This is The Guardian. Hello, my name is Ben Rawlence, and I'm the author of The Treeline is Out of Control, How the Climate Crisis is Turning the Arctic Green. that was originally published in print in 2022. I was first drawn to the moving tree line as... a fantastic way to talk about climate change in a practical way to show people to take them on a journey to the northern forest to see how
our planet was being transformed. And the seed of the Norway chapter, which is what this article is an excerpt from, was actually a random phone call to the... head of the Sami Reindeer Association in northern Norway in Alta. And I said to him on the phone, what does the forest look like? Is the tree line moving? And he just started laughing and said, you need to come and visit.
He said, I was born in 1950 something and I was born in the middle of the tundra and now I live in the middle of the forest. And that was the seed that took me to Norway and started me on the journey to research both this article, but also the book as a whole. Since I wrote the piece, many of the trends that are highlighted in it have continued. So we are seeing a real low snow winter in the winter of 2024, 2025, and this alternating pattern now of freezing.
and snowfall followed by rain when once upon a time mercury in the thermometer would drop below minus 20 and would stay there for the whole of the winter. You had these dry, cold winters. So that trend is continuing, as is all of the social dislocation for the Sami people. that follows from that, because as the piece makes clear, the reindeer and the climate are intimately connected, and the reindeer and the people whose economy and society and culture rests on...
The cycles of the reindeer are also intimately connected, so we're seeing that social disruption as well. Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to theguardian.com forward slash long read. The Treeline is Out of Control. How the Climate Crisis is Turning the Arctic Green by Ben Rawlins. Read by Christian Anhalt and produced by Hattie Moyer.
Altafjord is a wide expanse of black water on the edge of the Barents Sea, ringed with mountains. Alta is a relatively large town in the Finnmark province. the crown of the horse's mane that forms Norway's jagged coastline and Europe's northern shore. Here at sea level, the most northerly trees in Europe are moving upslope, gobbling up the tundra as they go.
The people and animals that live here are trying to make sense of the rapid changes with a mixture of confusion, denial and panic. Dawn at 70 degrees north during winter lasts nearly the whole day. The sun never rises. The day is permanently on the verge of breaking. It is disorienting. On the way to City Hall from the guesthouse, I spied few pedestrians.
alta is a town built along american principles that is to say a town built for a world in which petrol is cheap and cars are taken for granted it is a landscape of shopping malls gas stations and spaced out residential suburbs normally at this time of year it isn't safe to be outside for long without wearing animal skins but on the day of my visit it was only minus one degrees
All along the road to the city centre were rows of young Scots pines, their orangey bark contrasting with the fresh dusting of snow. Intermingled with the pines were shorter, ragged-looking trees with lumpy trunks. wizened branches and fine twigs like gnarled fingers betula pubescens downy birch it is these trees that had brought me here to the office of halgeas
the Director of Planning for the Municipality of Alta, at 9am on a Monday in the middle of winter. As the planet warms, the Arctic treeline is accelerating towards the pole. turning the white landscape to green the trees used to creep forward a few centimeters every year now they are leaping north at a rate of forty to fifty meters a year in the european arctic the birch
is the leader of the pack. Downy birch is one of a few broad-leaved deciduous trees in the Arctic, and it is hardier even than most conifers. It's down. is a soft coating of hairs that acts like a fur coat in the punishing cold. Often found cooperating with pines and spruce at lower latitudes and altitudes, Above a certain point, the birch leaves the others behind and goes on alone for hundreds of miles. It might be unprepossessing, even ugly.
with its stumpy branches and pockmark bark, but this tough little tree is a survivor and a pioneer, essential to nearly all life in the Arctic, used by humans for tools. houses, fuel, food and medicine. It is home to microbes, fungi and insects central to the food chain and it is critical for sheltering other plants needed to make a forest.
The downy birch dictates the terms of what can grow, survive, and move in the areas in which it takes hold. And, as the Arctic heats up, that range is expanding fast. Alters Town Hall is a modern timber clad building radiating orange light. The entrance vestibule is a two-stage affair, like a submarine airlock, where you must pass through a bath of blasting hot air.
When I arrived, the receptionist was in a good mood. She, like everyone in Ulta, was relieved. Finally, there was some snow, and finally the temperature was below freezing, even if only just. It gets very dark when we don't have any snow, said Streefeld, ensconced in his modern office. Winters have been getting gradually warmer in recent years, but the warmth when I visited was, he said, extreme.
The whole community had been in a state of panic, reindeer herders posting photos of a snowless tundra on Facebook. Streefeld is a city dweller. a mild man with rimless glasses and a reserved air he is also half sami the indigenous people of arctic europe who share dna and a common linguistic heritage with the peoples of the circumpolar region from finland to Russia, across the Bering Strait to Alaska, Labrador and back to Greenland.
