Frame Alignment Between Environmentalists and the Sámi in the Forest Dispute in Inari, Finland Until the 2000s—Competing Conservation Needs and Obstacles for Co-Living With the Non-Human

Nyyssönen, Jukka

doi:10.3389/fcosc.2022.925713

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Conserv. Sci., 12 July 2022

Sec. Human-Wildlife Interactions

Volume 3 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2022.925713

This article is part of the Research Topic Decolonizing Human and Non-human Coexistence View all 6 articles

Frame Alignment Between Environmentalists and the Sámi in the Forest Dispute in Inari, Finland Until the 2000s—Competing Conservation Needs and Obstacles for Co-Living With the Non-Human

Jukka Nyyssönen^*

High North Department, Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, Tromsø, Norway

The cooperation between Sámi actors and environmentalists in the resistance of loggings in the conflict over forestry in Inari, in Finnish Sápmi, in the 2000s has been presented as a cohesive alliance, innovative in creating new political space and channels of influence. Looking more closely, there were foundational non-aligning factors causing friction to the alliance, relating to the legitimacy of the presence of the non-human in the biotic system. I shall examine as to what extent and why the frames employed aligned or conflicted. One way to grasp the fragility of the frame alignment is to study the opinions held by the different actors about what needs restoring/conserving, whether these are economic, ecological, or cultural elements, or a combination of these, and how the entities to be protected were situated in time. The historical context of this article is the long series of forestry conflicts in Inari, for the duration of which the transformations and varying strategies of alignment of environmental, herder, and forestry frames are studied. It is argued that the combination and number of the non-human animals to be protected were one root cause for misalignment, deepening the rifts between environmentalists and the Sámi to this day.

Introduction

In 2008, Greenpeace Nordic published a report criticizing Finnish and Swedish forestry. There is a short paragraph on the old forests and loggings undertaken in the Sámi homeland: “The northern forests have been used by the Saami for hundreds of years to provide pasture and fodder for reindeer. This traditional way of land use, which is also a basis for the Saami culture, is threatened by other land use practices” (Harkki et al., 2008). The Sámi usage is presented through a series of framings, which, in order to function, requires a series of omissions of alternative framings circulating in the public sphere during this time: reindeer herding is framed as traditional land use instead of, as one extreme example, semi-industrial ranching for meat production. The traditionality and its age-oldness guarantee the cultural survival of the Sámi; it is not credited to economic robustness or expansive strategies of herding. The old forest is presented as a pasture, which feeds the reindeer, instead of forest being trampled by the overabundant reindeer or providing economic services in the form of timber and employment. The threat emanates from the externalities depicted in extenso after the quoted passage. The biggest omission is the dominant biodiversity talk, the ecological framing. Its alignment with the Sámi cause was not presented, even though it is possible to state that forestry is detrimental to the Sámi herding, culture, and identity.

In environmentalist discourses, it has become commonplace to exhibit a shared front for the actor groups. The front is constructed through a shared external threat of extractive land-use forms, against which Indigenous People (IP) are especially vulnerable. The ecosystem needs to be saved as the foundation for the life forms of the IP (Pariisin ilmastosopimus ja saamelaiset: Älkää viekö meiltä talvea - Greenpeace Suomi; Feola & Jaworska, 2018). On many occasions, though, the environmental movement and the collaborating Indigenous groups have proven to have different aims, interests, and motives behind their engagement. The environmentalists sometimes have major expectations regarding the anticipated high ecological morals of the IP and a romanticized view of the superiority of ecological Indigenous knowledge. These hegemonic constructions are prone to numerous uses and abuses as well as paternalism and intolerance. The focus on nature is often a complicated issue for the Indigenous movement. On the one hand, they claim authority over traditional places, which intertwine with their identities or have usage value as resource areas. On the other hand, they reject preconceived notions of themselves as “natural conservationists” as a belittling and condemnatory characteristic (Mathiesen, 2004; Green, 2009; Neale and Vincent, 2016). These alliances may be abandoned by IP due to changes of strategic goals, preferences and cost-benefit evaluations as well (Horowitz et al., 2018).

In this article, I shall examine the cooperation between Sámi actors and the environmentalists in their resistance towards loggings in the conflict over forestry in Inari, located in the Finnish part of the Sápmi, the Sámi home area, in the mid- to late 2000s. By analyzing the restoration/protection priorities and the position of the non-human animals, I shall study the extent to which the employed frames aligned or conflicted. The dispute, escalating and weakening throughout the 2000s, is contextualized in the longer history of land use, frame alignment efforts, and forestry conflicts in Inari, the root cause of which is the overlapping usage areas of forestry and reindeer herding. The land in Inari, of which approximately 90% is owned by the state (a situation questioned by the Sámi), is divided as follows: (1) land area in economic usage; (2) wilderness areas, with limited zones for forestry usage; and (3) conserved areas, in which forestry is totally forbidden. The disputed areas belong mostly to category 1, but there were also plans to log within the wilderness areas (Valkonen, 2007). Reindeer herding can be practiced in the whole region, but the pasture area for each reindeer-herding cooperative is delimited and the stress from forestry is unevenly shared between the cooperatives. Five cooperatives were involved in the dispute, of which the Ivalo cooperative and the region of Nellim saw the most heated disputes. The usage of area has followed the principles of not parallel but shared, multiple and overlapping usage and management, under different management regimes, between which cooperation was for a long time non-existent. The fronts and alliance-building in the disputes have fluctuated, whereas the scales of the conflicts have long been global, not just local (Hallikainen et al., 2006; Vartiainen, 2008; Sarkki and Heikkinen, 2010; Nyyssönen, 2011).

The topic is analyzed using frame analysis, and more closely by theorizing on frame alignment. Framing has become a popular concept both in communication sciences (Entman, 1993, passim) and sociology (Goffman, 1974 1986, passim). Frames provide coherent understanding of complex policy situations through a selection of certain features of reality for attention (Raitio, 2008) and interpretation. Framing is an elementary part of political communication and of communicating the relevance of one’s agenda. Through framing, social movement organizations try to gather support for their claims and mobilize potential participants by interpreting and constructing coherent meanings. Framing includes the selection and employment of chosen elements to construct an argument about problems and their causation, evaluation, and solution (Entman, 1993; Raitio, 2008; Sara, 2019; Snow et al., 2019). Frames condition and shape the interests and bias for action, as well as the duties and rights of individuals/organizations (Raitio, 2008), and often perform a transformative function by reconstituting the way in which objects of attention are seen or understood (Ketelaars et al., 2014; Snow et al., 2019). In the same manner as discourses, frames also exclude other ways of seeing the issue at hand, competing knowledge systems, policy options, etc. (Saarikoski and Raitio, 2013). Frame disputes can be both “detrimental and facilitative” for mobilization, leading to factionalization in some situations and enabling collective action in others (Snow et al., 2019).

Since the 1970s, frame analysis has been used increasingly in studies on social mobilization and environmental disputes. Until the late 1990s, the majority of framing research was descriptive and concentrated on the elaboration of framing concepts. Since then, the empirical scope of the field has grown, and nowadays the bulk of framing research is explanatory (Ketelaars et al., 2014, 506). Applied to social movements, the idea of framing suggests that meanings associated with events, activities, places, and actors are typically contestable and negotiable, and thus open to debate and differential interpretation (Ketelaars et al., 2014; Snow et al., 2019).

