70 degrees north above the arctic circle. Every muscle in my body clings as best it can to the six-wheeled machine, which climbs with a crash, ignoring obstacles. On my knees, Dielku, the shepherd dog, does not fear the slaps of the branches which would have beheaded us for a bit. On the contrary, he is impatient: the reindeer are near. We gain altitude and soon, the dwarf birches give way to a tundra that stretches as far as the eye can see. The engine runs out of steam; I breathe again. Anders, a Sami reindeer herder, leaps from the vehicle and points his binoculars towards the horizon.
- Look, he says, handing me the binoculars, we see the Eiffel Tower.
In the distance, on the neighboring slope, the tundra is dotted with white and brown dots. Reindeer already gathered for winter migration by his colleagues from the siida – an alliance between families of breeders. But that is not what he designates: higher up, the horizon line comes up against an imposed, metallic verticality. Gigantic electricity pylons, carrying high voltage lines, are set up as monuments of energy, of development.
- It’s the new 420 kilovolt line, Anders blurted out his cigarette. It will cross all the north of Sápmi. It is only good to frighten the herds. With one and a half inhabitants per square kilometer, we don’t need this monster.
Sápmi. This is how the Sami – the last indigenous people in Europe – call the lands they have inhabited for millennia. This territory also called Lapland is located in the far north of the continent, straddling Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia.
I lived with Anders’ family for a month. I am taught the basics of growing, harvesting plants, berries, fishing and preparing meat. We have been reclusive from the world for several days, on the high plateau of Finnmarksvidda. In the evening, wrapped up in a reindeer skin, I sought sleep in the lava, the traditional tent, between the crackling of the embers and the feet of a nonagenarian grandmother already asleep. Outside, squalls assaulted the thin tarpaulin that separated us from the black immensity. I had no idea, then, that this high-voltage line, intended among other things for “new renewable energies”, would become the common thread of my report, a route linking the encounters and stories collected during two months in the Norwegian Arctic, like pebbles on my way.
The Arctic, caught in the grip of the West
The Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the Earth and influences the global climate that he is said to be the conductor. Its summer pack ice, doomed to disappear by 2050, gives way to new trade sea routes, including the famous Polar Silk Road. But also, in a race for raw materials: the Far North alone conceals nearly 20% of the world’s gas and oil reserves. Enough to panic the desires of the great powers and multinationals.
In the shadow of this new war for resources in the polar environment, a million indigenous souls, including the Sami. People at the forefront of the climate emergency and whose survival depends in part on nature. However, the paradox is terrible: many will tell you that global warming threatens them less than so-called “green” developments which aim to remedy it.
Copper mines for the batteries of our future electric cars, green hydrogen and ammonia power plants as fuel for passenger ships, forests of wind turbines and construction of dams… Double penalty for the Samis, here they are facing a second front, that of energy transition in addition to that of climate change.
- They want Finnmark to become Europe’s battery, one reindeer breeder said indignantly.
A rush for the green nugget after the one for black gold?
In September 2021, Aili Keskitalo, then president of the Sami Parliament in Norway, went to the Swiss Green Economy Symposium in Winthertur, to denounce “green colonialism”.
“What is sustainability? she said to the assembly. If I am here, it is because your world has landed in my world brandishing this term. In the name of the energy transition, our ancestral lands are monopolized. How many reindeer herders are abandoning their sustainable practices because the earth has been removed from under their feet! Is this sustainability? For us, it is not a question of the aesthetics of the landscape, but of the survival of our culture. ”
Tabea Willi, from the Swiss section of the Society for Threatened Peoples, said no more. “We are witnessing a repetition of history, except that we have swapped the red tunic for the green cape”, she told me. And this summer, an NGO, the Equinox Racial Justice Initiative, accused the European Union’s Green Deal of green colonialism.
As the world’s leading hub in commodity trading, with a major financial center, Switzerland holds its share of responsibility.
“Many Swiss banks and multinationals, such as Credit Suisse, UBS or BKW are often involved in the financing of controversial projects. This is the case with the largest onshore wind farm in Europe, located in Norway, and lithium mines in Russia ”, continues Tabea Willi.
For climate justice
On the eve of COP26 in Glasgow, this series of reports is an invitation to nuance. A step aside to take into account the complexity of a challenge whose actors and issues are multiple and varied, contradictory and interconnected. To find solutions without repeating the mistakes of the past, it will undoubtedly be necessary to extricate oneself from the Manichean cleavages which would like to divide the world between the “good” and the “bad”, the “big” and the “small”, the “green”. “, And” polluters “.
Between white and black, I invite you to a gray area, in the very north of Europe. If the green transition is necessary, the question remains: how to go about it?
“We do not protect nature by destroying nature”, a reindeer herder told me on the rubble of a gaping copper mine, abandoned, the subject of the first episode of this Exploration.
In a world where the most vulnerable to global warming are also those who have contributed the least to it, let us listen to these voices too rarely invited to the debate. Failing to include them at the negotiating table, I went to meet them for two months.
This report was produced with the support of a grant awarded by the Jordi Foundation for Journalism.
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