The Sami used to migrate across the land without hindrance, but now the 80,000 who remain find themselves instead citizens of one of four different modern nations, Norway, Sweden. Finland or Russia. They are the only indigenous group in Europe recognized by the United Nations. Reindeer are central to Streefeldt's identity, as they are for all Sami.
His mother's family were reindeer herders, but when his grandmother died in childbirth on the plateau, his grandfather brought his infant mother to Alta and left her with a Norwegian family to raise.
the grandfather went back to his herds beneath the wide skies of the plateau to his larvo a traditional tent much like a teepee and married again halgir has a foot in the city and the larvo when i saw him later that week at a psalmi cultural event he was wearing the traditional psalmi felt jacket embroidered with gold a silk scarf reindeer skin trousers and boots with an elaborately worked silver belt
Reindeer are endearing animals with their wide brown eyes, furry antlers, soft fur and enormous snow-proof padded hooves. Sami herders recognise every member of their herd individually. Love is an insufficient word for the relationship. Codependency comes closer. The people move because the reindeer move in search of grazing.
Their culture has evolved around the migratory needs of the herds, but the breakdown in weather is upsetting this cycle. The Sami are among the first victims of climate breakdown. forced to contemplate a little earlier than the rest of us the collapse of a whole culture. The reindeer are the only pillar left of what was once a more diversified civilization.
The forest Sami are long gone, forced by the Norwegian government over a century ago to choose between reindeer husbandry or assimilation. The integration of the fishing Sami has taken longer. But the collapse in cod stocks has helped accelerate the move to the towns, a process that is Streefeld's job to manage. Alta is a boom town of 20,000 inhabitants. growing as the countryside all around is drained of people. Reindeer herding is valued by the rest of Norway and so it has persisted.
The Norwegian state sees reindeer as a farmed resource, with quotas and subsidies and strict controls on culls. To the official mind, they are a commodity. a useful export from the otherwise unproductive vast plateau of the north but for the Sami the reindeer's significance is not only economic and cultural it is also symbolic
Reindeer are life. They are everything. Without reindeer, we die, as three folk told me. And now, reindeer herding, a way of life that has survived intact for 10,000 years. is under threat. This time it is not the Norwegian government that poses the greatest danger but the climate. Warmer winters are deadly for the reindeer in two ways. One is short and sharp leading to a quick death. Ice. The other is slow but sure. Too many trees. Once upon a time.
The first snows of winter would fall sometime in October, initially on the tundra, the plateau above the treeline, and then on the pine and birch forests of the river valleys and the coasts. Shortly after... the mercury in the thermometer would descend below freezing and stay there until april or may when the snow would begin to melt and the rivers would rush with the clear turquoise of super oxygenated ice
Until 2005, the average winter temperature in the region was minus 15 degrees and it would reliably sink below minus 40 degrees at least once during the winter, eliminating even the hardiest of all insect larvae. a process that kept the Arctic pest free in the summer. This world of winter was dark and cold and dry. At those temperatures there was no moisture at all. The snowpack was the consistency of sand made up of several layers of large snow crystals.
At minus 40 or 50 degrees in the middle of winter, the quality and nature of snow crystals is critical to the survival of humans and animals alike. When the temperature climbs back up towards zero or, even worse, above it, this delicate winter ecosystem collapses. Even a little warming of the snow can create havoc.
Moisture starts to appear in the snowpack at minus 5 or minus 6 degrees, at which point it loses its sand-like quality and the snow starts to compact under the reindeer's hooves, ruining the grazing beneath. If the thermometer goes all the way into the positive as it has done increasingly in recent years it is a catastrophe. Melting snow or rain will freeze when the temperature goes negative again.
forming a crust of ice over the ground, locking the vegetation away from the browsing reindeer. This happened in 2013 and again in 2017. Tens of thousands of reindeer died. some herders lost more than a third of their animals in the past one hundred and thirty years the temperature has crept above zero three times during winter two of these times were in the past decade
From now on, the projections say every winter will experience days above zero. Reindeer herds can be up to 20,000 or 30,000 strong, and they are spread out across thousands of square miles of the Finnmark Plateau. artificial feeding is impractical not to mention far too expensive something is going to have to give warmer winters mean that the reindeer herds need more space in which to feed
Competition for the grassy tundra of the plateau is increasing from other reindeer, from wind farms, pylons, roads and mines. But the most formidable challenger is the humble downy birch. The office next to Threefels belongs to Thor Havard Sund, manager of the Finnmark Forest Service. Sund is a large man in a checked shirt with an open face and a warm smile.