Kaisa Raitio (2008, 45ff.; see also e.g. Ketelaars et al., 2014) has listed the advantages of frame analysis: frames provide insights as to why participants in a debate have different understandings of the problem and why efforts to settle a conflict fail; since frames determine in part what counts as a fact, a simple cognitive approach—the examination of facts and evidence—is not enough to resolve a locked conflict, like the one ongoing in Inari. Frame analysis can provide knowledge of the beliefs, valuations, and interpretations, underlying the alternative understandings of the debated problem, including what the conflict itself is about. The interests of the participants are not taken as given, but frames are seen as conditioning the interests of the conflicting parties. Meanings mobilized in the context of social movements are also seen as something that is produced having numerous sources, including cultural ones: no longer only political opportunities or organizational structures. In addition, the materiality of the underlying problem, and the creation of meanings based on real perceptions of the participant’s physical environment, is not erased in frame analysis. Discourse and framing are often used almost identically in research; in this article, the frames are perceived as embedded in discourses, such as those of economic growth, biotic well-being, and cultural rights.

Frame Alignment

In a sociological vein, David A. Snow and colleagues have studied and problematized framing in social movement studies and introduced the concept of frame alignment, the classical definition being “the linkage of individual and social movement organizations’ interpretive orientations, such that some set of individual interests, values and beliefs and organization activities, goals and ideology are congruent and complementary” (Snow et al., 1986). The interactive interpretative process through which meanings are debated and new ones are articulated substantiates frame alignment and can be examined empirically within the context of social movements (Snow et al., 2019). Ideally, and as evidenced in empirical research, the resulting frame resonance contributes to a movement’s success by affirming the interaction of a frame with a discursive opportunity structure, which supports movements’ arguments (Zeng et al., 2019).

Much research interest has been invested in the micro-level of protest participation with the meso-level of protest organization. There is a growing awareness that frame alignment is not a constant, and there is not necessarily a full alignment between individual participants and those of the movement. The alignment of individuals with a movement is something that should be examined empirically, and which is a matter of degree (Ketelaars et al., 2014), that is, as a factor prone to variation from full to partial, potentially also including non-aligning elements.

Four basic strategic alignment processes have been identified by Snow and his colleagues. Frame bridging involves “the linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally disconnected frames regarding a particular issue.” Bridging can occur between a movement and individuals, or across/between social movements. Frame amplification entails “the embellishment, crystallization, and invigoration of selected values, beliefs, and understandings so that they are more salient and dominant than other existing values.” Frame extension shows how the interests and framings of the movement extend beyond the movement’s initial constituency to include issues thought to be of relevance to potential adherents. Frame transformation involves changing prior understandings and perspectives among individuals or collectivities (Snow et al., 1986; Snow et al., 2019). This typology is set to work in this study of the alignment building between two structurally disconnected frames between movements, with an overlapping but not unproblematic history.

The complexity of the conflict is highlighted by the fact that the parties were unanimous about with who the different parties were disputing against—The Sámi view was that they were bargaining for their rights from the state and ministries, whereas other parties were of the opinion that the dispute existed between (outsider) environmentalists and the local population (Vartiainen, 2008). In the local community, the conflict was deeply dividing and heated. Media campaigns, demonstrations, physical harassment, and threats were employed during the dispute (Raitio, 2008).

The parties in this conflict were the Forest and Park Service (FPS), a state enterprise responsible for loggings and conservation of the forests, siding with its guiding Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, with industrial actors/purchasers of timber and with the local employees on their payroll, including a number of Sámi loggers. The Sámi herders, whose winter pastures were at stake, sided with the environmental movement. Environmentalist actors included Nature League (Luonto-Liitto), the youth organization of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (Suomen luonnonsuojeluliitto, Sll). The League concentrated on petition work and surveys of endangered species. The Sll was established in 1938 and is considered to be the “official” conservationist organization (Poutanen & Terhonen, 2008, 255). The Sll was not directly involved in the conflict but reported the matter in their periodical Suomen Luonto. The most visible actor in the conflict, Greenpeace, is usually taken to be foreign and the most radical organization entering Inari. Its ad hoc mode of action, too, differed from the established national organizations. Greenpeace is media savvy and experienced in running media campaigns, but it had a problem in lacking local legitimacy (Sarkki, 2012; Zeng et al., 2019). I shall refer to these actor groups by their organization names, when relevant; I shall otherwise refer to them and to their frames as “environmentalists”.

In the municipality of Inari, three Sámi groups reside, distinguished by language and different sets of traditional means of living. In total, the Sámi are a minority in Inari, comprising approximately 30% (2,152 out of 6,985) of the total population in 2006 (Vartiainen, 2008). The majority speak Northern Sámi. All the Sámi languages are threatened, and this concerns especially the Aanaar and Skolt Sámi languages. The Sámi have sustained their identity and culture despite periods of assimilative pressure and participation in welfare-state-induced modernization. As a result of this modernization, there is no clear-cut division along the subsistence forms: in Finland, there are Sámi on the payroll of the FPS and Finns have a right to herd reindeer (Lehtola, 2002). A total of 85% of the herders in Inari were Sámi at the time (Vartiainen, 2008). Although reindeer herding, the most iconic subsistence form of the Sámi, is a subsistence form practiced by a minority, reindeer are of great importance for the Sámi. They provide economic assets, sustain communities and identities, and generate cultural rights for the whole community. Industrial land use—in Inari, most significantly forestry—is one of the externalities causing disturbance in pasture lands. The externalities, in addition to the indisputable rise in the number of reindeer, have created periods of crisis and accelerated the modernization of herding in numerous ways, including resorting to artificial feeding in times of poor pastures.

My contribution is empirical rather than theoretical: the historical sedimentation of the frames is one crucial means of understanding their fixated sternness or transformation, as well as conditions and prerequisites for their alignment. The historical take contributes directly to one knowledge deficit in the field: as pointed out by Snow et al. (2019), comparatively little research has studied the discursive, contextual, and structural processes through which frames evolve and change. This change is discernible when researching the theme historically over a longer period of time. The second contribution is less dependent upon aspects of (historical) time. As the field has recently moved on to study the effects and consequences of framing and frame resonance, there is still a lack of systematic studies of frame alignment across (two or more) movements (Ketelaars et al., 2014). The Sámi and the environmentalist movement differ in radical ways: the first is organized in multiple forums, acting as an institutionalized self-governing organization, while the environmentalist movement is a single-issue movement mostly organized as a civil society actor. Studying them as movements is possible in the context of the dispute, which gathered a number of actors in an ad hoc civil society action.

I am interested in how the frames were constructed and what their implications to the Sámi were: subjectifying, hierarchizing, or rights-generating, under the conservation paradigm? Did the Sámi and environmentalist frames align, or which omissions were required for them to do so? More specifically, in what ways were the positions of non-human animals and conservation/restoration needs articulated in different frames?

Materials and Methods

The historical section of this article is based on prior research. Much of the earlier research on this 2000s conflict has concentrated on Greenpeace, so I have increased the number of relevant organizations studied. Primary research material comprises petitions, pamphlets, and other material intended for public debate, gathered in the open electronic archives of Greenpeace and of Nature League, both active in the conflict. The primary material covers the core years of the conflict studied, 2003–2006. Greenpeace archives did not contain statements, but web articles and more substantial pamphlets, in addition to which I received some references (seven in total) directly from their Helsinki office. The archive of Nature League contained statements and petitions, 118 in total, of which 14 concerned topics directly or indirectly connected to the dispute studied. The volumes from the aforementioned years of the periodical of the Sll, Suomen Luonto, were examined. The choice of open electronic organization archives was pragmatic: the coverage and number of sources produced by the activists is exhaustive in the sense that it covers the available public source material reasonably to hand in its entirety. There is no longer any guarantee of the full availability of relevant press material in web media outlets, and there was not enough time to go through paper versions from such a time period. Sámi voices are audible in these mentioned sources as well, whereas the electronic archive of the Sámi Parliament did not cover the years studied. This deficit was covered by means of public material used in my earlier studies.

