Fighting climate change on a personal level

AKUREYRI, Iceland – If you want to do something about climate change, go back to the land, rediscover traditional life and cherish your language and culture, because it’s not worth waiting for governments or organizations like the Arctic Council to act, says Tero Mustonen, co-editor of Snowscapes, Dreamscapes: A Snowchange Community Book of Change.

“You have to hunt and fish. You have to go to the land, respect the old ways, speak the language, let go of the abuse and listen to elders,” Mustonen says.

Collecting words for snow and ice, recording place names, learning to read the weather, dancing, telling stories or making equipment for travel on the land are things anyone can do, he suggests.

Snowscapes, compiled by Mustonen and his Saami colleague, reindeer owner, artist and researcher, Elina Helander, contains contributions from around the circumpolar and indigenous world, including several from Nunavut.

At 565 pages, Snowscapes is an ambitious and dense book. It’s also a bit awkward to read because it’s shorter and wider in size than usual.

And it takes longer to read, too, although it’s worth the effort. That’s because the book is crammed with interviews, observations, stories, photos, art and poetry, which raise the question “what can we do here and now” to fight climate change.

“I was thinking, what can we do? We can do everything, that is, [by] finding local solutions to global changes and challenges posed by climate change,” Mustonen says.

Monitoring climate change and adapting to change isn’t enough – fighting change on the personal level is essential, he says.

“I really feel this generation has to put up this fight because if we don’t do it, who is going to change things? It has to come from the young people and the elders, otherwise what’s left?” Mustonen asks.

Mustonen, 28, is from Karelia, a sub-arctic region split by the Russian border into two – with Finnish citizens living on one side and Karelians, who are considered a “small people” of Russia, on the other.

Karelia is a region dependent on forestry and fishing, whose people speak a language closely related to Finnish and Saami and continue shamanistic practices in private.

Mustonen is an instructor at the University of Akureyri, where he teaches circumpolar studies. He also writes poems in the ancient Karelian style and recently produced a short video with striking images and a soundtrack of songs and poems about Karelia’s fishing and lake culture.

Mustonen contributed to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report on climate change and he spoke at the recent ACIA symposium, although he sounded radically different from others at the gathering.

But he says he wants to make sure there’s a “post-colonialist” voice on record at these scientific meetings.

“The crisis is so bad that we have to make alliances with scientists,” he says.

But Mustonen doesn’t have any confidence in government or organized groups. After travelling around the circumpolar region, he’s convinced individuals and families are the key to fighting climate change.

Mustonen has one foot in the academic world, but he’s scornful of western knowledge because he says it created a “Nokia” or cell-phone culture in his home country of Finland.

“Books operate in this context of knowledge.”

So, he’s aware his Snowscapes doesn’t tell the whole story about climate change, but, as a believer in education, he says books can still help communicate knowledge that is usually learned by experience.

These days, he’s planning to take his students seal hunting in the traditional Icelandic fashion so they can learn by doing.

Challenging and inspiring to read, Snowscapes is a book that will be useful for anyone who wants to take a personal stand on climate change or just wants to share what others know about it.

Snowscapes came out of two conferences on climate change and a series of community consultations and visits from 2001 to 2004 that were part of a “Snowchange” project, which received money from a variety of governments and organizations.

In 2002, Finland’s World Wildlife Fund gave the Snowchange Project its “Panda Prize” for that year’s top environmental project.

Snowscapes, Dreamscapes:
A Snowchange Community Book of Change is published by Finland’s Tampere Polytechnic.