As we were talking, we consulted the huge map that forms one wall of his office, but he quickly got frustrated. When was this map printed? he asked. We locate the date in small print at the edge. 1994. This is totally useless, he said. We need new maps. The tree line is out of control. Several interlinked factors affect the habitable range of tree species. The availability of sunlight, water and nutrients are prerequisites, but these interact with other variables such as wind and temperature.
Tiny gradations in altitude or latitude can mark large differences in vegetation. The downy birch detected the current warming trend much earlier than most scientists. This tree loves the warmer weather. It used to be confined to the dips and gullies on the plateau, away from the icy winds, but, unleashed by the warmth, it is storming over the top and out into the open, moving upslope.
at the rate of 40 metres a year. An enormous amount of territory is being transformed from tundra into woodland. On the face of it, more trees might sound like a good thing. The problem is that the greening of the tundra further accelerates the warming process. As the birch improves the soil and warms it with microbial activity, melting the permafrost and releasing methane, a greenhouse gas
85 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in its warming effects over a shorter time frame. Birch is a pioneer tree. In spring, it consents when the nights are getting shorter and the temperature is warmer and when the timing is right it flowers with two sets of catkins after pollination the downy buds covered in fine hair
break open to release countless little winged seeds onto the wind a good year for seed dispersal is called a mast year every year is a mast year these days before the growing season was may to october now it is april to november sooner or later the whole of the plateau will be covered in trees said sund it takes one hundred and sixty years for an old growth pine and birch forest to form
one that is suitable for reindeer to graze in. In Norway, aggressive tree growth is now creating havoc. The birch is racing over the tundra faster than the pines can keep up. This is bad news for the reindeer and the humans who rely on them. Upright birch forests don't develop a canopy. They are more like thickets. Without a canopy, they trap more snow.
their mass forming a windbreak for drifts too deep for the reindeer to walk or dig through. Their roots warm the ground below, causing the ice to melt around them. In time, a hectare of birch. will deposit three to four tons of leaf litter on the ground, further improving the organic composition of the soil and encouraging other plants. Reindeer do nibble the twigs of young birch,
But even if you doubled the number of reindeer in Finnmark County, you could not stop the birch, said Sund. Every year, more and more herders beg Sund to cut the birch to protect the precious tundra habitat needed for reindeer. And so, the herders who traditionally consider themselves a part of the natural world, not distinct from it, are fighting a losing battle against nature. Sund was blunt. The Sami...
will need to find another lifestyle. Thank you for listening to The Guardian Long Read. We'll be back after this. Welcome back to The Guardian Long Read. In spring and summer, the Sami bring their herds of reindeer to the coast. It used to be common in springtime to see herds swimming across a fjord to reach the lush grass of the untouched island, the herders and their dogs following in kayaks or rowing boats.
These days, most herds make the crossing in ferries that are otherwise used for cars. In summer, many Sami are dispersed with the herds, living in lava. Their traditional tents made of woven wool stretched over an interlocking pyramid of birch poles. Children, off school for the holidays, will still often spend weeks at their family's summer place, rarely venturing home.
It was only recently that herding families began to settle predominantly in one location, required by government edicts to live by a road and send their children to government schools. an attempt to clip the wings of the nomads and keep them where they could be seen and their animals taxed before herding was a family affair now it is mostly a male activity
as women look after school-aged children. In autumn and winter, though, the herds return to the plateau, to their winter place. It is during winter that Sami socialising takes place.
when herds are gathered on the plateau mostly within striking distance a day's hard riding by snowmobile of the centre of sami cultural life the town of kautakino It is Kautakino that hosts Sami University of Applied Sciences, the Sami Cultural Centre, the Biaivash Sami Theatre and the International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry.
For the hub of Europe's oldest continuous civilization, a way of life essentially intact for more than 10,000 years, it is surprisingly small. There are only 1,500 permanent inhabitants. Photos from the 1950s show the buildings of Kautakeno surrounded by the unbroken white of snowy tundra, without a tree in sight. Now, it is in the middle of a birch forest. From Alta I took the road to Cautaquino, 80 miles south. The road starts among the mixed pine and birch forests that border the river Alta.
then it climbed swiftly through a narrow gorge beneath sheer towering cliffs hundreds of metres high up on to the plateau above as i drove all along the roadside shrubby birch kept close company with the car Only once, when a mountain rose above the level of the open river valley, was there a flashing glimpse of unforested tundra, smooth, embellished snow cut by a line of bent and twisted little figures.
a battalion of birch marching upward. A short distance from Cautaceno, the road crested a ridge, and below, the plateau unfurled in a wide vista. From this vantage point, The plague of trees was frighteningly clear. As far as the eye could see the tundra of the plateau was flecked with black streaks. It was a beautiful scene.