Instead of aiming for measurable results by means of a quantitative analysis of concepts, phrasings, and arguments (cf. e.g. Ketelaars et al., 2014), my approach is qualitative. I compare the choice, weighting, and level of congruence of the strategic resources mobilized in an interpretation of the problem and its framing by foresters, environmentalists, and the Sámi, with the main focus on the environmentalist effort to build a frame alignment with the Sámi. The frame-defined solution and the varying coverage of conservation needs are studied as well. Of the basic strategic alignment processes, frame bridging is taken as an organizational aim, while frame amplification and frame extension are used to analyze the alignment strategies. Frame transformation, or lack thereof, is charted in the historical section of the article (Snow et al., 1986; Snow et al., 2019). In addition, I shall analyze the strategy in frame alignment by looking into the omissions (Entman, 1993), and by comparing the frames to the discursive field debating the relationship between herding and forestry. Thus, the method is concerned not only with loose resonance with broader political values or tendencies but also with efforts to align frames that are seen as embedded in a specific discursive field, where the discursive resources change over time as well.

Because of this connection, a short inquiry is undertaken concerning aspects of discursive power in the dispute. Discursive power is exercised by influencing desires and beliefs. This form of power refers to invisible and subtle forms of power, which rest primarily on ideational sources, such as values, norms, and ideas when trying to influence an agenda or a process. Knowledge and the control of it are key sources for the exercise of discursive power. Work on discursive power has highlighted that power not only pursues and serves interests but also generates them in the first place. Discursive power stresses the role of accepted truths and knowledge about desirable developments, thereby uncovering the interrelations between discursive power, legitimacy, and authority (Fritz & Binder, 2020). In this article, I follow the discursive power of agenda-setting in framing the dispute and the consequences it had in relation to other parties and their frames. Whose frame(s) marginalized other frames, interests, and ideas?

Raitio (2008) has studied the forestry frames employed by the state actors in this dispute in the greatest depth. In addition, the dispute has been studied as a case of seeking ways to bypass the formal and state- and industry-dominated ways of administering environmental policies. Linjakumpu and Valkonen (2006; see also Valkonen, 2007) have studied the case as part of the new way of political alliance-building through communication in networks, bypassing and winning over the traditional forestry power centers with a successful horizontal alliance between Greenpeace and the Sámi herders. Sarkki and Heikkinen (2010) studied the case using actor-network theory, employing human and conceptual networks to meet targeted goals. They claimed as well that the social and conceptual network building turned out to be a success. I aim to discover which omissions were required to make the alliance possible, and whether the foundation for the environmentalist-Sámi frame alignment was a robust one. Before doing that, I shall contextualize the case in longer histories of frame alignment in the fields of nature protection and forestry in Inari and their relation to the Sámi question.

Results

Environmentalists and Sámi Framings on Protection of Nature

Nature conservation was among the first politico-ideological “intrusions” into the Sámi home area by the state of Finland: the first areas were protected at the beginning of the 20^th century, during the first wave of nature conservation. Historically, in nature conservation discourses of Nordic countries, references to nationalism/patriotism and natural romanticism were substituted with economic reasons for conservation/protection, and finally with the environmental concerns of the 1960s (Niemi, 2018). Environmentalism was among the classic new social movements of the 1960s, promising an alternative to class-based policies. This promise of deeper democratization (Forsyth, 2004) was amplified by an anti-colonial stance: in the 1960s and 1970s, when environmental concerns emerged and were circulated in the Finnish public sphere, conservation was presented as an anti-colonial means of protecting nature, natural resources, and the environment from the industrial, European-American onslaught taking place, e.g., in the colonies. The ideology embraced the world in a global ecosphere of solidarity. This turned the biologized idea-complex into one of the “good” ideologies in circulation at the time, although environmentalism was not free from middle-class interests and visions of nature, nor from colonial remnants and ideas (the natives were placed low in the cultural evolution, yet still capable of causing damage and changes in the biotopes). What was new was the varying level of critical anti-progressivism and anti-industrialism. Another novelty was an inclination to see humans as a “cancer”: no longer as the carriers of rights, but as misguided beings needing to be forced/guided into changing their excessive and destructive ways. Thus, environmentalism possessed a stigmatizing discursive power to label opponents as irrational and harmful. The high crisis consciousness, the sense of moral righteousness, and obligation to save the life itself added to the exclusive force. All this, added to the scientific, expert-driven nature of the movement, led to another colonial trait, the capacity to bypass “native” practices and rationales as environmentally harmful and ill-advised (Dorst, 1970; Taylor, 1970; Mesarovic and Pestel, 1974); concerning the Sámi in Finland, this “eco-colonial” way of reasoning became evident and sharper later in the 1980s (Valkonen, 2003; Nyyssönen, 2011).

The argument that the establishment of national parks and the regulation of hunting can operate as acts of claiming state/national sovereignty, authority, and administrative control to outlying peripheral areas has been well established in research (Roberts and Jørgensen, 2016; Elenius, 2017). In its turn, the idea of environmentalism and conservation as colonial and predatory acts of government-led land grab is rather recent. This vein of scholarship claims that the coupled authority and expertise to talk about these issues is usually reserved for the state authorities. It is also argued that in science and ecology, the whole conservation paradigm bypasses the moral issues of Indigenous rights and their stewardship over ancestral lands (e.g., Castagna, 2005). The conservation of native lands is seen to be based on and protected by state legislation and power, signifying a denial of lived materiality on the land and continuing symbolic and/or concrete displacement of the IP from their lands (Falch, 2002; Castagna, 2005; Lasko, 2005; Heinämäki et al., 2014). The strong position the state possesses also in Finland indicate that the frame transformation was only beginning to be undertaken as the environmentalist frame was constructed by amplifying the salience of natural values and the ecological side of the issues; the institutional frame was still the state but no longer from a nationalistic stance.

In Inari, the situation was different: a frame extension was taking place among the Sámi. From the 1970s onwards, in the Sámi public sphere, a widespread sentiment existed that nature protection was beneficial to them: it was viewed as protection of reindeer herding and subsistence possibilities, as well as protection of pastures from more detrimental land use forms (see e.g. Kitti, 1980; Nyyssönen, 2000; Hallikainen et al., 2006). The Sámi gaze upon nature conservation was a gaze to a preserved and saved resource zone; the questions of nature conservation were issues of compensations and securing usage rights. The natural environment was implicitly included in the sphere of protection, as a pasture resource. On the part of the Sámi, the frame extension did not mean abandoning the cultural or economic side of the issue, but since herding and hunting was allowed in the established parks, a rare occurrence of environmental peace ensued, clearly demarcated by the park borders (Nyyssönen, 2000). The chosen policy towards traditional subsistence forms exemplifies that the Finnish conservation paradigm was not only colonial by intention, and that the actual colonial remnants, which had placed IP in the cultural hierarchies, had vanished.

