I went for the ice and was forever changed: Reflections from South Georgia, November 2026

An unexpected journey from investment banking and oil to Greenland, Indigenous knowledge, and a different understanding of what matters

An unlikely beginning

I spent much of my professional life in industries that are exceptionally good at identifying value, developing it, and turning it into money.

Investment banking and oil.

Before Greenland became the focus of my life, I worked in finance and spent about a decade in the energy industry, including at major refineries in Texas and an LNG facility in Brunei.

I understood capital markets, corporate incentives, industrial operations, and the enormous infrastructure required to extract, process, and distribute natural resources.

What I didn't know was that this career would eventually give me the financial freedom to encounter a society that would challenge much of what I understood about value in the first place.

It began with ice.

I was fascinated by icebergs, climate change, and the extraordinary landscapes of Greenland. As a photographer, I wanted to experience these places firsthand and capture something of their beauty.

I wanted to see the northern lights, experience Greenland in winter, explore more communities, encounter polar bears, and travel as far north as possible.

I had no institutional affiliation, research agenda, or particular question I was trying to answer.

I was simply curious.

And I was fortunate enough to have the resources to follow that curiosity wherever it took me.

Greenland without an agenda

Most of my meaningful experiences in Greenland have been independently financed. Apart from professional engagements and expedition voyages, I have travelled on my own terms, without an organization determining where I should go, what I should investigate, or what conclusions I should reach.

That freedom has been enormously important to the development of my work.

I could spend time in a community without needing to justify my presence through a research proposal. I could follow an unexpected conversation, accept an invitation, change my plans, or simply spend time observing daily life.

I wasn't there to validate a thesis.

I was discovering the questions as I went.

Over the years, my interest in Greenland expanded far beyond its ice and landscapes.

I wanted to understand the people who lived there. I wanted to experience the extraordinary diversity of Greenland's communities, learn about their traditions, and understand the knowledge that had enabled generations of Inuit to live in some of the most challenging environments on Earth.

The more I learned, the more I realized how much I didn't know.

And every visit gave me another reason to return.

I do things backwards

My approach to learning is somewhat unconventional.

I often experience something before I understand what it means.

I might witness a particular activity, hear a conversation, participate in a hunt, or observe a way of doing something that initially confuses me.

I photograph it. I remember it. Sometimes I ask questions. But I don't necessarily understand its wider significance at the time.

Then I return home and begin reading.

Historical accounts, academic literature, oral histories, scientific studies, archival documents, contemporary reporting, and the words of Inuit experts themselves.

Sometimes a passage in a book suddenly explains something I witnessed months or years earlier.

Other times, my firsthand experience causes me to question an interpretation I encounter in the literature.

I return to Greenland with a deeper understanding, ask better questions, and encounter new things that I don't yet understand.

The process begins again.

Experience. Curiosity. Research. Reflection. Return.

Over time, I have developed two kinds of infrastructure.

The first is intellectual: a growing understanding of Greenland's history, environment, economy, politics, knowledge systems, and contemporary challenges.

The second is relational: friendships, trust, conversations, shared experiences, and relationships with people whose expertise I have come to appreciate.

Neither was originally developed for a particular project.

Both would eventually become extraordinarily valuable.

The people who became my teachers

In Greenland, I am a student.

I have been privileged to learn directly from Kalaallit, Tunumiit, and Inughuit elders, hunters, families, and other experts whose knowledge is grounded in experience, observation, and generations of intellectual inheritance.

I have come to recognize that much of the expertise necessary to live in the Arctic is extraordinarily sophisticated.

Understanding sea ice, weather, animal behavior, navigation, hunting, skin preparation, clothing, dog-team management, food preservation, and the relationships among these activities requires years of learning and practice.

These are not isolated competencies. They belong to an interconnected knowledge system.

An experienced hunter may understand the behavior of marine mammals, the movement of currents, the formation of ice, and the implications of a subtle change in the wind.

An expert in traditional clothing understands animal skins, their physical properties, preparation techniques, insulation, waterproofing, and the environmental conditions in which the finished garment must function.

The knowledge of one person supports the work and survival of others.

And much of this expertise developed without the institutions that Western societies tend to associate with advanced knowledge.

There were specialists, elders, teachers, apprentices, and people whose extraordinary abilities were recognized within their communities. But learning was deeply embedded in everyday life, relationships, and practical experience.

This distinction became increasingly important to me.

A person does not need an academic credential to possess profound intellectual authority.

And a person with an academic credential does not necessarily understand a particular environment better than someone who has spent a lifetime living and working within it.

As a Black American, I am also particularly sensitive to the ways people's knowledge, experiences, and humanity can be diminished by institutions that claim the authority to define them.

