As Arctic warms, reindeer herders tangle with new industries
FINNMARK PLATEAU, NORWAY/OSLO: When he’s not out on the Arctic tundra with his 2,000 reindeer, his dog and Whitney Houston blasting through his headphones, Nils Mathis Sara is often busy explaining to people how a planned copper mine threatens his livelihood.
Along with other Sami herders and fishermen, the 60-year- old is in a standoff with the mine owners, Norwegian officials and many townspeople that is, after six years, coming to a head.
It is a litmus test for the Arctic, where climate change and technology are enabling mineral and energy extraction, shipping and tourism while threatening traditional ways of life and creating tensions among its four million inhabitants.
“This mine is completely nuts,” said Sara, preparing to move his herd from winter pastures on Norway’s windswept Finnmark plateau three days north to the grass-rich pastures on the coast, where females calve and there are fewer mosquitoes.
“We would be losing summer pastures for our reindeer again.”
Herders around the Arctic – in other Nordic nations, Russia, Canada and Alaska – echoed his concerns in interviews, citing threats from climate change, mining, oil spills and poaching as well as thoughtless behaviour from townspeople and tourists.
Global majors, including Eni, Equinor, Gazprom, Glencore, Lukoil and Rio Tinto, are all grappling with how to square their prospecting plans with the interests of people whose views count more than in the past.
Anders Oskal , executive director of the International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry, said the copper mine was in the spotlight. “Big industry is sitting on the fence and seeing how it plays out,” he said.
Local officials gave the green light for the privately- owned
It would create optimism for the town.
Nussir copper project back in 2012 on the grounds it would bring in much-needed jobs and funds. It has been stuck ever since.
Indigenous Sami herders and fishermen say the plan to dump the mine’s tailings in the fjord, while less damaging than piling them on land, would destroy spawning grounds for cod and the mine would damage summer pasture grounds and frighten the reindeer.
“I don’t get it,” Tommy Pettersen, a 47-year-old Sami fisherman, said on board his boat, which gives him a potentially lucrative but unpredictable income. “We are a maritime nation. We have relied on the ocean to live off and we want to dump this stuff in the fjord?”
He had just caught king crabs worth 16,000 Norwegian crowns ( US$1,990). Last year he earned 1.6 million crowns ( US$199,000) for four weeks’ work – about half from cod and the rest from crabs, a Pacific species brought to the Barents Sea in the Stalin era.
Sara’s income is steadier. He gets up to 130 Norwegian crowns ( US$16) a kilo for his meat, 300 crowns for each skin and 140 crowns a kilo for the antlers, which he sells to China as aphrodisiac.
Nussir has won the necessary permits, says the area contains 72 million tonnes of copper – Norway’s largest reserve – and plans more than 1 billion crowns ( US$124 million) in investment.
“We can run this mine alongside reindeer herding and fishing,” said Oeystein Rushfeldt, the head of the project.
Terje Wickstroem, mayor of Kvalsund, a village of painted wooden houses on the Repparfjord with 1,027 inhabitants, said the mine would boost a municipality which spends 40 per cent of its income caring for the elderly as
Terje Wickstroem, Kvalsund mayor
young people move away.
“It would create optimism for the town,” said Wickstroem, who is himself a Sami.
After years of back and forth with locals and the consultative Sami Parliament of Norway, as well as assessments by ministries and government agencies, the centre- right, pro- business government will make a ruling on the copper mine this year.
Oskal, of the reindeer husbandry centre, said it was ironic that Nussir may be allowed to dump waste when Norwegian laws oblige Sami reindeer herders to send the animals’ stomachs and intestines for destruction, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, to reduce risks of disease.
Traditionally, herders just buried the remains.
The Sami herders insist they are not opposed to change – their language has no word for “stability” – but Sara said the politicians were not listening. “If this mine gets the go ahead, we will go to the courts to stop it,” he said.
Wickstroem said he understood Sara’s concerns. “His business is under pressure. But this is a bigger, national debate.” It is also an international one. Average temperatures in the Arctic region have risen more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6°F) since pre-industrial times, twice as fast as the world average, according to research for the inter governmental Arctic Council.
Temperatures now sometimes spike above freezing in midwinter, melting snow that then re-freezes into a blanket of ice on lichen pastures that the reindeer cannot nuzzle through. In the worst recorded ‘rain on snow’ event, in the Yamal Peninsula in Russia in 2013-2014, about 61,000 of 275,000 reindeer died.
“Indigenous peoples and systems in the Arctic” top a list of populations vulnerable to warming in a draft UN scientific report about the risks of climate change to be published in October.
Shrinking ice also means liquefied natural gas tankers can now travel west to Europe year- round and east to Asia in summer from the Yamal Peninsula in northern Russia, where Gazprom is the dominant producer.
“There is an explosion of industrial development in Arctic regions,” said Mikhail Pogodaev, Chair of the Association of World Reindeer Herders, who is based in Yakutsk, eastern Russia. — Reuters