Globally, the environmentalist movement responded to criticism of excluding the IP voice and tried to get rid of colonial residues. Environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) aimed to influence politics in novel ways through media attention and media campaigns, international agreements, and novel (direct) action forms from the 1980s onwards. A “natural” anti-state and anti-corporation alliance with the grassroots was celebrated in environmental research in the 1990s. While some ENGOs have achieved an institutionalized status in national and international policymaking, the experiences of their campaigning are not solely ones of success. ENGO engagement can result in compromises and the neutralization of radical agendas, where a more powerful global agenda marginalizes the local agendas and actors (Forsyth, 2004). Simultaneously, biodiversity discourses have made the environmental discourses even louder and more compelling. The alternative political space was in transformation and was seemingly causing the alignment, frame bridging, and deeper transformation of the frames and aims to become more complex. Two sources of conflict can be identified: the continuing stress on biodiversity in ENGO-argumentation and the increase in the ability of Sámi movements to define the topics of disputes and the connected blaming of (eco-)colonialism in the Sámi discourse.

Reindeer had a fragmenting effect on efforts to align the frames. The environmentalist movement leaned on a scientific discourse that had for most of the 20^th century aired frustration about herding being detrimental to nature conservation and ecosystems (Nyyssönen, in print). The periods of positive voices regarding herding have been short, and in fact with the accumulation of knowledge regarding growing reindeer numbers, scholarly voices on pasture ecology have become more critical of herding. The position of reindeer in the ecosystem has turned unstable. In recent years, the international conservation regime (articulated by, e.g., the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN, and the European Union) has become more critical of traditional usages in conserved areas due to returning to a “cultureless” wilderness thinking and conceptualizations like “natural state,” to which reindeer herding and other traditional usage forms are foreign or detrimental. The situation was deemed critical for reindeer herding in 2010, as uniform global models of conservation and the global discourses of natural state, biodiversity, and ecological sustainability sustained the idea of the detrimentality of traditional herding to conservation (Heikkinen et al., 2010). Biodiversity thinking has had a similar effect concerning the pasture ecosystem in general, but despite this, reindeer still graze in all of Northern Lapland, with one exception (the Malla Strict Nature Reserve, despite periods of illegal grazing, Jokinen, 2005; compare Heikkinen et al., 2010).

The Sámi community has aired multiple intersecting interests due to the Sámi group on the payroll of FPS. The Sámi are also increasingly losing goodwill from the (southern) public due to occasions of over-grazing, a disputed term, but the cultivation of which has, in any case, meant ruptures to the ecological reputation of the herding and the Sámi community. The position of the Sámi in the conservation discourses has become unstable (Luhta, 2008). The ecological hierarchies constructed in the environmental frames at worst stigmatize the vital aspects of the Sámi communities, and the divisions are sustained in the biodiversity frame to this date (Nyyssönen, in print).

After a short period of frame extension, an amplification of the salience of traditional means of living and a judicial framing took place on the Sámi front. This turn has been sustained by a number of scholars, also numerous within Sámi research, who are increasingly critical of the Green transition. This is seen as eco-colonialism, a form of epistemic violence, originating from academic and environmental hierarchies and frames, neglecting and denying Sámi environmental knowledge, especially of reindeer herding. The issue is coupled with the unsolved issue of land rights and cultural rights to practice subsistence forms, breached by conservationists, the renewables sector, and the extractive industries alike (Torp, 2001; Heikkilä, 2004).

Forestry, Forestry Conflicts in Inari, and the Sámi

The FPS has a history of working hard to launch and sustain efficient forestry in Inari. The forestry project was long hindered by lengthy distances, poor transport connections to the mills in Southern Lapland, and high costs. The state institution had a double role, since it managed the nature conservation areas as well. This constituted a center of power, with tangible consequences to the herders due to overlapping resource zones with reindeer herding (e.g., Nyyssönen, 2000). Forestry was practiced by different means and in varying intensity from the early 20^th century onwards. The forest sector became part of the state project of public management and income distribution, through employment and the industrialization of the peripheries of Finland (Nyyssönen, 2000; Parpola and Åberg, 2009). Concerning reindeer herding, the relationship was passively protective: in principle, the FPS was willing to secure the traditional means of living and their development. Later, during the 1940s, attitudes hardened and occasional demands for a decrease in the reindeer herding areas were heard (Parpola and Åberg, 2009). Contrary to general opinion and expectations, reindeer herding did not vanish (Turunen et al., 2018), and conservation areas were introduced to the region in earnest in the post-war era. This did not stop forestry: in the areas outside the protected areas, forestry expanded in scale, mechanization, harvested cubic meters and in logged areal, especially during the period between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the paper industry was expanding in capacity and demand for raw material was on the rise. The FPS was to log, secure, and increase growth in the remaining forests and reluctantly conserve such forests as they had to (Parpola and Åberg, 2009).

The forestry and industrial projects were long supported by the most powerful national ideologies, those of an increase in national and individual wealth. The forestry frame was long substantiated by the (scientifically backed) belief that loggings had an increasing effect on the amount of timber. From the end of the 1960s onwards, numerous actors began to criticize the FPS. This criticism concerned failures of cultivation and in securing forest regeneration, over-extensive clear cuttings, etc. The FPS reacted by denying the problems: the criticism was felt to be unearned, as the FPS had continued to conserve remote, unproductive areas and had begun to improve the traces of the efficient forestry. The criticism came from the emerging environmentalist movement (regarding the consequences for forest ecosystem and scenery) and from the state (regarding a failure to provide an economically balanced result, and also concerning the growth of forests). The first-mentioned actor was ignored and rejected as a serious actor until long into the 1980s, while the state actor was taken seriously by the FPS. In the 1970s, facing yet another series of initiatives in establishing conservation areas, the FPS teamed with forest industry and used lost employment possibilities as an argument for their resistance to conservation (Parpola and Åberg, 2009). The frame extension included only the forestry sector, and the transformation of the frame concerned only sharpening the tools for reacting to resistance.

The local population, including the Sámi, was long positive and pro-active towards the forestry project (Nyyssönen, 2007). A major Sámi concern was to obtain a share of the profits from the use of local natural resources, although emerging rights discourse is discernible as well. It is not difficult to find positive Sámi voices regarding forestry and employment as late as the mid-1960s (Nyyssönen, 2000). The Sámi movement began to frame their culture as having its foundation in nature in official statements during the mid-1970s. It became standard practice to represent the forestry as being harmful to pastures and to herding, and the question was connected to the land rights issue (Aikio, 1970; Nyyssönen, 2000). Several contextual changes assisted in this transformation, among them the Sámi movement entering the IP movement, providing impulses built on the environmental discourse. Another context was the forests/pasture lands of Inari: a new phase of efficient forestry had dawned in the 1970s, and its consequences were beginning to accumulate in the pastures.

In addition to active support of the protected areas among herders, sections of the Sámi community engaged in the series of forest disputes, which commenced in the 1980s and 1990s in Upper Lapland. In the Kessi dispute in the late 1980s, concerning loggings in southeastern Inari, the issue of Sámi (rights) and reindeer herding could not rise to the center of the conflict. The state actors framed the dispute as environmental and as one of national interest, regardless of the intentions of the Sámi, with whom the environmentalist Kessi movement built alliances. The Kessi dispute was significant in another way: deep ecology actors in the environmentalist front began to raise critical voices concerning the ecological reputation of the Sámi. Environmental thinking had increased in depth, radicality, its sense of urgency, and exclusive power (Nyyssönen, 2011), which in part disrupted efforts regarding frame extension by the environmentalists to cover Sámi issues. The Kessi dispute resulted in the establishment of 12 wilderness areas in Lapland, nine of them in the Sámi home area. These areas are meant to preserve the “wilderness” character of the regions, securing the Sámi culture and traditional means of living, and to develop the versatile usage of nature. In other words, the establishment followed the principles of multiple use/sustainable development, and it was possible to undertake cautious loggings in the wilderness areas (Nyyssönen, 2012).

