Are We "Over Techifying" Climate Action?

There is no cutting-edge climate technology inhumed in the blanket of white snow that covers the tundra in Jokkmokk, Sweden—a small hamlet in the Swedish Lapland. Nor are there glossy climate research centers – let alone people at all—but according to Scandinavia’s indigenous Sami people, the snow is nowhere as abundant as it used to be. “When I was young, the snow used to be up to our shoulders. Years later, up to the belt. Eventually, the knees. Now look, it’s up to the ankles.” An old Sami woman motions down toward her booted feet outside of her home. Even though it’s mid-February, the snow hardly covers them.

The Arctic region where the Sami live, along with the polar bear, has long been the poster child for the environmental crisis. The symbolism is there for a reason—with its high proportion of ice, the region acts as an amplifier of sorts for the global heat engine as the ice melts and the consequent higher sea levels absorb the heat. The results are catastrophic—causing significant global socio-economic, psychical and ecological impacts. Once triggered, they may continue for centuries and cause irreversible effects on ice sheets, global circulation and sea level rise. Indigenous people, like the Sami of Lapland, are at the forefront of unprecedented environmental changes that are forcing them to shift how they live and work on their land. For the Sami people, climate change is not a debate—it’s a daily reality.

The Sami people (also spelled Saami) are a Finno-Ugric tribe that encompass large parts of Sweden, Norway, northern parts of Finland and the Murmansk Oblast region of Russia. Although Sami ancestral lands are not well defined, they are present due to the meticulous work of their ancestors—and the fight for generations to preserve their identity.

A longstanding model for a progressive approach to economic development, the windswept Nordic countries of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark all boast low unemployment, high levels of equality and sophisticated social services. Perhaps most importantly, Scandinavia is a leader in operating primarily off of renewable energy—a crucial pursuit as we face another decade in a rapidly exacerbated environmental crisis.

In early April 2016, Norway took one of the biggest global steps forward in terms of renewable energy—six wind farms with a combined capacity of 1,057 MW at the cost of 11 billion crowns—roughly $1.3 billion. That’s enough to nearly double Norway’s wind potential.

Wind and solar energy require virtually no water to operate. Because of this, they do not pollute water resources, nor strain resources by competing with agriculture, drinking water or other essential water needs. On the contrary, fossil fuels have a significant impact on water resources: both coal mining and natural gas drilling can pollute sources of drinking water and all thermal power plants, including those powered by coal, gas and oil, withdraw and consume mass amounts of water for cooling. The Norwegian project is not about the big bad government going to drill holes in the land searching for oil and contributing to climate destruction. This is one of the largest, most progressiverenewable energy projects in the world. So what’s the catch?

The project lies in the middle of a crucial Sami reindeer grazing area, leaving traditional herders concerned for the future of their culture that they have fought for generations to preserve—local herders have said that the sight and sound of the turbines would disturb reindeer herding. Although UN calls to suspend the project to study the impact on indigenous herders livelihoods, the Norwegian Petroleum and Energy Ministry will proceed with the wind park, compromising Sami land, livelihood and identity.

Oleg Kobtzeff, a Franco-American professor, journalist and researcher studies the interface of civilizations and their relationships with their natural environments. Kobtzeff has worked for the U.S. National Parks Service, the CNES, (a French space agency) and scientific institutions in Alaska where he lived for four years in an indigenous community. He is a specialist in Arctic regions.

Kobtzeff believes that with a shift in the relationship between the government, the “rest of the world” and indigenous groups, “the Sami could eventually tell us where and how to build windmills that would not create a problem for them.”

“SAMI HAVE BEEN LIVING SUSTAINABLY FOR CENTURIES, WITHOUT THE USE OF SCIENCE.”

Although wind farms boost high wind potential and a promising renewable future for Norway, the Sami have opposed these plans, seeing them as unprecedented land grabs and a fundamental threat to their culture. Not only this, but the Sami have been living sustainably for centuries, without the use of science.

An estimated 80,000 Sami live in the frigid northern lands of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia—where reindeer herding has long been the crux of their livelihood and culture. But warmer winters mean less snow. Less snow means more rain. Due to the freezing temperatures, the rain then freezes into ice, making it impossible for reindeer to reach the vegetation that is crucial to their diet and survival. In turn, many reindeers starve or are born stunted.

This puts the traditional way of herding reindeer underpressure, as rising temperatures threaten the size of the herds and cause financial stress. In addition to these money woes, many young Sami feel the pressure of being the last remaining faces of a dissolving culture, while facing the first-hand effects of a warming planet.

With the new wind farm, this dilemma is only being amplified.

“The Sami may know much more than we do about climate change,” Kobtzeff says. “In fact, we know they do. The whole difficulty is to get them to share the information that they have.”

From an anthropological perspective, it is the indigenous people that have a rather robust track record of maintaining intimate, sustainable relationships with the world and ecosystems around them. These relationships have nourished their communities and sustained their culture for centuries—all without ruining life providing environment itself. This is the track record that they fight to maintain. Ironically, a solution from the “developed world” meant to mitigate climate change has threatened their age-old way of sustainability.

