The battle against deforestation
- ellinorfristrom
- May 16, 2021
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 9, 2021
Leif Lundberg pours a bit of coffee into a cup with reindeers on it. ”Here put some cheese in it,” he says as he hands me the cup. Coffee cheese is a tradition with origins in northern Finland, but even here in Arjeplog in Norrbotten it is a long-lived tradition. On the table, he has prepared a plate with a big chunk of homemade reindeer meat.
Lundberg is 70-years-old, and has worked in reindeer husbandry his whole life, and has seen the devastating effects of deforestation on reindeer husbandry. Last year Lundberg teamed up with the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation and wrote an open letter to the state-owned forest company Sveaskog demanding that the company respect the Sámi village and the laws and regulations in place.
In Maskaure Sámi village, Sveaskog is planning to sell 2 200-hectare forest and fell 32 forests, approximately 400 hectares within the village's reindeer grazing area. According to Lundberg, the situation in Maskaure is critical, which is already surrounded by large patches of clear-felled area.
“It’s been cut so hard in this village that it feels as if we are at the end of the road,” Lundberg says.
According to the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SLU, since 1950, 60 % of the Swedish forests have been cleared. For Sámi people, this has serious consequences as the reindeer’s food disappears along with them. Worst is the winter grazing situation when the reindeer live off lichen that grows on the ground and trees. Lichen is a crucial food source for the reindeer and is only abundant in older forests.
“If Sveaskog is allowed to continue as they have done now, there will not be many years before there are no such forests left,” Lundberg says.
“If you go look at a 60-year-old forest, then it might have started to grow a little bit of lichen, but then it takes another 60 years before it produces so much in a tree that it falls down,” Lundberg says. “Because a reindeer is not helped by lichen hanging 5 meters up in a tree”.
Especially crucial is the hanging lichen when the snow becomes too hard for the reindeer to dig through to reach the ground lichen.
“It is vital all year round really, but especially in the spring-winter when we come up with the reindeer from the coast, then there’s nothing but hanging lichen of which they can live on otherwise, you have to feed them, and that becomes very expensive,” Lundberg says.
Feeding reindeer has become a lot more common as a result of a loss of hanging lichen forests, but also because of rapid climate change. As the climate gets warmer, the snow melts more often. But when the temperature goes below zero, the water freezes and creates ice against the ground, making it impossible for the reindeer to reach the food. Lundberg estimates that during the last ten years he’s had to feed the reindeer almost every other year.
“And it seems that with this development with the climate that it just becomes more and more frequent,” he says.
Lars-Anders Baer, chairman of Luokta-Máva Sámi village says there are not enough reindeer grazing areas in relation to the number of reindeer allowed under the Reindeer Husbandry Act.
“Our village has previously been able to have 10 000 reindeer now we’re at about 7 000, and we do not have reindeer grazing for the 7 000 we have, we have to supplementary feed in the spring, and that is mainly because the lands have become so fragmented,” he says.
“And it also requires more work compared to the past when you had land that was more connected, today it’s like small islands in a forestry landscape”.
This fragmentation of grazing lands means that reindeer herders have to work a lot harder to steer the reindeers in the direction of these plots of lands.
“You also get a horrible spread on the reindeer herd,” Lundberg says, “because if there is no hanging lichen for them to eat, then they try to seek out and find places where there are hanging lichen”.
Sveaskog is also planning to cut down the two forests that surround the Sámi village’s reindeer enclosure despite the Environmental Code, stating that measures that significantly impede the operation of the reindeer industry should not be permitted.
We drive out to the forest in Mauskaure where the village has its reindeer enclosure.
“Here is the reindeer enclosure where they are planning to cut down all the trees around it but which the Sámi village has said no to,” he says. “And this just shows how wicked they are and autocratic”.
Lundberg points to a piece of lichen lying on the snow. “As you can see here, the lichen has fallen down on the ground, because as I said, the reindeer is not helped by the food being that high up,” he says as he points to some lichen hanging a few meters up in one of the pine trees. “They don’t want to climb that high,” he says with a laugh.
In Sweden, forest companies can apply for environmental certificates as proof that the wood comes from sustainable forestry. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has the highest requirements, which also demands that great consideration must be paid to indigenous people. The system has been accused of greenwashing, however and in 2010, the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation left its membership in FSC after they documented several cases in which certified landowners had cleared forests worthy of protection.
In order to inspect their own actions, forest companies hire audit firms to make sure that they follow the rules. The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter found that Sveaskog had committed the highest level of violation against the FSC rules on three occasions according to their own audit company DNV GL.
One of these instances was in Mauskaure Sámi village last June when a centuries-old natural forest was to be felled despite the county administrative board asking the company to wait to investigate whether they could make it into a nature reserve. Sveaskog themselves have appealed the decision from DNV GL and said that they followed the measures previously brought forward and don't agree with the Swedish Forest Agency classification of the forest as a key biotope.
Baer, who has also worked as a lawyer and been a member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, says the situation regarding forestry is very serious.
“My prognosis is that if this doesn’t work out, the Sámi villages will have to sue Sveaskog, and the tragic thing is that to be able to enter into a dialogue, we have to talk in terms of money. In other words, the value of reindeer grazing and that we suffer a financial loss depending on their activities,” he says.
Baer says that unlike the laws regarding water in relation to reindeer husbandry, the laws regarding forestry in relation to reindeer husbandry are not as clearly defined making, it difficult for reindeer herders to assert their rights.
“If you dam over land and it becomes unusable, the water law states that you have to compensate the Sámi village for that loss, but as far as reindeer grazing in relation to forestry is concerned, there are no such regulations,” he says.
Sveaskog also wants to fell previously left consideration areas, which the Court of Appeal in Sundsvall, in a ruling in 2015, decided should be saved for a tree's orbital period, in other words, around 100 years. According to Baer a big problem for the villages is that during the consultation meetings most of the felling are merely pushed for the future, and nothing is permanently saved.
According to the Swedish Forest Management Act, forest companies have to set up consultation meetings with Sámi villages when their plans for example affect hanging lichen forests. According to Lundberg however, these consultation meetings work more as information meetings since the forest companies end up doing what they want anyway, regardless of the villagers' protests.
“We have tried to explain and talk to them, but every year you have to go over the same thing again. They have no understanding for reindeer husbandry,” Lundberg says.
“They say that we can co-exist on the same land, but it is not possible for reindeer to live on a clear-felled area, there has to exist food for the reindeer”.
“And it's not just the reindeer, it's everything that lives in the forest, but we think mostly of reindeer husbandry because that’s what we fight for, but it's all the birds and everything that lives here”, he says
“There has to be room for them as well, it should not just be Sveaskog that lives and thrives here”.
Watch the video about Leif Lundberg and his battle here
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