I understand something about what it feels like to experience second-class personhood in your own country.

My experience is not the same as that of Indigenous Greenlanders. But it has made me attentive to whose voices are heard, whose expertise is recognized, and whose perspectives are absent when outsiders discuss Greenland.

I increasingly found myself asking a fundamental question:

Who gets to be considered an expert, and who gets to decide?

When Greenland changed my understanding of the world

At some point, my interest in Greenland became something much more consequential than an interest in a country.

I began to question the assumptions underpinning the society in which I had grown up.

I experienced what I can only describe as an ontological rupture.

For much of my life, I had understood the system around me as simply the way the world worked.

People worked for money. Land was owned. Resources had economic value. Progress was associated with growth and development. Knowledge was validated by institutions. Time was organized around productivity.

These things seemed natural and inevitable.

But through my experiences in Greenland and my subsequent research, I began to understand that many of them were not inevitable features of human existence.

They were features of particular societies.

One small example illustrates the magnitude of this realization.

While reading Dorothy Harley Eber's When the Whalers Were Up North, a collection of Inuit oral histories concerning commercial whaling in the Eastern Canadian Arctic, I encountered accounts of the introduction of the European seven-day week.

People had sophisticated ways of understanding time through seasons, environmental conditions, animal movements, and other natural cycles.

They did not necessarily need to organize their lives around the same seven-day calendar that structured the activities of commercial whalers and missionaries.

In some communities, particular days acquired meaning through introduced routines of payment, trade, or religious observance.

Something as seemingly fundamental as the week suddenly became visible to me as a cultural convention.

This is how my thinking develops.

A seemingly small historical detail connects with something I have observed firsthand. That connection raises a much larger question. And suddenly I find myself reconsidering something I had accepted without question for decades.

I thought I was learning about Greenland.

What I didn't realize was that Greenland was teaching me to question the society that had formed me.

A different understanding of value

The Inuit knowledge systems I have encountered have challenged many of my assumptions about sustainability, economics, progress, and humanity's relationship with the natural world.

I am particularly interested in relationships, reciprocity, interdependence, and the idea of sufficiency.

The understanding that having enough can be a meaningful objective.

That humans exist within nature rather than outside or above it.

That knowledge has value even when it cannot be monetized.

That a person's contribution to a community cannot necessarily be measured through income.

That wealth can exist in relationships, competence, experience, and the ability to support others.

These are not ideas exclusive to Inuit, and Greenlanders do not all share a single worldview. Nor do I wish to romanticize traditional life or suggest that it was free from hardship, conflict, or inequality.

But the principles I have encountered offer a compelling alternative to some of the assumptions I inherited.

What I had been taught to valueWhat Greenland made me reconsiderEconomic growth and accumulationCollective well-being and sufficiencyLand and wildlife as resourcesHomeland, relationships, and responsibilityKnowledge as transferable informationKnowledge as lived experience and competenceExpertise validated through institutionsExpertise demonstrated through practice and experienceTime organized around productionTime understood through environmental conditions and opportunityConservation as protecting nature from humansConservation as sustaining relationships among humans, animals, and the environment

The distinction is not that one society has all the answers and another has none.

It is that different societies can begin with fundamentally different assumptions about what matters.

And those assumptions have consequences.

Once I began recognizing them, I could no longer see the world in quite the same way.

What is at risk of being lost?

As my understanding of Greenland deepened, I became increasingly concerned about the future of the knowledge I had encountered.

Some of the people possessing the deepest expertise are getting older.

The Greenland sled dog population has declined.

The activities through which much traditional knowledge was acquired and transmitted are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain alongside contemporary economic, educational, and social structures.

The Greenland sled dog is a particularly powerful example.

To someone unfamiliar with Greenland, the declining dog population might appear primarily to be an animal conservation issue.

But the dog is part of an interconnected system of knowledge and relationships.

A dog team involves expertise in animal behavior, breeding, feeding, training, hunting, navigation, weather, ice, equipment construction, and the management of relationships between humans and animals.

It also involves the economic and practical conditions that allow someone to maintain a team and spend time travelling with it.

The knowledge is not simply about the dogs.

It is about the entire system within which the dogs, the people, and the environment interact.

If the practice disappears, what happens to the knowledge associated with it?

What happens when the people who know how to do these things are no longer able to teach another generation?

And what happens when younger generations are interested in learning, but the conditions necessary for learning no longer exist?

These are questions that increasingly occupy my thinking.

Intellectual biodiversity

We understand why biodiversity matters.

We recognize that the disappearance of a species represents a loss that cannot necessarily be reversed. We devote substantial resources to protecting species, habitats, and the ecological relationships that sustain them.

