In May Greenpeace closed our Forest Rescue Station (FRS) located at Inari, Lapland, having achieved our objective of temporarily ending logging on valuable forest lands and in anticipation of talks on the future of the forests that were scheduled for June.
Whilst the Rescue Station was in operation, one of its main aims was to assist the Sàmi reindeer herding co-operatives in mapping and demarcating important areas of forest. The Sàmi are indigenous reindeer herders who rely on Lapland's remaining old-growth forests to provide vital food for their herds during the cold winter months. The reindeer forests have been reduced piece by piece by the government's own logging company, Metsähallitus, which carries out most of the logging in Lapland.
The campaign has already been instrumental in convincing the Xerox Corporation (USA) to agree to stop buying copy paper sourced from the ancient forests in the Sàmi region. We are also calling on top British magazine publishers including the BBC, EMAP and IPC to stop buying paper from the region.
Together with the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (FANC) and a majority of the reindeer herding co-operatives, we are demanding that harmful industrial logging be permanently stopped within these mapped areas, and that the needs of the Sàmi and other indigenous people be respected.
Javier Moro, Spanish author
Read the archived weblogs from the Station to find out more about the Sàmi and the action we've been taking to help them defend their threatened forests. You can also find out about our recent action at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, where activists dumped a truckload of logging waste inside its offices in Helsinki. Climbers unfurled a banner from the roof reading: 'Don't Finnish the Sàmi forests'.
Authors Trip:
In April we also took a number of European authors to the Forest Rescue Station, so they could see for themselves the effect of relentless logging on the last Sàmi reindeer forests. The authors included Javier Moro (Spain), Niccolo Ammaniti (Italy), Ken Finn (U.K.), Karel Verleyen (Belgium), Aur&eacure;lie Filipetti (France), Robin Valtiala (Finland) and Lydia Rood (The Netherlands).
