Radically Ordinary Lives: Young Rural Stayers and the Ingredients of the Good Life in Finnish Lapland

This article focuses on young people who, despite the general tendency towards youth outmigration in rural areas, have decided to stay in their home town. We explore the agency of young, conscious stayers, as well as the process of staying in the northern Finnish town of Kemijärvi. The stayers’ values and perceptions of the constituents of a good life could be taken as an alternative to the prevailing Western ideal that emphasizes mobility and ambitious educational and career plans, and is, in part, driving young people to leave their rural hometowns. The stayers in this study are active participants in their own fate and are content with their choice of staying. Applying ethnographic methods, we undertake to learn what rural stayers consider the building blocks of a good life in a small-town setting, one offering comparatively limited options in terms of jobs, education and leisure activities.

Luontosuhteen katkokset ja jatkuvuudet: maahanmuuttajien kokemuksia pohjoisessa

A close relationship with nature and the exploitation of products provided by nature are an integral part of Finnish identity. In this review article, we study the nature relationships of immigrants in Finnish Lapland, both in the context of their previous life stages and current integration. We apply the ideas of geobiography and lifelong environmental relationship. We ask how the migrants’ nature relationship has taken shape in the course of life, and what kind of discontinuities and continuities exist. We have approached the issue with focus group interviews conducted among immigrants who have residence permits in Finland and live in Lapland. In interviews, photo-elicitation has had an important role. It seems that northern nature has not become familiar during the “formal” integration process. Nature experiences in Finland relate in many ways to experiences in the nature of the country of origin. Refugee camp is the biggest discontinuity in nature relationship. The nature of the original homeland is therefore very distant in time, but still important.

Boulder pits of the White Sea Region

The purpose of the article is to introduce into scientific circulation little-known and controversial objects made of stones discovered during our field surveys in 2019 on the Tersk Coast of the White Sea near the Khlebnaya River. The monument consists of 27 boulder structures of four types: ring-shaped layouts with a recess in the center –– boulder pits (24), “seid”, “pile”, a flat boulder with stones laid on it. Boulder pits within the borders of the Russian Federation are found in the coastal zone of the Western and Northern White Sea regions and the Barents Sea. The distribution of such objects is noted in Finnmark and Finnish Lapland and correlates with the area of historical settlement of local Sami groups. We tend to interpret the “boulder pits” as objects associated with non-Christian cult practices, possibly of a funerary nature.

Проблемы актуализации земледельческих практик в Ямало-Ненецком автономном округе

Agricultural practices in agrocenoses of different ages and in fallow lands of Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region of the Russian Federation were studied with account for post-agrogenic transformations of soils under cryogenic conditions. Agricultural practices in the YNAR are much consistent with those in Finnish Lapland, Southern Greenland, and remote fishing villages in Alaska. Well-drained areas with sandy, light and medium loamy, sod-meadow or sod-podzolic soils, which are easily warmed and not floating in cases of heavy rainfall, are selected for gardens and fields. The depth of permafrost is reduced in plowed areas and depends on the age of their development. The content of available forms of phosphorus and potassium in the upper layer of fallow soils remains very high even through 5-20 years. The use of agricultural techniques, including mulching, drainage, and application of manure and compost derived from fish, increases soil fertility. Currently, agriculture in YNAR decays for such reasons as remoteness (logistics problems), dependence on weather conditions, difficulties in field cultivation, lack of market for agricultural products, and limited choice of products due to natural conditions and the specifics of the agricultural industry. The small indigenous peoples and the landscapes of the North are inseparable and may be sustainable only based on the traditional ways of life harmonized with the natural and social environments.

Wintertime subarctic new particle formation from Kola Peninsula sulfur emissions

The metallurgical industry in the Kola Peninsula, north-west Russia, form, after Norilsk, Siberia, the second largest source of air pollution in the Arctic and subarctic domain. Sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from the ore smelters are transported to wide areas, including Finnish Lapland. We performed investigations on concentrations of SO2, aerosol precursor vapours, aerosol and ion cluster size distributions together with chemical composition measurements of freshly formed clusters at the SMEAR I station in Finnish Lapland relatively close (∼ 300 km) to the Kola Peninsula industrial sites during the winter 2019–2020. We show that highly concentrated SO2 from smelter emissions is converted to sulfuric acid (H2SO4) in sufficient concentrations to drive new particle formation hundreds of kilometres downwind from the emission sources, even at very low solar radiation intensities. Observed new particle formation is primarily initiated by H2SO4–ammonia (negative-)ion-induced nucleation. Particle growth to cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) sizes was concluded to result from sulfuric acid condensation. However, air mass advection had a large role in modifying aerosol size distributions, and other growth mechanisms and condensation of other compounds cannot be fully excluded. Our results demonstrate the dominance of SO2 emissions in controlling wintertime aerosol and CCN concentrations in the subarctic region with a heavily polluting industry.

Introduction

In recent years, the concept of ‘frontier’ has become an important analytical device to discuss resource-making in connection with state formation, procurement of labour, environmental destruction, transformation of landscapes, and climate change. Current rapidly shifting frontier situations suggest that the frontier becomes a useful concept in connection with territorialization, since frontiers, as open or liminal areas, give rise to efforts to map, regulate, expand, and extract in them. We propose that frontiers are spatial, temporal, and relational situations that involve territorial processes that qualify landscapes and relations between humans and other beings, such as plants, animals, and so forth. In this special issue, the authors focus on different aspects and qualities of frontier making, namely questions about territorialization, the spatio-temporal dynamics of frontiers, and the possibilities of life under frontier conditions in the Indonesian Borneo, Papua New Guinea, Finnish Lapland, and the Brazilian Amazon. In all these areas, large-scale resource extraction and struggle over different tenure regimes are on-going. The various cases show that natural resources are not generic, they are specific natural elements that are revalued as commodities and resources that can be extracted in frontier situations. The articles of this special issue show that these nature elements, beings, and lives bear a great significance on different ways frontier dynamics and territorializing processes unfold in specific locations. The papers argue that these transformative processes lend specific qualities to socionatural relationships and limits to possibilities of life.

Transfer of Natural Radionuclides in Terrestrial Food Chains—A Review of Investigations in Finland

Transfer of natural radionuclides 210Pb, 210Po, 238U, and 228,230,232Th in subarctic food chains has been studied in Finland since the 1960s. The unique food chain lichen-reindeer-man related to Sami people in Finnish Lapland and other food chain options, from berries or mushrooms to man, have been explored and the activity concentrations of natural radionuclides in biological samples determined. The results from Finnish radioecological studies are summarized and differences in bioaccumulation between different radionuclides are discussed. It was found out that, although a substantial amount of activity concentration data exist from the research projects executed in Finland during the last 6 decades, more data, especially from U and Th, in biological environment and humans would be useful, e.g., for modeling purposes and for improved assessment of bioaccumulation and adverse effects (both radiological and chemical) of radionuclides.