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SEVETTIJÄRVI, Finland—We enter the taiga forest from a trailhead at the end of a dirt road, not far from a shed where a fresh reindeer hide had been nailed up to dry. After an easy 20-minute walk along a path of fallen pine needles and spongy moss, the trees fall away before a wide channel of big black rocks, which extended for about a quarter-mile in either direction between two small ponds. We are looking at the Vainosjoki River, a tributary of the 62-mile Näätämö River. But the only sign of the river is the sound of water flowing through a deep cleft in the middle of the otherwise dry channel. Pauliina Feodoroff steps with sure feet across the uneven surfaces of the rocks. An angular, dark-haired woman in her late 30s, Feodoroff is a Helsinki-based filmmaker and playwright and a native daughter of the Skolt Sámi village of Keväjärvi, one of the three small towns in Arctic Finland that most Skolt Sámi call home. Feodoroff spent her childhood here, however—on the Näätämö River and in the nearby Skolt Sámi village of Sevettijärvi. For this hike Feodoroff had donned a bulky black hooded parka, black snow pants, and sturdy boots. But the garb is almost too heavy for the day’s unseasonably warm temperature—which despite the mid-October date and our location nearly 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, is only a few degrees below freezing. Feodoroff hops over the Vainosjoki. Then she crouches down and lowers the GoPro camera she holds in one hand to the water. Using the smartphone in her other hand to direct the camera’s view, Feodoroff points the lens at the tendrils of blue-green algae swaying beneath the river’s surface and begins to record—adding to her documentation of how climate change has transformed the tribe’s corner of the Arctic. A minority within a minority, the Skolt Sámi make up about 700 of Finland’s 9,000 or so Sámi, an indigenous people whose historic territory, called Sápmi, has stretched across the present-day Scandinavian and western Russian Arctic for thousands of years. The Skolt Sámi have maintained their distinct culture and deeply spiritual relationship with nature amid centuries of Eurasian modernization, political and economic revolutions, social oppression, and war. “Long after great cities had spread across Germany and France,” writes Laurence Smith, a University of California, Los Angeles, geographer, in his book The New North, “the Sámi were still living in tents, migrating with their reindeer, living off the land by fishing, trapping, and hunting.” In the 21st century, these struggles are being intensified by climate change, which is transforming the Arctic more rapidly than any other region on Earth. Climate change is driving up temperatures in the Arctic and sub-Arctic at twice the rate of lower latitudes, and Finland is no exception. Finnish scientists have documented an increase in average winter temperatures by more than 3.6 degrees compared with the late 1700s. Since the 1850s, mean temperatures in Finland have risen by more than 0.25 degrees Fahrenheit a decade, and they are still rising. Each increment of warming has compounded the threats to the Skolt Sámi’s traditional livelihoods, such as fishing and reindeer herding. Climate change also endangers more contemporary occupations, such as catering to the 1 million eco-tourists who come to the Finnish Arctic each winter to tour on skis and snowmobiles across the region’s increasingly unpredictable ice and snow, and who return in the summer and fall to fish and hike. At the same time, the Skolt Sámi’s deep knowledge of their environment is helping them figure out how to adapt to a melting Arctic. That drive is what has brought us to the Vainosjoki River with Feodoroff. She and other members of her tribe are determined to reverse decades of damage to the Näätämö basin and its salmon stocks and in the process ensure that the Skolt Sámi can adapt to the great Arctic thaw. The algae are unnatural in this river, Feodoroff says as she films, an indication that increased erosion in the river basin is releasing more nutrients into the water. Warming water temperatures, meanwhile, are making it easier for the algae to thrive, competing with the river’s fish for oxygen and light. The positions of the rocks are not natural either but the remains of a Finnish government project dating back about 50 years. The idea had been to create a river route for small boats on the Vainosjoki. But the project only succeeded in destroying important streambed habitat for spawning Atlantic salmon, undercutting the potential for the fish and lake trout to adapt to climate change. Vladimir Feodoroff, Pauliina’s 65-year-old father, grew up fishing salmon and trout in the Näätämö basin and herding reindeer across its taiga forests and ice-covered lakes. “My grandfather knew the soul of the salmon and passed that on to me,” he says. "That’s where the spark came from for the salmon work” that he, his daughter, and other Skolt Sámi are undertaking now, he says. “In the 1960s we had periods of quite heavy weather”—rainfall and snowfall—“but they would be predictable,” he says. “The winters were normal all the way until the 1970s, [with] heavy frosts, good snow cover,” allowing the Skolt Sámi to plan their harvests of traditional foods, including the annual summer salmon fishery. In the 1980s, winter temperatures began to rise; the amount and intensity of snowfall became harder to predict. Years with unusually heavy snows meant higher river levels during spring and summer melts, which made it harder for salmon to swim upstream to spawn. In the past few years, both Feodoroffs have observed a new turn in the climate: the failure of summer rainfall. “These new dry summers are a totally new phenomenon that has not happened before,” Vladimir Feodoroff says. This leads to unusually low river water levels. That water can heat up quickly during hot summer weather, harming salmon and other cool-water species. As far back as at least 2004, climate researchers have been forecasting warmer weather and more precipitation in Finland owing to climate disruption, and the country has seen several years of record-breaking precipitation in some regions. A 2014 study found, however, that most of the increase is coming as more severe rain and snowfall during winter months, a trend that has been observed in other parts of the Arctic as well.
