Sweden’s ‘green transformation’ promises to help Europe fight the climate crisis. So why is it uniting radical environmentalists, ecologists and Sami reindeer herders in protest?
The stove gurgles as Sofia Olsson puts a chunk of wood into the fire, lifts the kettle and offers mugs of tea and grainy camp coffee to the small group reclining on reindeer skins around her. In the taiga forest and frozen marsh outside their snow-covered Swedish military tent, it’s -12C (10.4F). Last night, it was near -20C (-4F). But inside, it’s surprisingly comfortable.
Olsson and her fellow activists Jakob Bowers and Lan Pham have been here in the hamlet of Hukanmaa, in Pajala, Sweden’s most northerly municipality, on and off for more than a year, camping since December. The camp is an outpost of Forest Rebellion, an off-shoot of Swedish Extinction Rebellion, which says it is organising a campaign of “peaceful civil disobedience” with the Sami people against Arctic deforestation.
Some leading names in environmental activism have started to congregate in Swedish Sapmi, the Sami ancestral homeland, an area that stretches over parts of Finland, Norway and Russia. The German ecologist and author Carola Rackete – who made headlines in 2019 when she was arrested for captaining a ship that landed refugees on Lampedusa, Italy, without authorisation after a 17-day standoff – has arrived from her home in Norway.