From the archive: ‘The treeline is out of control’: how the climate crisis is turning the Arctic green

档案记录: “树木线失控”:气候危机如何使北极变绿

The Audio Long Read

社会与文化

2025-04-02

36 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2022: In northern Norway, trees are rapidly taking over the tundra and threatening an ancient way of life that depends on snow and ice By Ben Rawlence. Read by Christien Anholt. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod
更多

单集文稿 ...

  • This is The Guardian.

  • Hello, my name is Ben Rawlins and I'm the author of The Tree Line is Out of Control,

  • how the climate crisis is turning the Arctic green that was originally published in print in 2022.

  • I was first drawn to the moving tree line as a fantastic way to talk about climate change in a practical way to show people,

  • to take them on a journey to the northern forest to see how our planet was being transformed.

  • And the seed of the Norway chapter, which is what this article is an excerpt from,

  • was actually a random phone call to the head of the Sammy Reindeer Association in northern Norway in Alta.

  • And I said to him on the phone, what does the forest look like?

  • Is the tree line moving?

  • And he just started laughing and said, you need to come and visit.

  • He said,

  • I was born in 1950 something and I was born in the middle of the tundra and now I live in the middle of the forest.

  • And that was the seed that took me to Norway and started me on the journey to research both this article,

  • but also the book as a whole.

  • Since I wrote the piece, many of the trends that are highlighted in it have continued.

  • So we are seeing a real low snow winter in the winter of 2024, 2025.

  • And this alternating pattern now of freezing and snowfall followed by rain when, once upon a time,

  • the mercury in the thermometer would drop below minus 20 and would stay there for the whole of the winter.

  • You had these dry, cold winters.

  • So that trend is continuing, as is all of the social dislocation for the Sammy people that follows from that,