SMART TRAVELLER


NOT ES FROM AN AUTHOR Sophie Yeo


IN REMOTE FINLAND, AN ANCIENT METHOD OF ICE FISHING REVEALS A PRIMAL AND PRECIOUS RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMANS AND NATURE


I went to Finland in search of wilderness. I wasn’t naïve. I knew that there’s nowhere left in Europe untouched by human hand. Even so, I believed I might find a place where people were outsiders: a presence in the ecosystem, perhaps, but an unimportant one. One week later, and my view had changed.


For it was there, in the country that birthed Nokia and the Moomins, that I first understood the place of humans in the wild. From Helsinki, I travelled some 310 miles


northeast by train to a region called North Karelia, on the Russian border. It was October, and winter would soon whiten the landscape with snow, but, for now, the scenes that sped by were a blur of brown and evergreen. I’d arranged to see the work of Snowchange


Cooperative, an organisation that’s rewilding large areas of the country, acting in collaboration with the villagers, hunters and herders who live on the land. Under this combined stewardship, thousands of acres of forests, peatlands, rivers and wetlands have been restored to life. Some had been in a terrible state. Despite its reputation for forests and foraging, much of the Finnish landscape has been degraded through decades of resource exploitation. There’s as much work to do here as in the overgrazed hills of Britain. Snowchange’s flagship site, a marshmire


called Linnunsuo, is a former peat mine. The land now breathes again, and wildlife has returned. I walked around the edge of the water one cold morning; within minutes, I saw a white-tailed eagle soar through the sky. The restoration has proven a summons to humans, too. Locals hunt the occasional duck or goose in the autumn, alongside invasive species like mink and raccoon dogs, which have increased alongside the native birds upon which they predate. The people, in other words, are both the beneficiaries and agents of recovery. But it was within a fish processing


warehouse, on the shoreline of Lake Puruvesi, that I really began to understand the deep entanglements of people and nature. Here, Snowchange Cooperative is attempting to revive the ancient tradition of winter seining. The tradition hasn’t quite vanished, but it’s fading fast. This method of fishing sees fishers cut holes through the frozen lake and drop massive nets into the water below. They target vendace, a small fish with soft bones that swims in shoals through the dimly lit water.


I struggled at first to understand why


Snowchange considered its work with the fishery an act of rewilding — something that’s normally associated with the removal of human influence. But, as we bobbed across the choppy water in a small boat, Tero Mustonen — president of Snowchange and a seiner himself — explained the reasoning. Forestry and peat extraction had caused an excess of nutrients to flow into Puruvesi. The impacts of this were starting to appear in the form of algal blooms in the once-crystal clear bays. Fishing removed some of those nutrients, keeping the ecosystem in balance, while providing food and income for the community itself. Finnish villages were sustained by winter


seining for hundreds of years. The nets feature in the Kalevala, the poem considered the country’s national epic. But climate change and market forces have mostly put an end to the practice. As the tradition declines, so have the stories and knowledge embedded within it — the knowledge, for instance, of where and when to fish. The revival of winter seining on Lake Puruvesi was an act of both cultural and ecological revival, each essential to the other. The pressures may have been modern, but


the story was nothing new. The imprint of humanity needn’t be regarded as a stain upon the landscape. People have been shaping nature for thousands of years. In prehistory, our place in nature wasn’t defined by mere presence or absence, but of deep involvement; a relationship that wasn’t always of give and take, but of interdependence and reciprocity. The western concept of wilderness holds


The imprint of humanity need not be regarded as a stain upon the landscape. People have been shaping


nature for thousands of years. In prehistory, our place in nature wasn’t defined by mere presence or absence, but of deep involvement


little space for these positive interactions: thus, the most beautiful and natural landscapes are regarded as those from which humans are absent. But other languages do hold space for it — and Finnish is among them. The closest word Finnish has for


‘wilderness’ is erämaa. It harkens back to a time when villagers would have dispersed through wide territories to hunt and fish. It embodies places that were neither entirely civilised nor empty. It’s a piece of vocabulary we’d do well to learn.


Environmental journalist Sophie Yeo is the editor of UK conservation magazine Inkcap Journal and author of the book Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring it Back, published by HarperNorth, £22. @some_yeo


JUL/AUG 2024 39


ILLUSTRATION: JACQUI OAKLEY


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