But I am increasingly interested in a related concept: intellectual biodiversity.

What happens when an entire way of understanding the world disappears?

Human societies have developed extraordinary bodies of knowledge through their relationships with particular environments, animals, plants, landscapes, and one another.

These different knowledge systems represent generations of observation, experimentation, innovation, adaptation, and intellectual achievement.

They also offer different ways of interpreting the world and responding to its challenges.

Their value is not limited to what outsiders might find useful.

Indigenous peoples possess intellectual agency: the authority to develop, interpret, transmit, and determine how their own knowledge is used.

This distinction matters because the preservation of Indigenous knowledge can itself become a form of extraction.

An outside researcher may document an activity, publish a scientific paper, receive professional recognition, and make the resulting information available to an international audience.

But the community from which the knowledge originated may receive little benefit or retain little control over how it is interpreted and used.

The knowledge can become separated from the cultural context, practices, relationships, and obligations that give it meaning.

This is one form of what scholars describe as epistemic injustice: unfairness toward people in their capacity as producers and authorities of knowledge.

I am interested in something more than preserving information about Greenlandic traditions.

I am interested in the conditions that allow Greenlanders to continue developing, practicing, transmitting, and exercising authority over their knowledge.

The objective should not simply be to document a knowledge system before it disappears. It should be to consider how that knowledge system can remain alive.

What AI cannot do for us

Artificial intelligence has extraordinary capabilities.

I use it extensively in my own work to help process information, translate languages, analyze documents, identify connections, and communicate across linguistic boundaries.

But AI also makes the distinction between information and embodied knowledge increasingly important.

We can record an elder explaining how to prepare a particular animal skin.

We can photograph the process, film it, transcribe the instructions, translate them, and make them available through a searchable database.

But have we preserved the expertise?

Can someone who reads the instructions recognize exactly how the skin should feel at each stage? Can they identify the subtle differences that determine whether the finished garment will function properly?

An experienced hunter can explain how to recognize dangerous ice.

But reading that explanation is not the same as recognizing the danger while travelling across the ice yourself.

A dog driver can describe how to manage a team.

But that description is not equivalent to the judgment developed through years of working with living animals in changing environmental conditions.

AI can assist in documenting knowledge.

It cannot independently recover knowledge that was never recorded.

And it cannot substitute for the relationships, practical experiences, and environmental conditions through which much of that knowledge is developed.

We can digitize information.

We cannot digitize an entire way of knowing and assume we have saved it.

2026: When everything came together

Until this year, much of my work in Greenland developed through curiosity, independent research, photography, communication, and relationships.

I had accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge without knowing exactly how I would eventually use it.

Then something happened that brought together almost every part of my professional and personal life.

International interest in Greenland's natural resources intensified, including interest in oil exploration in Jameson Land, East Greenland.

The nearby community of Ittoqqortoormiit was already a place of personal significance to me.

I knew the community. I had relationships with people there. I understood something of the geography, the isolation, the logistical challenges, and the importance of hunting and the surrounding environment to local life.

And suddenly, the oil industry that had financed my original interest in Greenland became central to a challenge facing a place I had come to know and care about.

I realized that I possessed an unusual combination of knowledge.

My investment banking background helped me understand corporate structures, capital markets, financing arrangements, shareholder interests, and the incentives behind resource development.

My experience in the oil industry helped me understand what industrial development actually entails: infrastructure, logistics, personnel, equipment, fuel, transportation, operational risk, and the practical realities that can be difficult to appreciate from a corporate presentation.

My independent research gave me the historical, environmental, economic, and political context.

My relationships with people in Greenland gave me something equally important: an understanding of the human dimension of the issue.

And my experience as a communicator gave me the ability to bring these different elements together.

I began investigating corporate and financial structures, examining regulatory documents and industrial plans, tracing the history of the projects, and communicating what I was learning.

I also began connecting people.

Journalists, NGOs, specialists, Greenlanders, and others across different countries possessed different pieces of the knowledge required to understand the situation.

A financial analyst might understand the transaction but not the consequences of industrial activity in a remote Arctic environment.

An environmental specialist might understand the ecological vulnerability but not the corporate financing.

A journalist might recognize the significance of the story but need assistance interpreting technical documents or identifying relevant sources.

A local resident might understand the realities of the region better than any of them, while having limited access to the corporate information and international networks necessary to contextualize what was happening.

I could see how these different perspectives related to one another.

And I could help bring the people who possessed them into conversation.

My work became an effort to help the wider world understand what was happening in Greenland, increase scrutiny of proposed developments, and support Greenlanders' ability to navigate these challenges on their own terms.

