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Reindeer herding is central to the Sámi people’s survival and culture - but climate change and logging threaten an ancient way of life

We drive through an icy wilderness on the back of a snow mobile, multiple layers of clothing protecting us from the -23 degree Celsius temperatures. A frozen lake stretches off into the distance behind us. The rapidly fading light casts a magical glow over the landscape as we head into pine and spruce woodlands cloaked with snow.

Around 300 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, Lapland’s fairy-tale beauty can distract from just how treacherous this environment can be.

So to work outdoors as reindeer herders – as our Sámi guides Leo Aikio and Antti Tervaniemi have done most days since they were knee-high – takes a special kind of resilience.

Aikio’s and Tervaniemi’s forefathers were reindeer herders as far back as they can trace, and herding has been integral to the Sámi people’s survival for millennia. The meat is sold or eaten. The skins provide warmth. The antlers and bones are used for handicrafts and utensils. What’s more, herding is intimately tied to the Sámi’s connection to their land, and their knowledge of how to survive in it.

“You wouldn’t do this if you didn’t love it,” says Aikio, who solicitously keeps checking how we’re bearing up in the cold. For him, the life of a reindeer herder is freedom. “When you go out to the forest in the morning, you never know where you’re going, or when you’ll be home.”

Tervaniemi, who is younger and quieter than his colleague, says that he got in at 2 am the night before.

We stop. Aikio beckons us over.

He digs beneath the surface layer of snow with his hands, and pulls up a big slab of ice.

“Catastrophe,” he says, shaking his head.

Climate change, which is happening faster in the Arctic than in most of the rest of the world, is taking its toll: dramatic changes in temperature throughout the long winter mean rain falls and then freezes, leaving layers of ice beneath the surface snow. The ice stops the reindeer from reaching ground lichen, which along with the tree hanging arboreal variety, is their main food during the harsh winter months.

That’s not all.

As we continue our journey, the reality of Finland’s industrial logging becomes plain: 44 per cent of the productive forest lands here – within an overall area of 2,682 square kilometres – have been logged. The clear cutting of these boreal primary forests spells both short and long-term disaster, the herders say.

First, destroying old growth forests means destroying tree hanging lichen, further choking the reindeers’ food supply. Second, once felled these trees can take around 170 years to grow back in this unforgiving climate, condemning future generations to the same fate.

“It will not be possible to live with reindeers here if they keep on with this logging,” says Aikio. “This culture is going to die here.”

That evening we join him and his wife, Tiina Sanila-Aikio, at their home. Sanila-Aikio is a reindeer herder and singer (whose song Uuh was the first single in the Skolt Sámi language ever to chart in Finland), and current President of Finland’s Sámi Parliament.

She sees logging and climate change on a par with historic existential threats to the Sámi way of life, such as the boarding school system that the Finnish government introduced in the 19th century which removed Sámi children from their homes and stripped them of their language and culture.

“Are we still an indigenous people if we don’t have a connection to the nature?” she asks. “We have been talking a lot about what type of future our daughter will have. Sometimes it’s too stressing and too hopeless. Can we even risk that she will follow in our steps and be a reindeer herder?”

She sees a grim portent of the future in the lives of many retired reindeer herders. “These old guys have been herding all their lives. They get to retirement age and they try to keep on going. When they finally stop they lose themselves and they die in a year or so. They can’t manage to survive.”

The next day, we meet Osmo Seurujärvi, chairman of Muddusjärvi reindeer herding co-operative, which has about 60 members and 5,200 reindeers.

He explains that the scarcity of lichen means the herders are now buying other feedstock for the reindeers. This is not simply a matter of added expense, but something more fundamental: a seismic shift both in the reindeer’ diets and the co-operative members’ way of life.

“So far it’s still possible to have reindeer on natural grazing grounds. But if this continues we will have to take the reindeers inside fences. The situation is already so tight, if the logging is increased we will lose the reindeer. You cannot change the system so that you go totally to artificial feeding. Their stomachs cannot take it, so it would mean a generation [of reindeer] would die.”

Seurujärvi has to rush back to “the office” (the forest). As he leaves, we ask if he has a message for Finland’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the architect of the country’s forest policy.

He does, and it’s blunt: “Leave also some space for us.”

Carbon dispute

The Sámi’s plight is part of a story whose significance reaches beyond Finland’s forest policy, and into the complexities of how countries account for the carbon emissions cuts they’ve pledged to make under the Paris Climate Agreement.

As Europe’s most heavily forested nation, Finland’s economic fortunes have long been tied to its forests.

Following the economic crash of 2008, and the slump in fortunes of Finland’s tech pin-up Nokia, the forest industry took on renewed significance for Finland’s policymakers, who looked to them for economic salvation.

The emerging bio-economy – driven by international climate policies encouraging countries to switch from burning fossil fuels to renewable energy – appeared as a lifeline for an economy on the brink.

In Europe, renewable energy largely means burning wood. This in turn, means chopping down more trees. Last year, the Finnish government announced its intention to increase harvesting the country’s forests by a staggering 23 per cent between now and 2030.

This might make short-term sense for Finland’s economy, but not for the climate.

Forests absorb carbon dioxide when they live and release it when they are dead. So the less carbon there is in Finland’s forests, the more there is in the atmosphere. Finland’s own impact assessment shows that even if the country cuts its fossil fuel use, its overall emissions won’t be reduced in the next decade or so because of this increased logging.

Finland is currently embroiled in a debate with the European Commission over how it accounts for these extra forest emissions under the Paris Agreement. It argues that its forests are so extensive that they will continue to absorb more carbon than they release.

But its critics claim that Finland is trying to bend the carbon accounting rules in the devilishly complex land and forests sector – otherwise known as LULUCF – in its favour. Among them is the Finnish Green Party MP Satu Hassi, who points out: “Even if you dupe most policymakers in Brussels, you can’t dupe the atmosphere.”

It’s not the only nation attempting to do so – and Finland succeeds it will set a precedent for the rest of the world, with a real danger that the carbon in the world’s forests will dramatically shrink.

For the Sámi, who are already suffering the consequences of both climate change and Finland’s industrial logging policy, this is not an abstract concept. For if Finland continues along its current path, it could prove fatal to a culture and lifestyle that’s survived for centuries.

Some, like the Sámi artist Jenni Laiti, are turning to activism as a means of resistance.

Laiti, who grew up in Inari, is among a younger generation of Sámi radicalised by life on the frontline of global warming, who have linked with climate activists around the world.

Laiti is at the forefront of a campaign to stop a major mining company drilling in the Swedish area of Sápmi - the traditional Sámi lands stretching across Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia - and took part in a 4,500 kilometre ‘climate justice’ relay from her homeland to Paris for the 2015 climate talks.

“I’m not an expert on climate change, but I see what’s happening around me,” she says. “It’s like death. Things are just dying… It’s mostly about the land because the land is where we come from. We can’t survive without the land.”

Fighting external threats – whether nature’s extremities or outsiders – has been a running theme through Sámi history. Tiina Sanila-Aikio draws inspiration from this.

“As long as we have Sámi children living in Sámi areas, children whose family practise traditional livelihoods, then we have hope,” she says.

Mark Olden is a journalist and press advisor to the forests and rights NGO Fern. His report with Hannah Mowat is Arctic Limits: How Finland’s forest policies threaten the Sámi and the climate.