In the modern saga unspooling in Greenland, there is little invention, only repetition. A long-ignored people has taken power. They’ve been courted and bought. Global mining giants have gotten themselves licenses and leases with long-execution time frames. These will undoubtedly ramp up in the foreseeable future. Then there will be deepwater docking stations in pristine fjords, roads, and possibly train networks to move minerals, thousands of foreign workers laboring in the deep and the dust. And, of course, royalty payouts to investors and to the Greenland natives who now number around 57,000 – only a small percentage of whom, roughly 7 percent, voted in 2013 for the Inuit Party. Perhaps that's because the party favors ending all foreign influences, including mining firms and Denmark, which has ruled Greenland in varying degrees for over 250 years and still provides it a healthy subsidy of around $500 million annually.

Will Greenland become an epic ruin of our dwindling natural world? Still pristine, under wraps of ice and snow, the region’s emerging physical beauty is stunning and its hidden mineral bounty is, as a 2013 Economist story put it, “tantalizingly within reach.” It is the mineral bounty — coal, iron ore, uranium — mixed with rare-earth minerals, along with diamonds, gold, and precious sapphires that will undo the nation’s beauty. The history of modern mining is a dark saga of danger, dirt, ruined landscapes, polluted aquifers and ripples of damage still felt long after the mines have closed and left town or country.

As Greenland melts, making its minerals more accessible, ice-penetrating radar is revealing a topography that includes a Grand Canyon, large lakes, inland rivers — a world of the new in a place three times the size of Texas. Today what the public sees most about Greenland are stories of glaciers calving at the mouths of 200 rivers, like corks popped out of icy bottles, and melt-measuring expeditions on the top of the melting ice. Climate deniers refuse to admit that anything new is happening here, as Earth’s seas continue to rise and grow warmer. A complete meltdown of the icecap would result in a global sea rise of about 22 feet — and if that happens, Greenland will be a towering new nation in a transformed world that many countries still do not care to contemplate, never mind begin to prepare for.

Will anything be done to forestall Greenland’s demise as a mythical possibility of a sustainable future? To date, and especially since the elections of 2013, the prospects of great plunder across the region have become more visible.

Back in 2013, a centrist party, Siumut, came to power in a narrow victory. It put a native, village-born Inuit named Aleqa Hammond in the prime minister’s slot. It also put the world’s mining industry on high alert: Greenland was open for business. Of the mining firms that came knocking, six were given access for exploration, ranging from the frigid north to the relatively warm south, where the majority of Greenlanders live and where farming and fishing have long histories. Two of the six companies were London Mining, with its slurry of lawyers, and North American Nickel, with its nose in the ground for rare metals, gold and nickel.

For an emerging nation – even one tethered legally and financially to another long-established one (Denmark) – there is no protection from the harpies of extraction. No underage nation statute is keeping the place off limits. No enforcement by a global community committed to halting a travesty at its conception. In truth, what our world has in place is just the opposite: an open-ticket to plunder at will. Just bring money and a plan with promises. Act forcefully. Ravish and depart. Such operations, which mining firms embody with a long history to prove it – and with all the lawyers money can buy, so they can keep on proving it – are staking down Greenland like the Lilliputians staked down Gulliver. Without help, a young nation like Greenland is seduced and exploited.

One can only mutter: Shouldn’t companies trailing tales of ruin and in need of slews of lawyers be served summons, rather than served dinner with champagne and given the keys to the kingdom – given licenses, maps and contracts to a treasure like Greenland, whose protective icy coat is sinking into the sea and whose global impact will only intensify and grow?

Since 2013, as the mining firms staked out their claims and began prospecting, digging and pitching investors with projections of big profits, the chapter read like something straight out of the mining industry playbook. There were meetings and negotiations but little transparency. Nor much local Inuit input. NGOs trying to get involved with the formalities of decision-making had varying degrees of success. The great distances in Greenland and absence of roads made attending meetings in the four major towns, and many small settlements, a challenge. You flew by fixed-wing plane, helicopter or went by sea. A Greenland department of conservation was established, but ineffective as a control. As for the big six firms themselves, “We have to drag every single paper out of them,” said Rune Langhoff, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund in Denmark.