I am not opposed to Greenlanders determining that resource development is part of their future.

But I believe decisions of such magnitude deserve rigorous scrutiny, transparent information, and a meaningful understanding of the interests, risks, benefits, and consequences involved.

Who benefits?

Who bears the risks?

Who has access to the information?

Whose knowledge is recognized?

And who ultimately gets to decide?

These questions are especially important when considerable outside financial and geopolitical interests converge on a vulnerable region.

For me, the experience of 2026 demonstrated something extraordinary.

All those years of following my curiosity had prepared me to contribute something useful when it really mattered.

South Georgia: What becomes possible when people work together

I am writing this from South Georgia, where I have had the privilege of travelling with people associated with the South Georgia Heritage Trust and Friends of South Georgia Island.

South Georgia offers an extraordinary example of what people can accomplish when they commit their resources, expertise, and determination to a common objective.

Its history contains some of the most devastating examples of industrial exploitation of marine mammals.

And its more recent history demonstrates what deliberate conservation action can achieve.

The restoration of ecosystems, the eradication of introduced rodents, and the recovery of wildlife populations did not occur simply because people cared about South Georgia.

They required knowledge, funding, coordination, leadership, technical expertise, and sustained commitment.

They required people to come together.

That achievement is particularly meaningful to me because of what I have been experiencing and thinking about in Greenland.

There is, however, a fundamental distinction between the two places.

South Georgia had no Indigenous resident population.

Its industrial whaling operations were fundamentally different from the subsistence hunting practices of Inuit communities in the Arctic.

The industrial enterprise extracted marine mammals on an enormous scale for distant markets.

Inuit hunting is embedded in food systems, relationships, community life, knowledge transmission, and the practical requirements of living in the Arctic.

In South Georgia, ecological restoration could focus substantially on reversing the consequences of industrial extraction and introduced species.

In Greenland, conservation cannot be separated so easily from the people whose lives and knowledge are embedded within the environment.

Protecting Inuit knowledge while eliminating the activities through which it is developed and transmitted would be a contradiction.

Protecting animals without considering the relationships between those animals and Indigenous communities can create additional challenges.

The lesson I take from South Georgia is not that Greenland needs an identical conservation model.

It is that extraordinary things become possible when people with different resources and capabilities unite around something they consider important.

I experienced a version of that collective capacity in my own work this year.

And being here has made me think much more deeply about what else might be possible.

The next chapter is unwritten

People often ask me what I do.

The simplest answer is that I am an independent Greenland researcher, photographer, speaker, and communicator.

But that description doesn't fully capture the nature of my work.

I connect people, knowledge, and perspectives.

I spend time in Greenland learning directly from people whose expertise has challenged my own understanding of the world.

I study, contextualize, and communicate what I learn.

I connect subjects that are often examined separately and help audiences recognize relationships they may not previously have considered.

Sometimes that means challenging the assumptions of subject-matter experts.

Sometimes it means helping journalists or organizations understand a complicated development.

Sometimes it means introducing people to Greenlanders whose perspectives can fundamentally change their understanding of a subject.

And sometimes it means recognizing that people in very different parts of the world have knowledge, resources, and capabilities that could be extraordinarily valuable if they were brought together.

I do not yet know precisely what the next chapter of my work in Greenland will look like.

There are projects and ideas I am interested in developing, including Arctic Reconnection and work concerning the coexistence of polar bears and people.

There are also much larger questions I want to continue exploring, particularly around the future of Indigenous knowledge, the conditions that allow it to be transmitted, and the relationship between tradition and modernity.

I do not have a predetermined institutional structure or a fully developed charitable program.

And I am comfortable with that.

My most meaningful work has emerged precisely because I allowed myself to explore without knowing exactly where the exploration would lead.

What I have developed is a substantial foundation of knowledge, relationships, experience, and the ability to bring people and ideas together.

What I would like to do now is invite other curious, capable people into that process.

People who understand the significance of what might be lost.

People who want to learn from Greenlanders.

People who recognize that humanity benefits from the continued existence of different ways of understanding the world.

People who are interested in discovering what we might accomplish together.

I spent years exploring Greenland without knowing where it would lead.

I went because I was fascinated by ice.

I kept returning because I became fascinated by people, by their knowledge, and by a way of understanding the world that challenged much of what I thought I knew.

This year, I discovered what can happen when all that accumulated knowledge and experience comes together around a real problem.

And now, in South Georgia, I find myself surrounded by people who have demonstrated what can happen when knowledge, resources, and collective determination are directed toward something that matters.

I don't know exactly where the next chapter will lead.

But I would love to find out what we can accomplish together.