This three-part series centers on Indigenous peoples fighting corporations that put profit over a liveable planet. It explores how their struggle is our struggle, how this fight is being brought to the centers of global capitalism, and the power of Indigenous science to rethink how we relate to the Earth.
The main output from last year's COP30 climate summit was bleak. Fossil fuels were not included in the agreement from the 30th annual meeting in Belém, the Amazon's eastern port city. At present, corporations are destroying the planet, with global temperatures on course to rise 2.6°C (36°F) above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
Brazil’s summit was promoted as an “Indigenous COP,” intended to place guardians of the planet’s richest biodiversity centrally in climate talks. Yet despite Brazil nationally granting stronger protection to 27 geographic spots, Indigenous peoples were largely excluded internationally.
Instead, corporate interests dominated. Rising temperatures and continued resource extraction increasingly threaten vital ecosystems. Rainforests, for instance in the Congo Basin, West Papua and Amazon, despite new protections, face existential danger that likewise endangers Indigenous communities and the global ecosystems that sustain life for us all.
These corporate-driven crises also threaten the Sámi, Europe's last Indigenous people from the far north.
Goavvi
“‘Goavvi’ means ruthless weather and season. The closest term in English is ‘locked pastures,’” the world-renowned Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara explained in an email interview.
The Sámi peoples' lifeways are interwoven with reindeer in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and northeast Russia. Sara's latest work, called Goavve-Geabbil, is now center stage at London's Tate Modern Gallery until April 6.
Goavvi (nominative form of Goavve) is a new Northern Sámi word describing how, due to climate change, the snow melts and then freezes into ice, trapping lichen and starving the reindeer.
Northern Sámi is one of the ten Sámi languages, spoken by Sara's family who live in Northern Norway.
Sara explains: “Goavvi is not a new phenomenon, but in recent years it has become more prevalent. Over the last century or so, herders in [her Norwegian municipality] Guovdageaidnu have experienced goavvi around 20 times, most severely in 1917-18, 1967-8 and 1996-7, and in the recent winters since 2020. Five consecutive years is extremely unusual, and climate change scientists predict that goavvi will continue to increase in frequency.”
She points to a recent co-authored study led by academic Elisabetta Canteri that warns 80 percent of reindeer could disappear due to climate change by 2100.
Reindeer are crucial for Indigenous people across the Arctic and for our global climate system. Reindeer grazing stops forest growth, meaning there is more heat reflective snow cover in the north, which for millennia has naturally cooled the planet.
About 300 kilometres south of Sara’s family's winter pastures, Jonas Vannar, a Swedish Sámi reindeer herder, confronts the same climate threat. Broadly, the Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average.
But the heating climate is not the only corporate-driven crisis the Sámi face.
Cumulative corporate crises
Vannar explains how climate change compounds other challenges. The top half of northern Sweden was once set aside for herding. But the state and corporations later grabbed more and more land for forestry, mining and hydropower. About 10 percent of Sweden’s electricity comes from hydropower built last century around the Lule River.
Vannar tells me how the dams disrupt the water's flow, making ice conditions unpredictable and unstable. This has led to reindeer, and even herders, dying after falling through the ice. Vannar explains: “It is not something we can ask the elders about because they haven't experienced it, when it comes to effects occurring from climate change.”
Now his herd faces a new threat. The British company Beowulf plans to build a large iron ore mine at Gállok. Vannar and other Sámi have long resisted these plans, including a direct action protest camp in the summer of 2013.
“Big mining is very destructive,” Vannar says.
Further north, the Swedish Sámi town of Kiruna has faced so much mining the town is being moved as it is collapsing. Herders from there have told Vannar transport infrastructure is the most devastating of many of the mine's impacts, as roads and railways further cut up available grazing lands and many animals die in collisions.
Vannar and the other Sámi herders challenging Beowulf’s planned mine face a planning system that favors the miners. It is difficult to prove the dangers until it is too late. It is also hard to prove how migratory reindeer depend on all their land. Meanwhile, the permitting process forces herders into endless reports and legal fights—time stolen from keeping their herds.
Green colonialism
The forces of green capitalism are worsening this already dire situation. In 2024 the European Union introduced the Critical Raw Material Act. This will fast-track three mines across the Sámi's homeland – the Sápmi – that are deemed strategically important, so the planning process is reduced from a decade to 27 months. Mining projects will also have access to “Green funds.”
The EU will open successive rounds of mine applications, and it seems likely more mines will be defined across the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish Sápmi as these lands are touted for their “untapped” mineral potential.
Although not an EU member, Norway is a strategic partner on critical minerals.
The EU and Nordic countries' justification is that they need these “transition minerals” as raw ingredients to stop the climate crisis. But this is problematic for three reasons.
First, because mining is very carbon-intensive. Second, because much of the demand for minerals will drive ecologically damaging industries such as electric vehicles, the military, aerospace, and the tech-driven AI boom.
And third, mining creates sacrifice zones, destroying local people's lands and the planet's overall inhabitability.
In 2025, Amnesty International and the Sami Council co-authored a report asserting the planned expansion of mining across the Sapmi is “Green Colonialism.”
The dangerous fantasy of green growth
At Brazil's climate summit, oil companies and the oil-rich nations were emboldened with the United States’ absence, and with President Donald Trump’s full backing of an oil industry that will burn away our ability to live on this planet.
Yet the climate negotiations were also dominated by forces that think we can mine our way out of the crisis, even though this is also dangerous nonsense. To secure a habitable future we need to stop sacrificing the world for endless growth and endless extraction.
On the land where Máret Ánne Sara's family’s reindeer live, there are ongoing protests against the Nussir mine. She explains how Norway was an early adopter of the green capitalist mentality.
“Fifteen years ago, when it was predicted that oil was running out, rather than responding by making our consumption habits and ways of living more sustainable, there was a massive push for minerals in Norway, because the nation was keen to find a new lucrative industry to sustain and increase their standards of wealth,” Sara says.
“This mineral push was strategically dressed up as a green initiative. However, not only did the industry assume no environmental responsibility, in places such as the Nussir ASA copper mine in Repparfjord it took radical shortcuts such as giving permission to dump 30 million tons of mining waste into healthy fjords.
“Meanwhile, since oil has not yet run out, the Norwegian state decided to continue this business to the bitter end by electrifying the oil and gas infrastructure in Norway to make it appear more eco-friendly. So, now Sámi people are under pressure of being displaced from their lands under the guise of conservation and sustainability,” she said.
From the lithium triangle in the Andes, to mines for so-called transition minerals in the Philippines, and from nickel mining's expansion in West Papua to other rich, biodiverse lands across the world, the expansion of mining for “transition minerals” threatens indigenous people and those who live with the land.
Green capitalism is proposed as a means to save capitalism, yet it is an existential threat to us all. It will cost us the planet.
Part two of this series will examine how Indigenous peoples are taking the fight against extraction directly to London, confronting the heart of global capitalism.
