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Hello, my name is Ben Rawlens, 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 Sami 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, 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 and 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 Sami people that follows from that, because as the piece makes clear, the reindeer and the climate are intimately connected, and the reindeer and the people whose economy and society and culture rests on the cycles of the reindeer are also intimately connected.

So we're seeing that social disruption as well.

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