But the fact that the trees shouldn't be there and the river should be rock hard, with ice several meters thick, capable of sustaining the weight of a herd of reindeer or an articulated truck, made the beauty of the vision hard to absorb. On this winter day, at this spot in the Arctic Circle, at minus 1 degrees, 14 degrees above average for this time of year, it was hard to avoid the feeling that if there's a tipping point in the Earth's climatic equilibrium...
We have already left it far behind. On my first morning in Kautakeno, the town was half asleep. deadened by the dark and the cold it was now minus eight degrees still not cold enough the woman in my guest-house complained the sky was overcast and without its clear dome The light was a kind of murky soup. The river beneath the bridge was moving in a slow sweep past the dark church on its spit of land. But the petrol station was different.
The forecourt was blazing with white lights, queues of huge pickup trucks, many outfitted by the same arctic truck company with enormous snow tires, sat with their engines running. filling the crisp air with clouds of diesel fumes behind each one was a trailer carrying a snowmobile or quad bike or both men wrapped head to toe in snowsuits and fox fur hats
clambered down and filled batches of jerry cans with fuel. They bought energy stacks and then they jumped into their massive polluting machines, pushed them into gear and roared off into the murk that passes for morning.
they were the reindeer herders off to do their check on their animals some might be back to-night some might be gone for weeks some might not come back at all In a yellow one-story house on the outskirts of Kautakeno, Berit Utsi held her two-year-old son to her chest and looked out into the mounting dark at the lake covered by a paper-thin sheet of ice.
and ringed with birch trees the secretary of the local reindeer herders association she had agreed to talk to me about the problems caused by the advancing trees it's not our culture to make a drama she said Everyone kept a calm exterior, but inside we were all very worried. She was speaking of the incredibly warm winter, which had just been blessed with its first snow. But Utsi's worries were not over. Her husband...
a reindeer herder, was still out there. This is a very stressful time for herders, even in a good year, moving the herds from autumn to winter grazing, keeping the herd together over hundreds of square kilometres. Apart from the previous week, when he had come back for a few days because she'd had an operation, Utsi's husband had been out on the plateau with the herds for two months straight. The family's entire income and savings are invested in the herd.
one animal is worth over 1200 euros at the abattoir and every part of the carcass skin antlers hooves and sinews is used by the Sami for clothes, tools and handicrafts. The high stakes encourage risk. There have been a lot of accidents lately, Utsi said. A point check, driving a perimeter all around the herd, is the daily routine of a herder. People have been driving snowmobiles on stones, hitting trees and crashing, ending up in hospital.
or maybe the ice is strong enough to carry the reindeer but the quad bike falls in last year two people went through the ice and did not come up she said when she was a teenager utzi tried working in a town but she missed her reindeer she grew up with them spending every summer with her family and the animals she remembers the tundra with fewer trees when she was a child
She feels the change is a loss. But like most Sami I met, she is pragmatic. We adapt. We always have. But the changing weather... And the advance of the trees combined with other pressures on grazing, roads, mines, wind turbines, mean that the economics of reindeer herding are becoming harder and harder. And... To make matters worse, the government is aware of the shrinking grazing and demands ever larger culls of animals every year. Her family needs another income.
The birch is almost as essential to traditional Sami life on the tundra as the reindeer. Crucial for shelter, insulation, sleds, skins and snowshoes, and for fuel. Its tannins and oils are used in treating clothes and skins and making oiled paper. Its bark was used for canoe skins and fermented in seawater. Utsi's modern kitchen was still full of the traditional handicrafts of the nomads made on her summer trips to the mountains. Her wooden spoons and ladles were all carved from birch.
Cups and bowls on a shelf were also carved from birch, while the handles of handmade knives were of antler and bone. In a small pot on the worktop were shavings of birch bark for tisanes and medicinal brews. But now the trees have become too much, said Utsi, frowning. She was studying to become a teacher.
Everyone knows someone who has given up their reindeer. Those who continue are either the herding aristocracy, who are so rich in animals that they can weather the storms for the moment, or else they are true devotees. Possibly addicts, possibly mad. I'm not sure which epithet best describes Isat, but his experience perfectly captures the cognitive dissonance forced upon us by global heating. Rationally.
We know what is happening and what is likely to happen. But practically and emotionally, it seems we will do everything we possibly can to avoid accepting the facts. I met Isat in his nondescript office in the back of a municipal building in Kautikeno at 9pm at the end of a long day. His organization, Protect Sapmi, is an NGO that provides legal advice to Sami communities, challenging the takeover of their land by multinationals and government parastatal organisations, and it is overwhelmed.