To give the mining firms some praise, there were no big scandals. Except one. Aleqa Hammond, a year in office, resigned because of mishandling of expense money as prime minister. Shortly after that, the global markets in most of the minerals that Greenland has in its interior took a dive. The mining firms pulled back. And the idea of quick independence for Greenland based on a flood of royalties from mines faded.

One of the firms, London Mining, went bankrupt. Not from its open-pit iron-ore mine plan in western Greenland, but from Ebola decimating a company mine in Sierra Leone. The global giant’s assets, in a telling move, were bought by General Nice, a Chinese outfit with even less transparency, more shadowy ownership, and no known experience in mining. General Nice, a name you could not make up except maybe for a James Bond script, bought London Mining’s rights on the cheap. Now its bosses quietly await an uptick in global energy and mineral needs.

As 2015 closes out, Greenland is melting and the harpies are resting.

Greenland deserves better. The largest island in the world has mythic potency, to borrow a phrase that the Irish poet Seamus Heaney used to describe the epic poem Beowulf. But it lacks mythic leadership. Like the rest of the world, Greenland’s leaders are all too human. Not that Aleqa Hammond lost her popularity by skimming money off the top. Once she resigned, Greenlanders voted her into the Danish Parliament as one of the nation’s elected representatives. But Hammond’s integrity has been tarnished. And if Greenland’s role in Earth’s future intends to be epic, which it by all rights could and should be, it is unlikely that Hammond will be at the helm. Yet no other leader with the fortitude and vision to steer the young nation on a fresh tack has emerged.

As things stand, with global sales of minerals low and independence for Greenland unlikely, the country finds itself in a precarious position. The harpies have landed. Greenland is caught in the sights of private-equity firms often headquartered on offshore islands, high above the rising waters that Greenland’s meltdown insures will keep rising. The private-equity firms seem mostly indifferent to the carbon consequences of their profiteering, yet the carbon belches from their work will be gargantuan. Scouts for mining firms with ambitions in Greenland can be regularly seen in Nuuk, the nation’s capital, and in the Isukasia area of Western Greenland where General Nice has taken over London Mining’s claims.

They are also in the shadows of Kuannersuit, a mountain on the southern tip of Greenland said to contain the second largest rare-earth mineral deposits on the planet, together with uranium, which makes mining there especially dangerous because of radioactive dust ruining the region’s farming and fishing. Blowing off Kuannersuit’s slopes, the dust will contaminate soil and sea, making for an unhealthy harvest and catch. It won’t be good for tourism either, and the region is now a prospect to become a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Might the global slowdown, which has stalled Greenland’s fast track plans, reshape the nation’s saga, providing some time for reflection and change? Or will it end with more foreign hustlers joining the next round of Klondike fever? Will the center-right government now in power in Denmark, which has reduced assistance help to refugees, also cut Greenland’s ongoing subsidies putting greater pressure on the nation to handle its own financial affairs? Can myth, the backbone of the world’s polar-region history, be a factor in the future there? All important questions, with answers beyond the scope of this brief report. But as for the last one, myth, why not? If General Nice can join the dark side, can’t an Inuit or Viking immortal rise to counter the demons and throw off the Danes once and for all?

It was just over a thousand years ago, in 982, that Eric the Red, born in Jæren in Norway and outlawed from Iceland for committing murder, sailed to Greenland and became the first European inhabitant. The pagan chief built a settlement called Brattahlid, or the steep slope, which survived for about 500 years. We know this from a mix of sources: Norse sagas, archeological digs, ice-core samples, geology and multiple cross-disciplinary research – like that which used to plot the history, and project the future, of climate change. Collective forces, which included the Little Ice Age and the sprawl of 16th century Christianity, drove the last Norse colonizers away, leaving Greenland to the Inuit until the Danes colonized the place in the early 1700s. The Inuit only got Home Rule from the Danes in 1979. Self rule came 30 years later, in 2009. With it came control over minerals which triggered the invasion of the harpies. If this isn’t a global epic awaiting leadership of mythical might to cheer for, pinch me, please.

With the future knocking, its icecap melting and its mineral wealth waiting in undetermined quantities, Greenland’s potential is epic. Will the climate change negotiators in Paris give any nods, any time, any dispensations to Greenland? Stay tuned. We’ll see what we find out in the City of Light, now a beacon of both fear and of hope. Long live Beowulf!