In Finland during the 1990s, a major shift occurred towards more environmentally sound practices, management strategies, and a broader involvement of the affected people/citizens in decision-making regarding resource management. This democratization led to public local planning by the FPS in Inari in the mid-1990s. Kaisa Raitio detected a great level of inclusion in participatory planning in the public hearings, working groups, and negotiations, while the actual influence in the upper levels of administrative decision-making remained unclear and meager (Raitio, 2008). This has not decreased the critical voices that the FPS has had to listen to since the 1970s. The non-effect of consultations on the location and scale of loggings, for example, demonstrated the FPS’s unwillingness regarding frame transformation.

In the forestry debates in the mid-2000s, a change occurred in constellations, in fronts and in the ways the problems were constructed: whereas in the debates during the 1990s, the conflicting parties were forestry economy and the environmentalist movement, during the 2000s, the conflicting parties were forestry and reindeer herders/the Sámi, the latter backed up by the environmentalists. Frame transformation and frame extension were taking place: facing criticism of an overt focus on biodiversity and failing, despite their efforts, to provide the IP with a meaningful voice, the environmentalist movement included justice, human rights, and equity within their agenda, at the same time as Sámi actors revised their argumentation in disputes taking place in the 2000s by toning down the environmental issues in their repertoire (Sarkki and Heikkinen, 2010). One consequence of this shift has been a lesser weight laid upon ecological arguments, while the rights of the Sámi and reindeer herding have risen in significance (Hallikainen et al., 2006).

In the 2000s, according to Kaisa Raitio, the state forestry frame was thoroughly economical, the land being gazed upon as a resource for two equally important land use forms, which the FPS regarded itself as “conciliating” between as a “neutral partner.” This belief was a central tenet in the identity frame of the FPS. At the same time as reindeer herding and the user rights of the Sámi culture were considered important, the FPS was of the opinion that reindeer herding, although suffering damage in pastures, had to give way to forestry, due to the fulfillment of profitability goals and because forestry had had to retreat from protected areas. The latter also considered that reindeer herding was being given adequate consideration, while additional restrictions would hamper the most important task of the FPS, i.e., employment (Raitio, 2008; Vartiainen, 2008). During the dispute, there was little means to build alignment with the FPS.

Throughout the decade-long conflicts over forestry, the fronts had been symmetrically opposed to one another: in the forestry frame, officials chose to highlight forest coverage as increasing, whereas loggings in the wilderness areas and the areal of the disputed areas had been marginal (Tynys, 2000; Veijola, 2000), but extremely significant as a source of local employment. The environmentalist frame perceived the solution to the contrary effect to be an extension of protected areas and saving the old forests connected to the protected areas from loggings as well, since all logging was and would be detrimental to the ecosystem (Harkki and Pyykkö, 2005). Reindeer was a dividing issue in the framings: foresters and forestry scientists perceived an over-abundance of reindeer as a threat to the regeneration of the forest ecosystem (Juntunen, 2000), while the environmentalists claimed that forestry harms reindeer herding by spoiling winter pastures. In retrospect, the FPS was on the retreat because of changes in support from the state administration. In principle, their framing resonated well with the local, provincial, and state administrative priorities of employment (Nyyssönen, 2000; Green, 2009), but the framing of silvicultural wisdom may have experienced wear and tear.

The Sámi herders and the Sámi movement have had to relate to two strong, partially state-pronounced frames, both of which enjoyed, at different periods and from different segments, wide support in the local community. A serious effort was made to align the environmentalist and herder frames. In the early 2000s, the front was united on the matter of its shared antagonist the FPS regarding the spoiling of pastures and the ecology.

The Conflict Over Logging the Old Forests in Inari in the 2000s: Competing Framings

The experience of poor potential to influence the FPS, and changes in herder strategy, enabled a new alliance between Greenpeace and Sámi herders (Sarkki, 2012). The dispute was initiated by a group of herders from Ivalo and Hammastunturi cooperatives, who did not accept the scale and location of the loggings in important pasture areas; the latter cooperative invited Greenpeace to Inari (Valkonen, 2007). The most active phase of the dispute, in the years 2003–2006, was marked by a series of demonstrations, boycotts, and publicity campaigns in Finland and abroad, organized by Greenpeace. The FPS chose a hard line and continued the planned loggings until January 2006, initiating court cases on this matter (Valkonen, 2007; Raitio, 2008; Liimatainen, 2010). In 2005–2006, the environmentalists and the Sámi organizations launched a successful operation that bypassed the participatory negotiations and halted the loggings, due to claims that the forestry certificates¹ were not sufficient to protect the rights of the IP or the value of the environment. Greenpeace campaigns targeting paper buyers in Germany damaged the reputation of the purchaser of timber, Stora Enso. The Sámi made effective use of emerging Internet communities, as well as lists of ethical industrial actors and lastly the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), which took the side of Greenpeace and the Sámi. The Saami Council, another international actor, had done the same: under pressure, the Foreign Ministry of Finland ordered the FPS to halt the loggings—just before a counter-appeal to the UN by Sámi forestry workers, who appealed regarding their right to earn a living by legal means. (Sarkki, 2012). In 2007, with one exception, the FPS withdrew from loggings and entered into moratoriums and an agreement in 2010 with the Sámi herders, where 100,000 hectares were conserved from forestry (Liimatainen, 2010). The FPS could log elsewhere in the region and Greenpeace withdrew from Inari, celebrating a victory (Sarkki, 2012). Raitio (2008) credits the escalation of the dispute to ill-functioning consultation instruments not providing a full voice to the partners, and the responsible ministries escaping their responsibility to solve and arbitrate the dispute, while the local/regional organs did not have mandate to do so either. Sarkki (2012) claims that because of changes in support from the state administration, the FPS was already on the retreat and the loss of the corporatist power of the forestry sector turned it into a weak party.

The Rights of the Reindeer Herding frame was occupied with questions of the state fulfilling its legislative commitments to Sámi herding rights. User aspects and cultural rights, in which ecology is fundamental to the rights of the IP, were the main issues. Forest ecology was harnessed in herder discourse concerning the severe and long-term consequences of commercial forestry to the winter pastures: the status of the old forests has been lost and their value as winter pastures has sunk. Forestry damaged Sámi culture, shattered forest environments, made the use of nature more difficult for other usage forms and hindered local democracy. The promoted solution was a full moratorium and the protection of the forests. The forestry frame, which has been said to dominate the public sphere, was unchanged: foresters blamed reindeer herding for difficulties in the pastures/forests and perceived the environmentalists as a factor threatening local democracy. The regional and local socio-economic significance of forestry was highlighted (Valkonen, 2007; Raitio, 2008). The fact that the FPS could not tear itself away from the forestry frame had a uniting effect on the resisting front (Sarkki and Heikkinen, 2010).

