following different people, “observers,” from around the globe as they travel to new places to explore how they experience the world. Some are formal scientists, others are citizen scientists, and still others—an artist, a poet, a hunter—bring their own different ways of seeing.

In a bout of coincidence, one of the first segments Ian filmed took the poet, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, from her home in Mississippi to Greenland. At the time, the massive island seemed very distant and a place few Americans thought much about. But by the time we were watching the final film in Denmark, which counts Greenland as a self-governing territory, all that had changed to a degree that leaves me stunned. 

Being in and around Copenhagen was wonderful. The city is charming—pedestrian- and bike-friendly, and full of history. The people are kind and curious. It felt great to celebrate science and film with longtime friends. Not to mention the food and drink are very tasty.

But throughout it all, I felt an undertow of anxiety, anger, and disbelief. I knew that back home, science is under attack. As for Denmark, it is in the crosshairs, perhaps quite literally, of the Trump regime. In recent days, these threats have only increased, as JD Vance, his wife, and others close to the president have gone to Greenland to echo Trump’s bellicosity and insanity about somehow annexing it and not letting Denmark, a founding member of NATO and for decades a close American ally, get in the way.

To even try to type these thoughts into sentences seems nuts. What are these people thinking? Why are they threatening a place that is often on the top of the list of happy countries, a place that has given the world, among other things, Legos, wonderful pastries, and the writings of Hans Christian Andersen? As for Greenland, it is home to proud people who, by every poll taken, don’t want anything to do with the United States coming in and taking them over. I mean, who would?

The United States has a long history of poor behavior on the world stage. We have waged unjust wars and toppled democratically elected governments. We have overlooked human rights in favor of our narrow strategic interests. We have polluted and exploited the land and air, at home and around the globe. But this is something different. 

We are actively laying waste to our reputation as a force for global stability. We are blowing up entities like USAID, now completely destroyed, that saved countless lives and promoted us as helpful actors for those in need. We forged strong alliances with fellow democracies who knew they could depend on us. 

All that is gone, though we don’t know what lies ahead. What we do know is that any world in which the United States is talking about taking Greenland is a world that is completely unmoored from any semblance of sanity.

But being in Denmark, I could also see that we could—and must— have a better, happier future. It was a welcome reminder that there are other ways to live and organize society besides the dystopian hellscape this regime is inflicting. For too long, autocratic forces have taken root in the United States without a suitable response.

Our friends overseas understand that America can choose a different path. They are not giving up on us yet, and neither can we.

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