Sweden's plans to mine rare-earth minerals could ruin the lives of Indigenous Sami reindeer herders

KIRUNA, Sweden (AP) — High atop the Luossavaara Mountain in northern Sweden, Sami reindeer herder Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen mapped out a bleak future for himself and other Indigenous people whose reindeer have roamed this land for thousands of years.

An expanding iron-ore mine and a deposit of rare-earth minerals are fragmenting the land and altering ancient reindeer migration routes. But with the Arctic warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, herders say they need more geographic flexibility, not less, to ensure the animals' survival.

If a mine is established at the deposit of rare-earth minerals called Per Geijer, which Sweden heralds as Europe’s largest, Kuhmunen said it could completely cut off the migration routes used by the Sami village of Gabna.

That would be the end of the Indigenous way of life for Kuhmunen, his children and their fellow Sami reindeer herders, he said, in this far-north corner of Sweden some 200 kilometers (124 miles) above the Arctic Circle.

“The reindeer is the fundamental base of the Sami culture in Sweden,” Kuhmunen said. “Everything is founded around the reindeers: The food, the language, the knowledge of mountains. Everything is founded around the reindeer herding. If that ceases to exist, the Sami culture will also cease to exist.”

Sami herders are descended from a once-nomadic people scattered across a region spanning the far north of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the northwestern corner of Russia. Until the 1960s, members of this Indigenous minority were discouraged from reindeer herding, and the church and state suppressed their language and culture.

In Sweden alone there are at least 20,000 people with Sami heritage, though an official count does not exist because an ethnicity-based census is against the law. Today, a Sami village called a sameby is a business entity dictated by the state, which determines how many semi-domesticated reindeer each village can have and where they can roam.

“It’s getting more and more a problem to have a sort of sustainable reindeer husbandry and to be able to have the reindeers to survive the Arctic winter and into the next year,” said Stefan Mikaelsson, a member of the Sami Parliament.

In the Gabna village, Kuhmunen oversees about 2,500 to 3,000 reindeer and 15 to 20 herders. Their families, some 150 people in total, depend on the bottom line of the business.

Even before the discovery of the Per Geijer deposit, they had to contend with the expanding footprint of Kiirunavaara. The world’s largest underground, iron-ore mine has forced the village's herders to lead their reindeer through a longer and harder migration route.

Swedish officials and LKAB, the state-owned mining company, say the proposed Per Geijer mine could reduce Europe's reliance on China for rare-earth minerals. LKAB hopes to begin mining there in the 2030s.

Besides being essential to many kinds of consumer technology, including cellphones, hard drives and electric and hybrid vehicles, rare-earth minerals also are considered crucial to shifting the economy away from fossil fuels toward electricity and renewable energy.

But if work on Per Geijer goes forward, Kuhmunen said there will be no other routes for the Gabna herders to take the reindeer east from the mountains in the summer to the grazing pastures full of nutrient-rich lichen in the winter.

The village will contest the mine in court but Kuhmunen said he is not optimistic.

“It's really difficult to fight a mine. They have all the resources, they have all the means. They have the money. We don’t have that," Kuhmunen said. “We only have our will to exist. To pass these grazing lands to our children."

Darren Wilson, LKAB’s senior vice president of special products, said the mining company is seeking solutions to assist the Sami herders, though he would not speculate on what they might be.

“There are potential things that we can do and we can explore and we have to keep engaging,” he said. “But I’m not underestimating the challenge of doing that.”

Climate change is wreaking havoc on traditional Sami reindeer husbandry.

Global warming has brought rain instead of snow during the winter in Swedish Lapland. The freezing rain then traps lichen under a thick layer of ice where hungry reindeer can’t reach the food, according to Anna Skarin, a reindeer husbandry expert and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences professor.

In the summer, mountain temperatures have risen to 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) and left reindeer over-heated and unable to graze enough to gain the weight needed to sustain them in winter.

Some in Sweden suggest putting the reindeer onto trucks to ferry them between grazing lands if the Per Geijer mine is built. But Skarin said that isn't feasible because the animals eat on the move and the relocation would deny them food to be grazed while walking from one area to another.

“So you’re kind of both taking away the migration route that they have used traditionally over hundreds and thousands of years," she said, "and you would also take away that forage resource that they should have used during that time.”

For Kuhmunen, it would also mean the end of Sami traditions passed down by generations of reindeer herders on this land.

“How can you tell your people that what we’re doing now, it will cease to exist in the near future?” he said.

Pietro De Cristofaro in Kiruna, Sweden, contributed to this report.

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Reindeer stand at a farm in Lulea, Sweden, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

Darren Wilson, LKAB's senior vice president of special products, gestures next to a model of existing mines, in Kiruna, Sweden, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

The mining area where a proposed mine would cut off ancient reindeer migration routes in Kiruna, Sweden, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen, a Sami reindeer herder and chairman of Sami village of Gabna, grimaces in Kiruna, Sweden, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

A reindeer calf rests at a farm in Lulea, Sweden, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

LONDON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump says he's strongly considering pulling the United States out of NATO, ratcheting up his criticism of European allies and exposing a wider rift in the trans-Atlantic alliance — this time over the Iran war.