Sarkki and Heikkinen (2010) have pointed out that the choice of venues for demonstrations and bargaining was of great significance: the actors went to the Netherlands, to demonstrate against the purchaser of the timber, Stora Enso, and took their case to the UN; in these venues, cases of biodiversity and the fate of reindeer herding could be raised in alignment. The alliance had limited scope: what was protected by Greenpeace and by a group of Sámi herders were the disputed old forests. Another frame extension by the environmentalists was the transformation of the Sámi from “mere” herders, trapped in the economic framing, into holders of the right to practice Sámi culture, which was reliant on biodiversity. The FPS threatened all the elements valued by both actors: the biodiversity of the old forests, which carried the Sámi culture. This amalgamated, successfully, the rights of the Indigenous people, the Sámi, as well as the well-being of reindeer into the scheme.

As there was genuine goodwill concerning the preservation of Sámi culture, the frame articulated by Greenpeace sustained older, ecologically advised hierarchies as well, which disrupted the frame transformation: in this frame, human actors appear legitimate according to the sustainability of their usage of the environment. The main agent, with the strongest regulatory power to restrict the encroachment, is the biotic system due to the intrinsic value of being old and sustaining a unique set of species, ranking differently in their levels of endangerment. The biotic system is framed as threatened by industrial land use forms, while the natural values serve as a foundation for a selection of land use forms, including reindeer herding, only when protected. In order to include the Sámi within the biocentric frame as legitimate actors, a variety of rhetoric tools were employed, such as presenting the Sámi usage forms as “cautious” and boasting an age-old sustainability (Tuolpujärvet, Inari (greenpeace.fi), read 08/16/2021). The environmental frame required a specific definition of herding.

“A Forest Rescue Station² Briefing” (2005) couples Sámi herders into the frame of resistance by demonizing the land grab and destruction of the Indigenous culture caused by the FPS, thus coupling the fate of reindeer herding and the cultural survival of Sámi culture, and by presenting the threatened winter pastures as the only source of nutrition during the winter grazing. Herding, “nomadic in nature” (which strictly speaking no longer applies to herding in Finland), is represented in a mostly matter-of-fact manner; the additional feeding is mentioned as being due to a lack of natural food sources, while the reasons for this lack are not covered. The organization of herding is presented in a manner that hides the private ownership of reindeer: “Land is not divided up and owned by individual herders as it is in farming. Reindeer herding is conducted jointly in herding cooperatives (in Finnish, paliskunta) made up of varying numbers of different families. Each cooperative operates in a specified area ensuring that its reindeer only feed in pastures traditionally used by that cooperative.” (Lapland: State of Conflict, 2005). The omissions—the increase in the number of privately owned reindeer—were partly a result of the emphasis on externalities, but the effort to align the frames is visible as well.

Frames could be aligned in valuation and by amplifying the salience of the old forests: the winter pastures had undergone destruction in the loggings. This was detrimental to the local traditional livelihood of the reindeer herders (Liimatainen, 2010). In the environmental frame of Greenpeace, the forest nature in Upper Lapland is insufficiently protected. In addition, a wrong biotype is protected (high slopes of mountains growing mountain birch, not the old forests, which were of greater value as a source of nutrition for the reindeer). This framing is backed up by the concept of forestry as an economically insignificant means of living regionally. The identified problem is the demand of profitability imposed upon the FPS by the Ministry. Another repeated premise for the frame is the representation of reindeer herding as an age-old, almost unchanged and sustainable means of living, integral to the environment and still carrying the Sámi culture, currently threatened by a looming demise. The aspect of excessive grazing pressure is taken up at the end of the pamphlet, but this is credited to forestry as an externality, as well as the fragmentation of the pastures and diminishing pasture areal (Harkki & Pyykkö, 2005). The increase in the number of reindeer is omitted, but the extension of the Greenpeace frame still suffered from leakages of ecological problem definitions.

Nature League took its starting point in multiple-use and varying sustainabilities of the land use forms. In this frame, as well, forestry and the emphasis on economic gain were seen as most harmful to the sustainability of other means of living. The contrary was the case concerning herding: it did not threaten the sustainability of, e.g., tourism. This kind of economic framing could, like the environmental framing, represent the industrial externalities as harmful; it also included herding within the sphere of socio-economic and environmental sustainability, and could align with the Sámi cause.³ In many petitions, herding is implicitly included in the criticism due to the uncompromising priority given to biodiversity and the demands of leaving the forest ecosystem untouched.⁴ The same goes for the argumentation for protection, which rested on values of biodiversity and recreational usage,⁵ or of conserving a single species, valued because the biotic system they live on is threatened by externalities or at risk of extinction⁶.

The most obvious omissions were the environmental effects of herding, which were not dealt with. It was safer to say that herding would suffer from forestry and was protected by law. On some occasions, the herders were distanced from the environmental frame by presenting them as “herders concerned about their means of living”.⁷ At best, reindeer herding was framed as an ecologically, socially, and economically wiser use of the forests than forestry. “The areas are important for recreation, tourism, and reindeer herding, for example. The activities of the FPS are not ecologically, socially, or economically wise.”⁸

The source material in the periodical Suomen Luonto does not straightforwardly support Sarkki and Heikkinen’s perception of the diffusion of human and cultural rights into the environmentalist discourse or frames. On many occasions, the need, temporality, and motivation for conservation are articulated differently. The natural state of the site to be protected, and the ancient cultural heritage found there, appeared as signs of legitimate and sustainable past usages raised high among environmentalists. An implication of the least possible usage, or even non-usage, is given in the environmentalist argumentation. The contemporaneous usage forms remained a problem for environmentalists, whereas the Sámi stressed the need to protect the existing forms of usage and cultural heritage originating from a more modern date. The instrumental value of nature for the dynamic of species in general (e.g., as passages for spreading/migrating) is as big as, if not bigger than, that of human usage (Kangas, 2003; Salmela and Ollikainen, 2005). A strong prioritization of nature values is visible in the way the question of landownership frustrated some environmentalists since, according to some actors, it continually postponed conservation plans (Raninen, 2003). The Sll was not directly involved in the dispute, so their frames remained ecological and stand out as an example of an organization venting the environmental agenda freely, exposing the underlying hindrance of frame alignment.

Inclusivity in frame extension, and its limitations, was remembered by an active member of an environmental group as well. Among the environmentalists, the environmental framing was prioritized, but the Sámi cause and that of reindeer herding were taken as important reasons for the protection of the old forests: the forests had to be protected, since they were also vital for the reindeer. The memories from the surveys in the terrain are ones of mutual positivity and aid. The protection of the old forests was a shared issue, which glued the alliance from the point of view of the environmentalists. Traditional reindeer herding, reliant on the natural winter pastures, was taken as an unproblematic practice. The environmentalists were aware of the pasture pressure, but the worst usage form was thought to be forestry. The difference in values was highest concerning the predator question, as the hunting/poaching of wolves created dissonance and controversy among environmentalists. The issue was considered sensitive to take up and difficult to act upon concretely, so petitioning the Ministry responsible was the chosen action (personal communication, 11/15/2021). It is time to introduce yet another actor group, the one causing the deepest friction in frame alignment.

