Additionally, degraded peatlands pollute local watersheds, lakes, and rivers by releasing organic materials, heavy metals, nitrogen, and phosphorous that result in eutrophication, algal blooms, and browning of clear waters. This has proved disastrous for the abundant freshwater resources of a country that’s often called “The Land of a Thousand Lakes.” That moniker is a bit of an understatement though — the country holds 187,000 lakes that make up about 10 percent of its total land area, are home to several endemic bird and fish species, and offer resting spots for many migratory birds. Many of these water bodies, are suffering the impacts of state-sponsored industrial extraction of Finnish peatlands and forests.
“We have lost 95 percent of our boreal forests and most of the lakes are affected by human alterations,” says Mustonen, who has made it his mission to reverse this loss. “As we are water rich, the pollution has been going downstream for 30 to 50 years. In [Finnish] law there is nothing that requires the industry to handle the legacy of those downstream impacts.”
In 2000, Mustonen, who is also the head of the village of Selkie in the North Karelia region, founded Snowchange Cooperative, a pan-Arctic and boreal forest network of community associations that are devoted to conserving traditional Indigenous knowledge and cultures, and fighting climate change and biodiversity loss. “We need to restore our landscapes, but we are also fighting for our lives because the boreal and the Arctic are warming very fast,” he says.
In 2018, Snowchange launched a rewilding program to restore degraded wetland ecosystems and promote Indigenous and community rights in conservation and restoration. (In Finland, Indigenous people still don’t have rights to the land). The organization purchased several degraded, former industrial forestry and peatland sites, chosen based both on the local community’s priorities and on ecological needs….