
Can Lapland's Primeval Forests Be Saved?
Lapland looks like an unbroken forest on a map, but travel north across the Sweden-Finland border and the clear-cuts multiply. The culprit is Sveaskog, Sweden's largest forestland owner, whose logging operations have eaten into the primeval woodland that Sami reindeer herders depend on for winter grazing. The film follows Greenpeace activists staging months-long demonstrations against the state-owned company, and Sami herders describing how shrinking pastures threaten a herding tradition that stretches back generations. It crosses into Finland, where a protest twenty years ago in Inari, the center of Finnish Sami culture, led authorities to preserve stretches of old-growth forest rather than pulp them into paper cups and toilet paper. Interviews with loggers, conservationists, and Sami representatives lay out competing claims on the same land, and the film tracks Sveaskog's recent pledge to reduce cutting and leave more room for reindeer calving grounds. The question running through it is whether that pledge arrives in time to matter.