Frictions and Symmetrically Opposing Frames—The Predator Question

In one additional respect, the environmentalist thinking had evolved: large predators had become an indicator of ecosystem health. The environmentalists projected the wolf as a misunderstood and demonized creature, with right to existence and its wolf ways (Kojola, 2005). The environmentalist framing coded the human/herder impact as the problem, detrimental to the “balance” of, or to “proper” functioning of the predator–reindeer relationship: the taming of reindeer had disrupted this balance and enabled an over-harvesting of the stocks by the wolf (Helle, 2005). This topic created dissonance in frame affinity throughout the 2000s; wolves in the reindeer-herding area, especially, was a constant theme for the Nature League’s “wolf working group” (susityöryhmä) activity⁹. The usual theme was protests against the hunting and poaching of wolves by herders. On October 16 2009, in connection with a wolf hunt in a southern herding cooperative, Nature League was sufficiently provoked to ask whether reindeer herding was economically and ecologically sustainable. This was denied by the working group, given conditions of too-large stocks wearing down the pastures. This statement was a reply to an earlier herder statement holding the wolves responsible for herding difficulties¹⁰, which were mounting up at the time. The justification of reindeer herding was questioned in the most heated phases of the hunting debate, if the cost was the decimation of wolf populations.¹¹ A question of hunting had turned into a question of ecosystem health, genetic health, and the rights of the predator species, to which reindeer and human hunters were turning into a threat. The protests were directed against all the reindeer-herding areas, including the Finnish- and Sámi-populated areas, but the protest targeted herding as a means of living that was growing too dominant, rather than the Sámi culture; the state policies of predator compensations, rather than the Sámi communities.

For herders, the idea of “conserving” predators in protected areas and pastures in general was foreign. In the reindeer-herding community, predators are considered to be a harm, and killing (and poaching) them was perceived as a feasible solution throughout the 20^th century (Lähdesmäki, 2020). Predators threaten economic assets and cause an increased amount of work, especially during calving time and in the winter, as reindeer killed by protected predators have to be located in order to receive compensation (Sara & Sara, 2004). The recent increase in the number of predators, and their protection, dictated from the “south”, has aroused resistance and a crisis in the herding industry, as well as in the livelihood and well-being of the herders (Pohjola and Valkonen, 2012). A shared sense of subsistence form under threat, eco-colonialism and epistemic violence from the hegemonic environmentalist ideologies permeates the herding discourse (Heikkilä, 2004; Sara and Sara, 2004).

The predator presence in the conserved areas is interpreted differently, as a natural part of the ecosystem to be conserved, or as a threat (economic or otherwise) to be controlled, killed, and pushed away. The space to be conserved, and the entering of the predators to this space, is framed either as an economic space, where one means of controlling risks has been stripped from the herders, or as a wilderness ecosystem to be protected in its entirety. One clear winner was the predator, entering a hunting ground with lesser risk. Environmentalist actors highlighted the biodiversity as having inherent value, and the herders perceived their home area as being invaded by an undesirable threat. In addition, the discursive change of the wolf from a threatening beast to a vulnerable scarcity and victim of human activity was undone in Lapland: the distance between people and predators is definitely less and the risks one has to deal with regarding nature-bound subsistence forms are bigger. The still-followed solutions in national park legislation, allowing limited and controlled hunting in the parks, and compensation for the predator losses, follow national discourses on predator conservation, controlling the population size and genetic multiplicity, and managing the harm the animals cause (Lähdesmäki, 2020).

Adding wolves to the sphere of inter-species co-living in the conserved areas/pastures was unacceptable to the Sámi herding community. This is an example of hegemonic environmentalist frames and discourses placing actors seeking alignment unintentionally in an abject position. In the herders’ eyes, the position of the reindeer was weakened further, if it was to prosper under proper, environmentalist-defined sustainable herding and survive the hunting predator increasing in numbers.

Discussion

The changes in the prerequisites of frame alignment may also illustrate the dynamics of the way frames evolve (Snow et al., 2019). One factor is the complex, sometimes unprecedented changes in the discourses (scientific, ethnopolitical, environmental, etc.) in which the frames are embedded. They, or a general political change in society, do not explain the change alone. The theoretical point made about strategic choices in framing is apt: changes in personal commitment to ideologies and alternative movements, education, and strategic re-orientations, for example, changed the Sámi frames tremendously (from modernization-friendly to an advocate of conservation, and to an ethnopolitical frame questioning the judicial foundation of conservation). The change followed dynamics of its own, with impulses fetched from various sources. One clear transformation in the environmentalist framing was a change in the way the frame hierarchized the IP: by getting rid of the essentializing cultural hierarchies of colonialism proper (as in Dorst, 1970), the hierarchies were fetched from perceptions of ecological performance. The knowledge mobilized in constructing these hierarchies is more robust than in the old studies, and the hierarchies are no less stringent.

Academic knowledge pools (see also Berglund, 2006; Räsänen et al., 2021, 427-428) did have an impact on how the agendas, actors, and their frames were evaluated by other parties. Together with education-based professional identities, the knowledge pools sustained the forester frame and beliefs concerning their trade (forestry science) amplified the environmentalist/biodiversity frames (pasture ecology) and transformed the judicially inclined Sámi frames (Indigenous Law). The ideational sources of power, knowledge pools relied on by the actors, deepened the amplification of frames, but mostly only their core interest areas, leading to a potential path to mutually excluding frames. The overlap of frames, and the once-shared environmentalist concerns, not only no longer enabled but also actively hindered alignment. Traditional ecological knowledge, however, was not only marginalized: it was actively used in the campaigns. The pools of knowledge fragmented the value base for alignment, and therefore dispersed concepts of interests and desirable developments. Knowledge pools are by far the only influence to change of frames, and their effect might be over-dimensioned, as the frames in my study have been constructed by experts, educated officials, etc.

It is interesting that the FPS, the actor with the strongest reliance on dominant societal norms and structures, had the weakest standing and legitimacy from the outset of the debate. It was possible to bypass these mostly economic norms and values through a shared agenda setting in framings by stressing protection needs, which marginalized the interests and norms of the actor group the FPS forestry frame stood for. The discursive struggle over protection needs caused friction in the alliance between the Sámi and environmentalists, as well. One source of friction concerned the extent to which the values of nature should be perceived instrumentally, or as having an inherent value. The perception of the rights-generating potential of the biotic system was also different: was it a source for human rights or a factor with a limiting capacity for human action?

On a more positive note, the aligning parties shared common antagonist in the conflict and were serious about the threats. The environmentalist movement provided herders with channels and means to keep the issue on the national agenda (Raitio, 2008). The unified front was effective for a while and forced the FPS to retreat. Synergies were sought and found: the cause of herding was added to the list of elements to be protected. Some ideas were adopted from the herding argumentation, such as that of the old forests being “shattered” by forestry¹², therefore diminishing the economic viability of herding. The externalities were used for all their might not to blame the herders.

