Save the Sami Reindeer Forests!

I was working on an idea for Christmas and wound up trawling the internet for pictures of real reindeer. I came across this photographer's blog and followed a link for more pictures that led me to a Greenpeace-related page. There, I read about the plight of the Sami reindeer herders and was moved to write this blog.

I will take a moment here to say that the recent acceptance of extremism into causes that I used to support is the very thing that turned me away from those causes. I don't feel that affected parties want to come to the negotiation table to talk with someone who is a known raving lunatic for their cause. I see diplomacy (and dollars- as in buying up endangered lands for an ecological trust) as the way that most effectively serves the interests of preserving endangered ecosystems. Call me conservative, but, how easy is it to get someone else to consistently use their natural resources in a way that caters to the bigger picture? Where I live, urban sprawl is rampant, over-population results in rolling electrical blackouts during the summer and constant traffic congestion during rush hour, and strangely, commercial interests and developers largely seem to get their way. The historical society can't seem to preserve anything that doesn't have ties to the industrialist family that took our state from "po' dirty South" to some semblance of a metro area. And local municipal entities seem keen to use eminent domain to improve their flagging tax bases. Anyway, I digress- now the subject at hand...

Like the forests of Western Ireland, the Sami reindeer-herding grounds in Finland are some of the few standing ancient growth forests in Europe still standing. The indigenous Sami people have lived in the extreme Northern reaches of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Penninsula of Russia for thousands of years. One of their traditional and cultural institutions is reindeer-herding. The semi-domesticated reindeer need free-grazing areas to survive. As always, the ecological niche vital to these reindeer is also vital to the life cycles of other species. The main crux of the plight of the Sami is the destruction of these forests by logging interests. In the particular case of the Sami living in Finland, the main logger is the Finnish State. What happens to the wood harvested from these forests? Most of the wood ends up as magazine and periodical paper for European consumption. Is a glossy copy of your favorite Euro magazine that is probably destined for the trash bin after you've read all of the articles worth the destruction of an ancient livelihood and vital ecosystem? Recycling those periodicals helps remove some of the guilt of consumption, but does an old-growth tree miraculously pop out of nowhere to replace the tree that was lost? Um, no. Beyond the replacement of trees, what about heavy machinery-related pollution, compaction of soils, etc.?

Here is a link where you can find out more about Greenpeace's efforts to preserve the Sami reindeer-herding lands.