Each summer, Nils Mikkelsen Utsi guides his reindeer to highland pastures overlooking a fjord, known to locals as Repparfjord, in northern Norway. There, under the Arctic midnight sun, female reindeer give birth and Mr. Utsi marks the ears of the calves. His ancestors have done this for generations.
“This is my reindeer district,” he said. “This is my life.”
Nearby, workers are building out the Nussir copper mine, the site of one of Norway’s most contentious environmental disputes. If it’s fully developed, Mr. Utsi fears the mine will cast a shadow over his way of life.
The Sami are Indigenous to Europe, and their territory, known as Sapmi, spreads across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. They have, for centuries, organized their lives around reindeer herding and fishing. Now, as with many traditional cultures, their way of life is colliding with the demands of a warming world.
Mr. Utsi, leader of the Fiettar reindeer herding district near Repparfjord, expects the situation to worsen. The mine’s proximity to reindeer calving grounds could push the animals off land they have long relied on, he said.
Similar conflicts have cropped up across Europe as governments race to secure metals for renewable technologies, like batteries and wind turbines. A 2024 European Union law — the Critical Raw Minerals Act — aims to bolster dozens of selected projects, including Nussir.A lithium mining project in rural Serbia prompted street protests, while others in France and Portugal have come under intensive environmental scrutiny and criticism.
Norway’s Nussir project will create an underground mine at the edge of Repparfjord, below a reindeer calving ground. The site is the country’s largest known copper deposit and home to an old open pit mine from the 1970s. The new project, mostly owned by Blue Moon Metals, a Canadian company, was granted an operating license in 2019.
Its facilities are carved into a mountain and will pump mining waste, known as tailings, through a pipe into the fjord. Norway is among a handful of countries that allow tailings to be disposed this way.
The mine’s permit allows it to deposit up to 30 million tons of waste into waters that both the Norwegian government and the Sami recognize as an important spawning site for Atlantic salmon. The fjord also provides habitat for other species, like cod and haddock.
This year, the project’s tailings permit turned 10 years old, a legal threshold that gave the government the option to amend or withdraw it. That anniversary drew more than 70 protesters to the mining site in January, despite subzero temperatures and rain.
Brage Boe Ulstein, 21, an organizer with the group Nature and Youth who has been arrested multiple times for demonstrating at Nussir, was there. He didn’t seem to mind the cold but led short drills to help other protesters warm up. “This would be the start of a big industrial venture in some of the most untouched nature in Norway,” he said.
Some protesters who first attended rallies in their early teens have returned as young adults. “We’ve kind of grown up with this case,” said Helene Sofie Smit, 20, a leader of the same organization.
Harald Sorby, an official at the Norwegian Environment Agency, a regulatory body that oversees polluting activities, acknowledged that allowing companies to deposit mining waste into the ocean is contentious. But piling it on land would cause greater disruption to reindeer herders, he said.
“We came to the conclusion that a marine deposit site would be the least environmentally damaging thing to do,” Mr. Sorby said. The agency is confident, he added, that the fjord’s deep waters will contain the waste even as climate change alters ocean conditions.
In April, the tailings permit was amended and renewed for another 10 years.
At the protest, Maren Benedicte Nystad Storslett, a member of the Sami Parliament in Norway, said her government had opposed the mine since the early days. “It will have enormous consequences for our livelihoods,” she said.
To minimize disruption to the herds, Oystein Rushfeldt, Nussir’s managing director, said the company settled on extracting the copper ore in a fully underground operation. The company also offered to invest in facilities that the reindeer herders needed, such as a mobile slaughterhouse so that herders wouldn’t need to go to ones farther away, he said.
Mr. Rushfeldt said he had attended more than 200 meetings, largely with reindeer herders and the Sami Parliament, listening to objections to the mine.
He saw a contradiction at the heart of the opposition. They say “no to metal and yes to everything that the metal is being used for,” he said, adding that the mine currently supports around 250 jobs. He noted that the project had already spent around $50 million on construction, and committed to spend roughly another $200 million over the next two years.
Lindsey Wuisan, a campaigner who works on mining issues at Friends of the Earth Europe, an environmental nonprofit, said that the desire to build climate-friendly technologies is a common excuse for mining projects, especially those supported by the 2024 E.U. law. But, she added, there is no guarantee that the minerals would actually be used in this way.
