Upon arriving in Kulusuk, I had no idea that reaching Tasiilaq required a helicopter transfer from the small airport. Kulusuk is not a place where one lingers casually; there is little infrastructure for visitors, and I quickly found myself stranded and uncertain of what to do next. Fortunately, an Inuit high school student wearing a New York Yankees cap came to my aid.

Together, we made the journey across the fjord by small boat. For more than an hour, we navigated driving rain, rough seas, and passing whales. I sat alongside his grandmother while the young man skillfully piloted the vessel. His pregnant girlfriend, clad in improvised rain gear fashioned from trash bags, rode with us through the storm.

From Tasiilaq, I embarked on a series of excursions aboard similarly modest boats. I witnessed glaciers calving into the sea and observed firsthand what I had assumed would be the visible consequences of global warming and consumer consumption. During one outing, my Inuit guide asked whether I had come to the region because my grandfather had been a soldier. Confused by the question, I told him I had no such connection.

On our return journey, he explained. We traveled to the remnants of Bluie East Two, a former American military airfield established during World War II along the Sermiligaaq Fjord. Scattered across the landscape were approximately 10,000 abandoned fuel barrels and a vast assortment of discarded military equipment left behind by U.S. forces in 1947. The site stood for decades as a symbol of environmental neglect, its cleanup entangled in disputes among the United States, Denmark, and Greenland until remediation efforts finally began in 2017. The area remains contaminated by asbestos and lead, and local accounts suggest that hundreds of pounds of undetonated dynamite may still be buried beneath the soil.

What I expected to find in Greenland was evidence of climate change. What I encountered instead was a more complicated story—one in which environmental degradation was not only the result of contemporary consumer culture, but also the enduring legacy of geopolitical ambition and military occupation.