Many Sami have an innate relationship to their environment and land; they can fathom things that engineers, scientists, zoologists and meteorologists who study climate and nature are not aware of. They possess a certain education that has come from centuries of experience, observation, trial and error from living off the land. In particular, sustainable solutions. Generations of reindeer herding have taught them how to use meat sustainably. How to use snowmelt for energy, free of industrial production. There are thousands of more traditional, less harmful methods toward climate action that we could learn from indigenous groups such as the Sami. “But for this to happen,” Kobtzeff says, “fundamentally, the relationship between the indigenous groups and the rest of the world needs to change.”

“WHEN I WAS YOUNG, THE SNOW USED TO BE UP TO OUR SHOULDERS. YEARS LATER, UP TO THE BELT. EVENTUALLY, THE KNEES. NOW LOOK, IT’S UP TO THE ANKLES.”

Unfortunately, the relationship between government, the “rest of the world” and indigenous groups such as the Sami in Norway, or the Inuit in Alaska has not exactly been convivial. For centuries, they have been mocked, referred to as savages or primitive, based on the notion that they simply cannot know better than those who have learned mathematics or climate science in official universities.

Indigenous groups have long featured on magazine covers and in documentary films. Their culture has been turned into a spectacle, an image.

In addition to this, a growing number of Sami have been exploited for their traditional medicinal remedies, further fueling the hostile relationship between indigenous groups and the rest of the world. This exploitation is known as “biopiracy” in which large companies, often pharmaceutical, commercially exploit naturally occurring biochemical or genetic material. Often, these companies will obtain patents that restrict the further use of these materials while failing to pay fair compensation to the community from which it originates.

“For all of these reasons, these are populations that are extremely wary of sharing traditional knowledge,” Kobtzeff says. “They know a lot about the climate because of the patterns of animal behavior. They are probably hiding a lot of this information because all of this has been mocked,” Kobtzeff suggests. “Because of that, they are shy. There is an attitude about keeping the information to themselves.”

While native peoples only constitute 4 to 5 percent of the world’s population, they use almost a quarter of the world’s land surface and manage 11 percent of its forests. “In doing so, they maintain 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity in, or adjacent to, 85 percent of the world’s protected areas,” says Gleb Raygorodetsky, a researcher with the POLIS Project on Ecological Governance at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. From a small village in the Bering Sea, Raygorodetsky has worked with indigenous communities around the world on traditional resource management, sacred sites, climate change adaption and mitigation and biocultural diversity for two decades.

“After all, it is they who have a robust, millennia-long track record of maintaining intimate relationships with the natural world, which has nourished their communities and sustained their cultures, without devouring the life-giving environment. This is the trackrecord that they continuously strive to maintain, despite formidable odds, including fierce opposition from the ‘developed’ world,” Raygorodetsky says. The ‘accomplishments’ of modern society, however, are a lot more recent, paltry, and have had much more destructive consequences for life on Earth. The most efficient path toward enhancing climate change resilience is to secure and support indigenous peoples’ rights to their lands and waters so that they can continue to support the majority of Earth’s remaining biological and cultural diversity,” he adds.

A potential solution for the wind farm is compensation— not necessarily financial, but the possibility of giving ownership over more land or allowing for more political representation by giving more power to local Sami institutions. Despite their strong identity and decades of lobbying since the 1960s, according to the Climate Institute, an institution aimed at discovering and implementing climate solutions by advancing research, sharing information, and collaborating with U.S. and international partners, “the ancient custom of reindeer herding represents one of the last means by which the Sami can support themselves with a traditional pursuit, providing one of the few remaining outlets for sustained cultural expression and pride.”

“FINDING SOLUTIONS TO THE IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE IS MUCH MORE COMPLICATED THAN EVERYONE HAVING THE MINDSET AND POSITIVE INCENTIVE OF ‘WANTING TO SAVE THE PLANET.’”

Raygorodetsky believes that in addition to scientific technologies—progressive as they may be—we should look to the people who are still closely connected to nature, not solely as the backbone that sustains them. Finding solutions to the impacts of climate change is much more complicated than everyone having the mindset and positive incentive of “wanting to save the planet.” It requires probing into a deep, multicultural, multi-knowledge perspective and understanding of the people around us who have lived sustainability for centuries.

Perhaps the most efficient path toward driving climate change resilience is to secure and support indigenous peoples’ rights to their lands and waters, and maintaina close relationship to them so that they can continue to support the majority of Earth’s remaining biological and cultural diversity in the same way that they have done for centuries.

The more we increase the multicultural,multi-knowledge perspective on what’s happening with us and the planet, the better it will be for us. Science is certainly one—crucial—way to solve the issue of climate change, but it is not the only one.

By Signi Livingstone-Peters

Photography by Oleg Kobtzeff