– People can’t imagine what it was like here before, Dagmar explains as the car penetrates a sea of willows, heather and grass. It has actually been a few years since she finished her work at Hjerkinn. For almost 30 years, she navigated the high mountain plateau. Now she is back. On the battlefield that has become a national park, there are some answers for how others can succeed with similar projects. Regrowth must be documented. Especially when this is one of the disappearing few large nature restoration projects in Norway and in the world. – Nature gives us back so much. Norway consists mostly of forests, bogs, mountains and glaciers. Built-up areas, where people live, make up only 2 percent of the area. We can be happy about that for many reasons, says Dagmar Hagen, who is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Natural Sciences (NINA). – Nature gives us so much back. We get something far beyond the aesthetic, says the naturalist, and starts rambling on at high speed: – Water purification, pollinating insects, carbon capture, climate regulation, flood protection, food resources, mental health… For someone who has devoted his whole life precisely to nature, the question of what nature gives us seems almost absurd. Nature is life-giving, protective and identity-creating. Still, it disappears little by little. – We must become more stingy. We must stop the loss of nature, says Dagmar. Approximately 70 square kilometers of untouched nature is removed every year, in favor of homes, cabins, commercial buildings, roads, power lines and gravel roofs. This is shown by figures from the Norwegian Environment Agency. Wilderness-characteristic nature in Norway in 2023 marked in dark green, with non-intervention areas in light green. Graphics: The Norwegian Environment Agency In particular, the proportion that constitutes nature free of intervention is steadily decreasing. At the start of the 20th century, these areas accounted for more than half of the country. Now they make up only 44 percent. Wilderness nature, where there is at least five kilometers to the nearest major natural intervention, is only 11.5 percent of it. From 2020 to 2030 is the UN decade for nature restoration, and Norway has ambitions. The government has set the goal of protecting 30 percent of all nature by 2030, and restoring 30 percent of destroyed nature within the same deadline. – The work to follow up the global goal in the new nature agreement has begun. Since 2015, we have, among other things, restored more than 140 bogs and almost 400 kilometers of ditches have been sealed, says the new climate and environment minister Andreas Bjelland Eriksen (Ap). We know what needs to be done, but we still don’t do it enough, says Dagmar. – I get frustrated when I see how much nature is destroyed compared to the small spots we repair, she sighs. Because we can give something back. Dagmar Hagen has proven that. Dagmar, devoted to life, stops the bus driver on the way towards the Snøheim tourist cabin at the barrier and exchanges a few words. – Most of them know me well now, says Dagmar. The researcher is one of the only people who is allowed to drive into this part of Dovrefjell, because the nature must be as unaffected by people and images as possible. She has lost count of how many times she has been to Hjerkinn. Her involvement first took root in the 1990s, when as a young master’s student she researched the sustainable operation of the high-military area. She drives the car past a pile of living, brown boulders. The Muskies have been the masters of Hjerkinn since 2020. Then the Norwegian Armed Forces packed up their things and went to Rena. In addition, wild reindeer and arctic fox are among the species that thrive on Dovrefjell. Photo: NINA/Forsvaret/ Philippe Bédos Ulvin / news – There was a large road network, large firing facilities with long ramparts, running tracks for tanks, and landfill areas with masses of gravel, says Dagmar, pointing to areas that are now almost inseparable from the rest of the landscape. For almost 100 years, Hjerkinn was a shooting range. In order to clear the area of munitions, it was manned and cleared of mines for 14 years. – All sorts of strange things happened here, and throughout the Cold War it was full of fun, says Dagmar. The task of returning the area to nature was carried out for and with former owner Forsvarsbygg, but few have been as involved as Dagmar. Now nature is apparently doing its job. Dagmar and Nina estimate that the area will eventually store 54,500 tonnes of carbon. This corresponds to the annual emissions from 1,100 Norwegian households. It feels good to document how effective the decades she has spent on the plateau have been. – It has been a unique opportunity to both have the specific project and be able to do research in parallel. It is somewhat symbolic that just as we were finishing, the UN came up with its decade for nature restoration, says Dagmar. She believes the examples from Hjerkinn can help other similar projects succeed. – If we don’t have large projects that show that nature restoration works, then we don’t have a chance in the sea, says Dagmar. She will meet two British biologists who are further into the mountain world, Neil and Ellie. They would like to see if similar projects