Norway’s green energy policy could destroy its indigenous people

‘It’s a fantastic feeling when you manage to steer a flock of reindeer, when everything goes well, and you make it home safely. I tend to say it’s like riding the wind.’ Ironically, it is the proliferation of wind farms that is threatening the last bastions of the Sami language and culture, writes Trygve Ulriksen Skogseth

The Fosen peninsula hosts some of Europe’s largest wind farms but the huge turbines are a danger to the indigenous Sami practice of herding reindeer through the mountainsv (Trygve Ulriksen Skogseth)

As soon as she learned how to walk, Lena Haugen wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. When her two triplet brothers started making excuses to stay home as teenagers, she would insist on accompanying their father up on the rugged coastal mountains of central Norway. There she would spend her summers living in a cabin for months on end, and in spring she helped gather the flock of well over a thousand reindeer, so they could keep close watch over calving. 

When she was 14, her father handed her a knife and told her she was old enough to carve her own mark into a newborn calf’s ear. The mark is like a signature, showing which herder the animal belongs to in the Sami community – the indigenous people spread through Scandinavia and Russia.  “I’ve always known this was the life that I wanted. I never saw myself doing anything else,” says Haugen, now in her twenties, with two children of her own.    

In the past couple of years, the Fosen peninsula in central Norway – the mountains where Haugen and her family keep their reindeer – has become home to 208 wind turbines. Standing roughly as tall as Big Ben, with rotor blades that reach as wide as the diameter of the London Eye, they harvest the steady stream of wind from the Atlantic Ocean which hammers the Norwegian coast throughout the year.