Living With Animals: Surviving Change in the Boreal Forest

Covering more than five million square miles, the vast belt of trees that stretches around the globe in the northern hemisphere is known as the boreal forest, or taiga.

In this project Tom Parfitt reports on boreal peoples of interior Alaska and Scandinavia and the impact that accelerating climate change, forestry and resource extraction are having on the vital human-animal ties which sustain them.

He will address these specific, under-reported stories:

1. Concerns over the Ambler Road Project, a proposed 211-mile industrial access road designed to assist the development of four copper mines in northern Alaska, and the effect it could have on subsistence lifestyles (hunting, trapping, fishing). This project was put on ice under President Biden but was revived in 2025 with the return to office of President Trump.

2. The cultural and social impact of the 2024 moratorium on salmon fisheries on the Yukon river and its tributaries, such as the Koyukuk.

3. The effect of global heating on reindeer kept by Sami herders in Sweden, which find it difficult to access under-snow lichen to eat because of fluctuating temperatures and refreezing of snow. The challenge to the Sami of finding remedies, changing feeding patterns, adapting.

4. The controversy over culling of wolves in Sweden (backed by famers protecting livestock, opposed by environmentalists), where the authorities want to increase the number that can be killed as human-wolf contact increases.