are possible in the Scottish mountains, where nature has many similarities to Hjerkinn. But now all the roads except one are gone. So to find Neil and Ellie, Dagmar has to leave the car and trudge through the terrain on her own. Fortunately, the whimsical mountain weather has changed. – Ah, then it was sunny too. This is one of the best parts of the job, smiles the researcher, happy to be able to use his feet. The bridges over the rushing streams have also been blown away. The shoes come off, and Dagmar rushes through. Trekking through the wilderness is more than just work. This summer, she and some friends walked almost 90 kilometers in 24 hours, just to see how far they could go. – People around me have realized that I can’t let it go. Every weekend it’s out on a trip, she says. Now Dagmar is looking forward to seeing how the large “HFK plain” is doing, what used to be a playground for tanks. Have the plants settled in? Have any new species appeared? Has gravel turned to grass? – It is not certain that we will ever get such a long-term project again, so I feel obliged to get everything published and disseminated. We must get the maximum out of what we have learned, says the biologist, firmly. The crops of the battlefield Neil Cowie and Ellie Dimambro-Denson kneel in front of the majestic mountain home. Their faces are centimeters from the ground, their fingers full of dirt. The biologists study every tiny plant on a randomly selected patch of the vast plain. In just a few minutes, a bumblebee buzzes, a frog hops, and two ravens flit by. Painstakingly they note the details. For common understanding, the Latin names of species such as green willows, polar willows and small willows are used. Down on the ground, the emerging diversity is obvious. The battlefield is being reconquered. There are more and bigger plants, and the animals are settling in more and more, the ground investigation shows. Neil looks engrossed in a plant he doesn’t quite recognize. – I think it is a salix phylicifolia, but it has an incredible number of squeegees. Hmm … – Yes, and look at this one. Could it be something strange from the garden? Ellie suggests, intrigued. – The slope and proximity to the mountain make the soil richer, so there are quite a few variations here compared to other places, Dagmar explains. The two Britons would like to see similar large-scale projects carried out in their country as well. – There is a lot to learn here, says Ellie. To get it all done, Dagmar was helped by a group of excavator drivers, who had to learn to do their job in reverse. Instead of planning and making straight edges, they suddenly had to create jagged and uneven terrain. – It was one of the funnest things about the whole project. The excavator drivers were a bit skeptical at the start, but they are “doers”, so we worked a lot to find out how we were going to do this, says the researcher. For some, their work pride was even lost, she remembers: – I met one of them at the barrier once, and he said “Yes, it doesn’t look the hell like it”. Then we drove in, and there it was exactly as ordered. Karen had understood the whole thing, but thought it was terribly painful. But he had made it so that the vegetation could establish itself. Dagmar now hopes to use all the lessons learned from that process. But she feels it’s an uphill battle. “51 percent sweetheart, 49 percent bitch – don’t push it” – To be completely honest, I don’t think it’s realistic that we’ll reach the goal of 30 percent by 2030. Not at today’s rate, Dagmar admits. On her desk at home, she has a guerilla embroidery with the motto “51 per cent sweetheart, 49 per cent bitch – don’t push it”. “Sometimes I get really frustrated,” she says. After two colossal and successful projects at Hjerkinn and now most recently at Sveagruven in Svalbard, things are still going in the wrong direction. – We need a turnaround, where we repair rather than destroy nature. It is about both integration and scaling up. This means that attitudes in society in general must change, so that we can work closely between different roles and groups. Then we can go from small trial areas to large landscape activities. She hopes for greater ambitions, a national strategy for nature restoration. – Now we have had a summer with extreme weather which shows very clearly that there is a connection between nature and climate. We must stop the loss of nature, says Dagmar, as the day draws to a close at Hjerkinn. Climate and Environment Minister Andreas Bjelland Eriksen promises progress within a short time. – The government has proposed creating a new grant scheme for nature restoration in the state budget for 2024, he says, and emphasizes that much has already been done, with national plans for the restoration of watercourses and wetlands. – There will now be a report to the Storting that will show how Norway will follow up on the global goals laid down in the nature agreement. Bjelland Eriksen believes that working at Hjerkinn will be an important experience in that process. – It shows that it is possible to carry out nature restoration on a large scale and is a good example of cooperation across sectors, says the newly-minted minister.
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The crop of the battlefield – Climate
