How should we understand how Sámi reindeer herders see their livelihood of reindeer husbandry? Elizabeth Gerhardsen, a renowned psychologist specialized in psychosocial services catered to Sámi people, put it most succinctly when she said that
to see reindeer herding only as a matter of producing meat is like to think about the family life as the production of children.
In other words, the bond between humans, reindeer and the nature is characterized by a strong feeling of belonging and unity. After all, you belong to a family, you do not own it. In the same way, humans, animals, and the land are all connected to each other. Just like each family is a collective of relatives, reindeer herding is weaved together with the past by the way that their ancestors are still in a sense present in the landscape. You cooperate with your ancestors as if they are still alive today and with your descendants as if they are your peers. In addition, you communicate not only with the animals, but also with the mountains, rivers and seas.
As a result, destroying ecosystems belonging to those land and waters leads therefore to a profound sense of despair and sorrow, which runs much deeper than just the loss of good grazing grounds or the beauty of that nature.
I think this is the best takeaway you can get from the Sámi philosophy on the relationship between humans and nature. The view that there’s a duality between humans vs. the nature is misleading and needs to be replaced with the view that it is a unity, or rather, a family with intimate and sensitive interconnections. Embodying this sort of philosophy ensures that you have feel a sense of responsibility to take care of the nature you yourself in, to preserve it as well as possible so that your community, other animals and the ecology may live on.
Author's note
The date of this post is misleading as I had written it several years before it made its way here. I decided to add it in the very beginning of the development of my webpage just so that I have something here and feel less bad about my lack of writings.