SPLENDID BE THE EARTH

Splendid Be the Earth: About the Mountains, the Climate, and Everything Not Yet Lost

By Mats Söderlund

One evening in September the young meteorologist Manne Hofling walks straight into the snowstorm, in direction to Kvikkjokk, in the very north of Sweden, in an attempt to get provisions. The year is 1917, and together with an assistant he has worked at the observatory in Pårte, a mountain massif, that back then was a spearhead in the Swedish meteorological research. Hofling is never to be found.

The Swedish mountains have always attracted adventurers, explorers and activists, and today they are in our focus in a completely new way. Melting glaciers and flagrant lack of reindeer grazing make these, Sweden’s last wilds, affected by the climate changes earlier than most other places in the country. Here are the climate crisis effects visible already today. 

With his own lifelong passion for the mountains as a point of departure, and voices from the people who with their own eyes sees life changing by a changed climate, Mats Söderlund writes about the Swedish mountains’ history and present times. It’s a declaration of love to the ecosystems and environments that are now threatened by devastation, and at the same time an engaging pleading for everything we haven’t yet lost.