Rare Earths, Sacred Ground

Over two intensive days at the end of August this year, Kiruna Church was carefully lifted from its foundations and rolled to a new location between the cemetery and the city’s new center. The church could only move at a pace of 0,5km/h to make sure the altarpiece wasn’t harmed on the 5km long journey. The operation was executed smoothly and according to plan, as the official announcement put it. In Sweden the event was livestreamed and framed as a sort of collective celebration, with 32 cameras present, as slow-TV by our national broadcaster. “Den stora kyrkflytten ” (the great church move) had a folkloric echo of “Den stora älgvandringen,” the much-loved yearly televised migration of moose that move across Sweden every spring.

At first glance, the story seems quaint, whimsical, and maybe even heartwarming. A church on wheels, a heritage saved, a community coming together. But the reality is (as often) more complicated. The church was moved as part of the larger complete upheaval of the city of Kiruna, and just the day after the live-streamed celebration, the state-owned mine LKAB announced that another 2,700 homes will be demolished to make way for the expansion of the iron ore mine. Six thousand people will lose not just their houses, but their places, their streets, their bearings; as Sámi author Ann-Helen Laestadius described on her Instagram  hours after the announcement. What is called “urban transformation” and framed as a people’s celebration of a shared future might elsewhere easily be called forced displacement.

Sweden provides 90% of Europe’s iron ore . Kiruna’s iron ore mine has been operating for over a century and remains one of the largest in the world. Now, its expansion is framed as a core part of Europe’s green future. The EU imports a huge amount of rare earth minerals today, mostly from China - crucial for wind turbines, electric cars and defence industries. And new findings show that Sweden and Norway hold some of Europe’s richest reserves. Sweden’s mines offer a promise of “greener mines” than those currently in use, and while still criticised (can you drill and blast your way into the earth without disrupting an ecosystem?) the country has comparatively strict rules around environmental causion. Moreover, it is understood as a delicate geopolitical matter that China is currently almost singlehandingly providing these metals to fullfil the global demand. Kiruna is not just a Swedish issue: it is Europe’s strategic bet on self-sufficiency.

 [book-strip index="1"]

In Sweden, we have known for years now that the city would be uprooted. In my kitchen I have a comic strip-print by artist Hilda Westerberg from 2020 framed, where the upcoming move of Kiruna is portrayed as a form of non-final-breakup in a relationship with harmful powerdynamics between mine and city. After the recent announcement that a third of the city would need moving in the coming years, LKAB continues to rely on the town’s unconditional support and a saying that has been around for generations “no mine, no Kiruna”. Meanwhile, LKAB faces increased criticism, and the municipal council of Kiruna has desperately asked for better national support and begged the government to consider the sacrifices Kiruna and its inhabitants are forced into for the benefit of both Sweden and Europe .  The municipality is currently in high debt, the hospital has had to close its ER and maternity ward, and schools and social welfare lack personell as many choose to work for the mine where the salaries are higher. The logic is capitalist at its core, here with the state itself deeply folded into the machinery of extraction and profit. When wrapped it in the language of sustainability and urban transformation, the contradiction becomes almost invisible. Kiruna is far from the only city in Sweden built up around a mine, and many have written at length  about the complexities of promises and access to services in a place ruled by time of extraction. How many years ahead will there be work and what happens when the mine shuts down? How are services provided fairly when ruled over by the company that employs you? Around one third of the mineral prospectors in Sweden are private foreign companies. While LKAB is a state-owned mine, Sweden has mining laws that stand out internationally and prioritise the rights of prospectors, even over the objections of landowners.

The Sámi community, particularly the reindeer-herding Gabna village in Kiruna, has long both experienced and warned of the damage of the extensive mining activities in Kiruna. The new Per Geijer deposit opened 600m north of the current mine is the largest known deposit of rare earth minerals in Europe, but lies on traditional herding land . In 2023 Jan Moström, President and Group CEO of LKAB said , upon coming across the deposit, that;

This is good news, not only for LKAB, the region and the Swedish people, but also for Europe and the climate. This is the largest known deposit of rare earth elements in our part of the world, and it could become a significant building block for producing the critical raw materials that are absolutely crucial to enable the green transition. We face a supply problem. Without mines, there can be no electric vehicles. 

When recently asked after the new announcement of predicted demolitions if these are last buildings that will have to be moved, the Senior Vice President of Community Development at LKAB Stefan Hämäläinen said “I actually hope not. It may sound a bit silly, but mining of this magnitude will require us to claim land.”

 [book-strip index="2"]

Having land claimed is nothing new for Sámi reindeer herding communities in Sweden, who continue to see their ancestral lands eroded and their traditional practices under threat. The Sámi have endured centuries of colonial displacement, with state authorities restricting migration, seizing lands for settlement, forestry, and mining, and steadily eroding Indigenous governance. Not least through ongoing court battles, with some Swedish Sámi reindeer-herding communities involved in, on average, five to six separate legal proceedings annually to defend their grazing and usage rights. A landmark moment came in the 2020 Girjas case, where Sweden’s Supreme Court confirmed a Sámi village’s exclusive rights to hunting and fishing on its lands; an important victory, yet one that underscores the ongoing need for legal battles to secure even basic recognition of Sámi land use. Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen, chair of Gabna RHC said in an interview that the new mine in Kiruna would completely cut off the passage between winter and summer hearding land: “There is nowhere left for us to move. This would mean the end of reindeer herding and Sámi culture here.”

LKAB announced that the move of the church was costing over half a billion SEK (approximately 40 million pounds). The city’s displacement is presented as a forward-looking celebration, the church’s move filmed like a national display, the mine itself branded as a symbol of pride and climate conciousness. Capitalism disguises itself in moments of rupture: by turning extraction into green transition and displacement into spectacle. The question of who pays remains hidden from sight. The move of Kiruna Church is a parable about what we choose to preserve, and what or who we choose to sacrifice. A church is kept intact; a community is uprooted. (Some) heritage is framed as sacred while indigenous rights and the lives of people as negotiables. The image of Kiruna’s church in transit feels dissonant as the stories of people left in it’s ruins are less likely to make international headlines. The church will probably stand in its new place many decades ahead, and most likely continue to attract visitors from across the globe. But if this is the model of transition, green or otherwise, the future it represents is already mortgaged to the same extractive logic that has defined the past.