Losing Nature to the Green Deal: the Sami Case
Losing Nature to the Green Deal: the Sami Case
In the wake of a new trend of climate goals and green transition, the indigenous Sámi are about to pay the price with the destruction of their land and culture.
For some years now, I have had a friend who lives so far in the north of Finland that as his home lies by the side of a river, his side is Finland and the opposite is Norway. However, these designations have little meaning for him. As a Sámi, as far as he is concerned, he is living in the land of Sápmi.
The Sámi are an indigenous people living inside the Arctic circle. Although there are only about 80,000 Sámis in total, their ancestral land comprises large parts of what is today’s northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, as well as bits of northwest Russia. Throughout the centuries, they have most prominenly maintained themselves by semi-nomadic reindeer herding.
Gállok: the Rise of Resistance
Although Scandinavian societies are generally hailed for their liberalism, being green and standing up for the minorities, the Sámi have repeatedly seen their traditional land and ways of life threatened, not least in recent years. These conflicts mostly involve private or government interest in using their land for commercial use, in relative disregard for the appeals of the indigenous Sámis. Perhaps the most graphic of these conflicts is the case of Gállok (or Kallak in Swedish spelling) in northern Sweden. Situated between the villages of Randijaur and Björkholmen in the Jokkmokk municipality, Gállok has been a traditional reindeer grazing ground for the Sámis. In the past 12 years though, the Swedish government has tried to claim the land for iron ore, finally awarding a concession for open-pit mining to Britain’s Beowulf Mining in March 2022.
The plan was vehemently opposed to not only by the Sámi Parliament, but by WWF, UNESCO and the UN as well, the special rapporteurs of the latter, José Francisco Cali Tzay and David R. Boyd, noting back in February 2022, “We are very concerned by the lack of good-faith consultations and the failure to obtain the free, prior and informed consent of the Sámi, and over the significant and irreversible risks that the Gállok project poses to Sámi lands, resources, culture and livelihoods.” More than a year prior, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination had already concluded in the case that Swedish law discriminated against the Sámi, failing to enable their free and informed consent.
Beside the environmental damage, as the project includes potential risks to water resources and the last remaining centuries-old, uncultivated forest in the area, the decision puts an end to the Sámi reindeer herding in the area where it has been going on for as long as anyone can remember. The petition of more than 80,000 signatories, addressed to the Swedish government to stop the project, additionally notes, “Iron ore itself is not a rare nor critical metal and is not required for us to fulfil the ‘green transition’.” According to the WWF as well, the plan presented “permanent damage to both physical and cultural landscape with projected 14 years of extraction”. The same was confirmed by researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute who, examining three existing mining sites in northern Sweden, concluded that the predicted impacts were “grossly underestimated” and would continue long after the closure of the mines. Irreversible damage to the natural area is to be expected in Gállok, concurred The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation.
Nine out of 12 mines in Sweden’s north are already located on Sámi land, including the largest iron-ore mine in the world in Kiruna, and one of the EU’s largest copper mines at Aitik, outside Gällivare. Moreover, in February 2022, the Swedish Supreme Court gave the Aitik mine the green light to expand, despite opposition from herders and environmentalists, with a new, 1 km long pit to be extracted.
It is to be additionally noted that 80% of Sweden’s forestry and large-scale hydropower is already situated in the traditional Sámi land, and as one result, the growth of lichen, traditional grazing for reindeer, has dropped by 71% in Sweden over the last six decades. Karen McVeigh and Klaus Thymann, journalists of The Guardian, have noted how Sweden has “invested hundreds of billions of kronor in its northernmost counties, Norrbotten and Västerbotten, where Hybrit, a fossil-free steel initiative, and H2 Green Steel, two coal-free power plants, a gigafactory for electric vehicle batteries, and a host of windfarms to power them, are planned.”
Karl-Petter Thorwaldsson, Sweden’s Minister of Trade and Industry who granted Beowulf the concession, however, assured the public of the positives of the project and the far-reaching counteracting measures that would be undertaken. Once the Swedish Greens, who opposed the Gállok project, left the former government coalition, he declared his party “loved mines” and hoped to open more of them. Lotta Finstorp, governor of the county administrative board of Norrbotten, Sweden’s northernmost county, similarly credited mining as ‘green industry’.
“The [Gállok] case is “symbolic”, Jenny Wik Karlsson, senior legal adviser to Swedish Sámi Association, and the Swedish Society of Nature Conservation, is nonetheless concerned. “It gives a clear view in how they are looking at Sámi rights. If the government don’t say no in this case, when it is a non-critical metal and they had the opportunity to say no, it is a green light for other mines as well.”
“Sweden pretends to be a leader for environment and human rights, but at home they violate indigenous rights and continue waging a war on nature,” activist Greta Thunberg said on Twitter after the government’s decision.
