Climate Change and Greed

My mystery, If the Owl Calls, will be published in November. One of the reasons I started writing the book several years ago was the rapid transformation of the Arctic region from climate change. The story is set in the far north of Norway in Finnmark. A place where I lived and travelled in the 1970s and years later, when I was deciding whether to live there. When I was in Finnmark, the Sami community was fighting the construction of a dam in Alta. It’s an incredibly beautiful fragile place. Yesterday the BBC had an article about the area. The author, Katya Adler, visits Kirkenes in the far north of Finnmark where the pressure of foreign investment in a trans-shipment port is an example of the continuing threats of development from governments, businesses, tourism, greed. She writes about the Arctic landscape that, “Indigenous communities in the region, just over half of whom live in the Russian Arctic, often feel that there is a failure on the part of those in power to acknowledge the rights of the peoples who have long called the region home.” She mentions Miyuki Daorana, a youth activist from Greenland representing the Inughuit indigenous community, who along with “others in the indigenous communities, accuse European countries of using the ‘climate crisis’ as an excuse to ‘extract and invade indigenous lands’.”