The warming Arctic has led to massive interest in opening up the north, not just in Norway, but all over the circumpolar world. Russia, Greenland, Alaska, Canada. Norway is self-sufficient in renewable energy, but there is huge demand from Germany, the UK and the Netherlands and wind farms in the arctic circle are rapidly colonising the few remaining treeless mountain ranges in finmark the sami people are supposed to control ninety six per cent of the land in finmark according to a recent law
And the Norwegian government is supposed to follow the UN principles of free, prior and informed consent for the alienation of indigenous land. But it doesn't. At the end of our discussion... At around 11pm, when I was ready for bed, Isat announced that he would now begin his second job, reindeer herding. He invited me to come along. His home was up the hill.
a terrace house in a small housing estate resembling many others in europe while i waited outside essap went in to kiss his wife and his four sleeping children and to put on his reindeer herding clothes two pairs of thick wool socks, thermals, down trousers, a fleece. a knee-length outer coat, a snowmobile jacket, thick rubber snow boots, mittens and a battered old reindeer skin hat lined with fox fur. He emerged ten minutes later.
Without his glasses and suit and neatly cut hair, he was transformed. No longer the quiet, diffident legal expert, he had become an action man.
Outside, it was only minus 5 degrees, but we had to be prepared to be out all night if an animal was lost or we had an accident. Shortly before I visited... a herder was trapped under a snowmobile for twelve hours before his friends came looking for him issat whistled to his dog who jumped on the back of his quad bike next to me she knew where we were going
The quad took us out of town, past the scraggy birch struggling up the hill, until the clumps got shorter and shorter. We sped past the 60 sign and up onto the plateau. At the top the trees were only head high. Isat slowed down and steered the quad to one side of the road. Standing up, he peered into the beams of his headlights, tracing the edge of the asphalt, looking for tracks.
Where the snow was disturbed, he moved especially slowly. Marks in the snow mean his reindeer have crossed the road and strayed. The trees cause the reindeer to roam more widely. which means more conflicts over territory and grazing areas, and more disputes with neighbours. Isat must patrol every night to make sure his reindeer are on the right side of the road.
The changes are increasing tensions in the Sami community. Back on the bike, we sped across open ground untrodden by reindeer, looking for tracks. Isat spied one, then many. heading in the wrong direction. He swerved at speed, following the tracks. The quad bike briefly left the ground, then landed with a crack on a frozen lake. Isat held his breath as the ice creaked and strained.
issuing an occasional report like a gunshot. Twice in the previous month he had gone through the ice. Last time he got soaked in a shallow pool up to his chest and the bike had to be winched out. taking several days to dry out in the garage. This is the most dangerous job in Norway, he said with a grin. After an hour and a half, Isat slid the bike to a stop. They should be here.
Do you have GPS? I asked. There were ten reindeer in the herd tagged with GPS, but Isat's phone was out of juice. In any case, he prefers not to use it. He turned off the engine and the lights. and listened for the bells that some of the reindeer wear. The silence was immense. Nothing. Oh well, he said, turning the key and twisting the bike towards home. isat told me his brother could continue the search in the morning isat knows that herding reindeer this way is no longer viable
though he spends all day arguing with the government and mining companies for compensation on the basis that it is. As the quad bike wind down the hill back towards the sleeping town in the valley below, The trees by the roadside gradually increased again in height, and the howls of the dogs of Kautokeno filled the night air. A wolf had been sighted nearby in recent days, another consequence of the expanding forest.
Esat pulled up outside his house, shuttered in darkness, and I climbed down, stiff with cold. As he unwrapped his outer clothes and went inside to bed, a light came on in his sister's house next door. His niece, Maret, was just waking up. It was the day of a big meeting, the 50th anniversary of the Norwegian Sami Association. Maret is famous among her people.
She is one of a few Sami chefs trying to preserve its cuisine and traditional practices around food and the medicinal uses of plants. I want to make people think through their stomachs, she said. I can make a protest through my food. Everything is from nature. That day, Sámi representatives from all over the north of Norway would gather to discuss the new reindeer lore.
proposed mining and wind farm developments in Finnmark and Tromsø, and a climate crisis adaptation fund to help the Sami transition to new livelihoods. But Maret sees the problem as much larger than Norway. Someone has to pay for this life, this lifestyle and it seems it is the animals and our indigenous way of living. That is the cost. For more Guardian Long Reads in text and a selection in audio, go to theguardian.com forward slash long read.
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