The Rest of Scandinavia
The Sámi heritage isn’t compromised only by the mines in Sweden. Similar concerns are raised in the north of Norway and Finland. Once the Geological Survey of Finland showed findings of nickel, copper, vanadium and cobalt in the Sámi land, all of them highly demanded metals in the production of electric vehicle batteries, the heritage and ancestral claims to the land seemed a whole lot less relevant. More so that, according to the country’s Mining Act, reindeer herders, reindeer-herder cooperatives and the Sámi Parliament have no right of appeal over mining reservations once they’re passed. In one case, that of Hietakero, the local Sámi heard of a mining plan only from a newspaper. “It [i.e. electric car battery production] could become bigger than the oil industry,” Frederic Hauge, founder of the Norwegian environmental Bellona Foundation, predicts for the future of region. Battery production is expected to ramp up all over northern Scandinavia.
The Sámis in Norway have had to tackle with similar issues, e.g. in the planning of the Repparfjord copper mine, where the problem is all the more serious for Norway being one of only four countries in the world that allow the use of seawater as dumpsite for tailings, that procedure being the cheapest to depose of them. “This [i.e. Repparjord, Riehppovuotna in Sámi spelling] is a test pilot project to see if it is possible to destroy indigenous land in the north of Norway. If they manage to open this, then it will be open for grab by anyone,” Beaska Niilas, from Norwegian Sámi Association, said to The Barents Observer back in 2019.
The Sámi Parliamentary Council has recognised “that climate change is a serious issue”, but impressed upon all the decision makers how the measures undertaken “must not bear a negative impact on the culture and living conditions of indigenous people”. “How can it be sustainable to destroy nature,” Inga Anne Karen Sara, daughter of a Sámi chief Nils Mathis Sara, asks rather more bluntly, seeing the Norwegian government seize more and more of her ancestral land for mining and wind power.
The Windmills of Our Minds?
Another vast area of controversy are the enormous wind farms erected and scheduled in the Sápmi area. The relatively barren and open land is seen as greatly fitting and profitable for the purpose. In October 2021, however, in a groundbreaking verdict, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that the two wind farms on Fosen peninsula, western Norway, violated the rights of six Sámi families, in breach of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. With four smaller, neighbouring installations, the two wind farms in question – Storheia and Roan – made up Europe’s biggest land-based wind park. Yet despite the fact of eleven Supreme Court judges unanimously delaring the operating permits of 151 wind turbines invalid, they didn’t say anything about what should happen to the structures, and in the one and half years that have followed, nothing has. “We haven’t decided whether the installations can stay in place in part or in full,” Petroleum and Energy Minister Marte Mjos Persen told AFP at the start of 2022. The decision has been put off ever since, despite criticism that Norway has a surplus of climate-friendly hydropower already.
The main rhetoric voiced in favour of wind farms and mineral mining, even if recognising their environmental impact, is that these resources are needed for the green transition. Pointing out that the income from the sale of reindeer meat amounts to no more than a few hundred thousand kroner (or a few tens of thousands of Euros) a year, compared to billions generated from wind turbines in Norway, Lars Ove Skorpen, head of renewable energy investments for Oslo-based Pareto Securities, notes that “it would be crazy” to tear the turbines down. In an interview to Dagens Næringsliv he added that “the sores” on natural beauty are “already a fact”, suggesting they should be accepted.
The concern is that without heavy expansion of wind energy and electric transport, the country’s climate goals will not be met. Jens Ulltveit-Moe, a wealthy businessman and now purportedly Norway’s “greenest” investor, called the Court’s decision “a tragedy”, noting that his “main priority” is climate change – “and I think we must tolerate scars on the nature,” he said. He added that the Sámi are also to sacrifice certain traditions and lifestyles ‘for the greater good’. It seems then that for some even the potential destruction of maybe the oldest surviving native tradition in Europe sounds like a worthy sacrifice in the combat. Skorpen was also proud to acknowledge in 2022 that his enterprise was raising more money for ‘green companies’ than for the entire oil and gas sector, and found that such investments should be increased sharply.
Returning to My Friend
My Sámi friend is not a reindeer herder. Reindeer herders actually form a relatively small segment of the Sámi society. Yet they are its cultural and social backbone. My friend likes to sing, or rather, as the Sámi say, to ‘yoik’. He assures me that to yoik is not the same as to sing – you sing about something, but you yoik the thing itself, as if merely giving it a sonic form, past the duality of the song and the factual matter. I wonder now, will still be possible to yoik the land and the landscape that won’t really exist anymore? Or to yoik the way of life which has, in full harmony with nature, lasted hundreds, if not thousands of years?
I am reminded of a rather different song, by composer Michel Legrand, with English lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Aren’t we, I wonder now, pursuing a purportedly more sustainable future and environment perhaps in a rather illusory, windmill-of-our-mind manner, instead of turning to those ways of living that have survived, and kept the nature surviving, throughout perceivable history. The Sámi tradition speaks fervently of lellema gærdda, ‘the circle of life’, of harmony with nature as the essence of all ethics. ‘We belong to nature,’ they believe. In that view, the ‘green transition’ can really begin only by seeing nature as a living thing in itself, as our gift and companion rather than our property. “If we – or someone else – destroy the nature, our culture is destroyed as well,” is stated in the Sámi Environmental Program.