However, alliance-building required omissions, where environmentalists had to find ways to align with reindeer herding. One aspect was a shift in focus from a solely ecological gaze to the eco-socio-cultural point of view of the Sámi herders, thus avoiding the crudest mismatches between the universalizing terminology of environmentalism and local realities. The discourse of old forest/winter pastures included segments of the local people into formation of concepts of ecology (Forsyth, 2004). The problem was that in the environmental framing, the position of the Sámi was unstable. They were immersed in the forest ecosystem as its age-old wise users, while latent expectations were established regarding the usage and Sámi agency towards environment, explicated elsewhere in the pasture discourse (on the Sámi uses of forest resources, see Itkonen, 2017). Both movements and the sources of legitimacy that they employed were still non-dominant, at least in the sense of lacking the fullest foundation in societal institutional structures. The difference in their impact could perhaps be found in the difference of status in the values (Fritz and Binder, 2020) that they fronted: the environmentalist values had a stronger status and wider resonance than the particularistic values of sustaining herding, which has a more distant location in the discursive landscape of Finland. The environmentalist frame had the potential to marginalize Sámi knowledge by questioning the sustainability of Sámi subsistence forms. This is why reindeer could be operationalized only from the perspective of cultural rights, not from the aspect of pasture ecology. The frames could not align regarding the question of predators. The rights generated to the wolf in the environmental framings brought aspects of deep dissonance and doubt to the alliance and resulted in at least one dramatic rupture. Reindeer were a similar sore point, as a key species in the ecosystem to be protected, but attempts were made to keep that point of friction in frame alignment under control. Rhetorical ways to include reindeer herding within the environmental frame included constructing histories of traditionality and threatened sustainability of longue durée.

The fragility of the alliance was not due to the traditional source of mismatch, that of romanticizing the Indigene, but rather because the Finnish environmentalist gaze upon nature is scientific and politicized. The science enabled activists to calculate the optimum pasture ecology and point to multiple-stressor unsustainable pressures on pastures (e.g. Kumpula, 2000), while the political stance empowered nature as an actor, with competing rights to those of the Sámi. The frame is biocentric, interested in dynamics and relations within the ecosystem, in which humans are just one composite species. A typical academic interpretation of the traditional Sámi relation to nature celebrates the Sámi holistic gaze upon nature, considering a specific environment: it embraces cultural, subsistence, generational, and kinship issues, rights, borders, knowledge, and identities in a manner that is both holistic and particularistic at the same time. The ecology (of certain forest, pasture, resource areas) and culture are connected (e.g., Länsman, 2004). The holism in environmentalism has different coverage, as it connects ecosystems to a larger web of life. Environmentalist holism has a stronger capacity to look away from the human dimension, and instead attributes nature with agentive potential. Added to the concept of human actors being capable of spoiling the ecosystem, this foundation strips the romanticized potential from people using nature, while nature, and its right to health and well-being, is valued highly (compare Vincent, 2016).

In Inari, initiatives to introduce additional conservation mobilize sharp reactions at a local level, raising reactions of undemocratic dictated policies from the south, neglecting local opinion and risking the loss of hunting rights, unemployment and a loss of income. While the support of conserving additional forest areal is still higher among reindeer herders (Hallikainen et al., 2006), there are Sámi voices who have begun to establish a distance from conservationists¹³. Internationally, environmentalist voices are being heard, which admit that the more extensive rights agenda of the IPs complicates manageable conservation processes. The environmentalist organizations risk exceeding their mandates and ending up as advocates of several non-conservation issues and policies in an uncoordinated manner. Importantly, there is a genuine will to promote both IP rights and conservation goals, but the frame alignment has become more complicated (Esposito, 2016).

The Finnish case provides varied evidence as to whether colonialism was to blame: the forestry was extractive, but it is now checked in the name of biodiversity and international reputation. The conservation paradigm has had periods of tolerant inclusivity (compare Buschman, 2022). The need for a de-colonization of the conservation paradigm is perhaps greater concerning the epistemic gap between Sámi and environmentalist knowledges, which constitute a systemic barrier for the full integration of traditional knowledge systems to conservation practices (compare Buschman, 2022). The scientific and administrative knowledge regimes concerning reindeer, and the connected priorities coupled to the biotic system, have numerous biases and neglect the aspect of social sustainability. Finnish forestry research has shown a tendency to exclude reindeer from the semi-Arctic ecosystems (Nyyssönen, in print), which with the tendencies towards re-wilding in conservation paradigms constitute an additional pressure for reindeer (herding). Finnish eco-colonialism has trouble acknowledging itself as such: the fact that environmental frames can be coded and framed as “good”, and inherently life-conserving, is one way to deny the need to re-envision the conservation paradigms. The implications of Sámi self-determination are not fully acknowledged either, especially concerning forms of herding applied in the protected pastures. This hinders deeper progress in integrating Sámi views in conservation policy, and them becoming fully culturally and socially relevant. So far, there has not been a better way to do this than through the inclusion of the IP at all the levels of the conservation regime, from education and research to management and employment in the conserved areas. That this results in further modernization of the regions to be conserved is one of the paradoxes of the conservation paradigm.

Ethics Statement

Ethical review and approval was not required for the animal study because the study is concerned with animals in history and how they are presented in the historical sources. No individual animals as such were subject of the study, but they appear as objects of dispute, as rhetorical animals.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Funding

This article was written with funding from Transformative research project “New Sámi Renaissance: Nordic Colonialism, Social Change and Indigenous Cultural Policy”, Norwegian Research Council, project number 315708.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the SAMFORSK research group at The Arctic University Museum of Norway for comments on an early draft of the article.

Footnotes

^ Certificates, given by the Forest Stewardship Council, set the criteria for the loggings, for example in relation to the rights of the IP and natural values. The certificate used in Finland at the time was the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification/Finnish Forest Certification System (PEFC/FFCS). Sarkki, 2012, 439.
^ Refers to the information sites different actors established during the dispute.
^ Luonto-Liitto toivoo malttia Pohjois-Suomen metsäkeskusteluun — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), read 08/17/2021; Hakkuut uhkaavat erämaita — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), read 08/30/2021; Metsä-Lapin suojelemattomat metsäerämaat - forestinfo.fi, read 08/30/2021.
^ Vanhoista metsistä löytyi tieteelle uusia eliölajeja — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), Metsähallituksen aarniometsähakkuista tutkintapyyntö poliisille — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), both read 08/30/2021; Luonto-Liitto vaatii Metsä-Lapin ikimetsien suojelua hakkuilta — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), read 08/30/2021.
^ Luonnonsuojelijat puolustavat Liperinsuon metsiä — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), read 08/30/2021.
^ Luonnonsuojelijat poistavat hakkuumerkit uhanalaisten lintujen kotimetsistä — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), read 08/30/2021.
^ Vanhempien mielenosoitus vaatii: säästäkää erämaametsät lapsille! — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), read 08/30/2021.
^ Luonto-Liitto vaatii Metsähallitusta lopettamaan suojelemattomien erämaametsien hakkuut Metsä-Lapissa — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi) read 08/31/2021.
^ Barentsin alueen nuoret vaativat kestävää energiapolitiikkaa ja kestävää luonnonvarojen käyttöä — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), read 08/30/2021; Luonto-Liitto ei hyväksy Lapin UKK-puistossa liikkuneen suden tappamista — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), read 08/31/2021.
^ Luonto-Liitto vaatii susille mahdollisuuksia elämään myös poronhoitoalueella — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), read 08/31/2021.
^ Sudet uhrataan poroelinkeinon vuoksi — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), read 09/01/2021.
^ Ympäristöjärjestöt paljastavat: Stora Enson sellukattilaan 300-vuotiasta puuta — Luonto-Liitto (luontoliitto.fi), read 08/30/2021.
^ Áile Aikio hämmästyy itsekin, kun keksii sen ainoan asian, miten saamelaisuus heillä kotona näkyy: Avaa saunan ovi ja edessäsi on valtavasti jotain, mitä ei eteläsuomalaisista kodeista takuulla löydy - Sunnuntai | HS.fi, read 6.2.2022.

References

Aikio O. (1970). Metsähallitus Tuhoaa Porolaitumet, Suomen Luonto. 3/1970