ABSTRACT
I was in a meeting with EU project researchers in the village bar of Vuotso, Lapland on a bright-green June day in 2002. We were trying to reach a collective definition of sustainability, so understandably emotions were running high. The ecologist was reacting to my questioning of what he assumed to be the agreed baseline criterion of sustainability in Lapland: no artificial feeding of reindeer in the tundra. I had wondered aloud what was so unsustainable about feeding the reindeer when cattle, sheep, and chickens were being fed a few hundred kilometers further south.
