[LINK] "Dodging Wind Farms and Bullets in the Arctic"

[rfmcdonald]

National Geographic's Scott Wallace writes about how the Sami of northern Norway are threatened by the steady encroachment upon their traditional lands.

Troms County is a sprawling region of broken coastline, labyrinthine fiords, and rugged alpine forests, situated some 700 miles (1,150 km) north of Oslo. This is the heart of Sami country, where Lapp nomads once moved their herds across vast distances to the rhythm of the seasons, oblivious to national borders. Those days are long gone. Of the estimated 100,000 Sami spread out across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula, only about 10,000 still herd reindeer for a living. Reindeer meat is an important part of a herder’s diet, as well as the sole source of income for some families. For part-time herders, the animals’ meat and hides augment their earnings from other sources.

Today, reindeer herders find themselves increasingly boxed in by powerful interests competing for their traditional grazing lands. Dams, roads, live-fire military drills, high-voltage power lines, even green energy projects such as wind farms all have nibbled away at grazing territory. Of particular concern to the Sami leadership are a proposed copper mine in Finnmark County to the north and a windmill park just to the south.

So far, no single project has posed an existential threat to the herding culture of the Sami, Western Europe’s only indigenous people who inhabit the Arctic. But the cumulative impacts–a road here, a pipeline there–have reduced Norway’s undisturbed reindeer habitat by 70 percent in the past century and reshaped the way reindeer herding is done.

Technology is a double-edged sword for the Sami. On the one hand, it provides herders with the comforts of modern life–warm houses, GPS collars and smartphone apps to track their animals, snowmobiles and ATVs to round them up. On the other, the steady encroachment of industrial infrastructure has reduced their range and freedom of movement, requiring them to move herds by truck and boat between summer and winter pastures. It’s an expensive undertaking, and herders receive just a one-time payout to compensate losses when courts override their objections and approve large-scale projects.

As Norway, one of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita, pushes forward with plans to extract more resources and build more industry in the Arctic, Sami leaders fear their languages and culture, largely sustained by herding families, will be sacrificed to produce wealth for the larger society.