While Trump's talk of a possible NATO pullout dates back years, the comments to The Telegraph newspaper in the U.K., published Wednesday, were among the clearest and most disparaging yet — suggesting that the fracture has deepened perhaps to a point of no return.

Asked whether he would reconsider U.S. membership in the alliance after the conflict in the Middle East ends, Trump replied: “Oh yes, I would say (it’s) beyond reconsideration."

NATO didn't provide immediate comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that his government was “fully committed to NATO” and called it “the single most effective military alliance the world has ever seen.”

Many European leaders have felt political pressure over the war, which faces opposition in their countries and has sent petroleum prices soaring as Iran has effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil passes.

“Whatever the pressure on me and others, whatever the noise, I am going to act in the British national interest in all the decisions I make,” Starmer said Wednesday.

The U.K. is working on plans that could help assuage Trump, and Starmer said military planners will work on a postwar security plan for the Strait.

On Thursday, British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper will host a virtual meeting of 35 countries that have signed up to help ensure security for shipping in the Strait — after the fighting ends.

Iulia-Sabina Joja, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, alluded to Trump's exhortation on Tuesday for allies to “go get your own oil” — in a social media post insisting it wasn't America's job to secure the Strait.

“The Europeans are not keen to go into an active warfare situation, to so-called ‘get’ their energy out of the Strait,” said Joba, a former deputy project manager at NATO Allied Command Transformation in Virginia.

Long-simmering tensions within the alliance have bubbled up again over the war.

As energy prices have spiked, Trump has been desperate to get countries to send their ships to the Strait of Hormuz. He has called NATO allies “cowards."

Even since his first term, Trump has urged the allies to assume greater responsibility for their own security and spend more on defense. He has argued that the U.S. has done more for them than the other way around.

A U.S. pullout would essentially spell the end of NATO, which flourished for decades under American leadership.

Speaking Tuesday on Fox News, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “I do think, unfortunately, we are going to have to reexamine whether or not this alliance that has served this country well for a while is still serving that purpose.”

Rubio raised questions with interviewer Sean Hannity about whether NATO has “become a one-way street where America is simply in a position to defend Europe — but when we need the help of our allies, they’re going to deny us basing rights and they’re going to deny us overflight.”

The criticism from Rubio could raise concerns in the alliance about whether the U.S. under Trump may no longer consider NATO as worth the time, money and personnel that Washington has invested in it.

The very mention of a pullout could weaken the alliance’s deterrence, particularly with Russia: It relies on ensuring that Russian President Vladimir Putin believes NATO will retaliate if he decides to one day expand Moscow's war in Ukraine.

NATO is built on Article 5 of its founding treaty, which pledges that an attack on any one member will be met with a response from them all.

As the Iran war has spread, missiles and drones have been fired toward NATO member Turkey and a British military base on Cyprus, fueling speculation about what might prompt NATO to trigger its collective security guarantee and come to their rescue.

The alliance hasn't intervened or signaled any plan to. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte — who has voiced support for Trump and Washington's role in the alliance — has been focusing mostly on the Russia-Ukraine war since Ukraine borders four NATO countries.

NATO operates uniquely by consensus. All 32 countries must agree for it to take decisions, so political priorities play a role. Even invoking Article 5 requires agreement among the allies. Turkey or the U.K. can't trigger it alone.

The U.S. can’t just simply walk away all that easy.

A Defense Act passed under U.S. President Joe Biden in 2024 prevents an American president from withdrawing from NATO without support of two-thirds of the Senate or under another act by Congress. It is unclear whether the Trump administration, which during his first term claimed broader authority on the matter, would challenge that law.

European leaders have called for the Middle East conflict to stop and want the U.S. and Iran to return to negotiations over Tehran's nuclear program, which Washington and Israel see as a threat.

The vocal opposition in Europe to Trump's war against Iran has started to turn into action.

Spain has closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in the war.

Early last month, France agreed to let the U.S. Air Force use a base in southern France after receiving a “full guarantee” from the United States that planes not involved in carrying out strikes against Iran would land there.

The government of Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, long seen as one of the European Union leaders with the best personal ties with Trump, denied permission for U.S. bombers to land at the Sigonella air base in Sicily for one mission related to the Middle East.

Franco Pavoncello, a professor of political science at Rome’s John Cabot University, said that decision might cost Meloni a lot of her political capital in Washington.

But he said: “The Italian government could not be seen by the European allies as too submissive to American interests, as it would have very negative repercussions both at home and in the EU.”

U.S. relations with Europe had already soured in recent months over Trump's call for Greenland — a semiautonomous territory of stalwart NATO ally Denmark — to become part of the United States, prompting many EU countries to rally behind Copenhagen.

Jamey Keaten reported from Geneva. Lorne Cook in Brussels, Giada Zampano in Rome, Sam McNeil in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Matthew Lee in Washington, contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters after signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House Tuesday, March 31, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks during a press conference at Downing Street in London, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, Pool)

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks during a press conference at Downing Street in London, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, Pool)

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks during a press conference at Downing Street in London, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, Pool)