Pia Lindman Reporting from Kainuu, Kuusamo, and Kilpisjärvi in Finland PART 1

Pia Lindman and Alice Smits (curator, Zone2Source, Amsterdam), camping out through parts of Carelia and Lapland in Finland

 

Travelling from Kajaani to Valtimo

Meeting up with Stop.Talvivaara activists Jari Natunen (molecular biologist) and Antti Lankinen (pastor and member of Kajaani City Council).

Natunen and Lankinen have continued following the state of the lakes and forest in the vicinity of the mine formerly known as Talvivaara, but after the takeover by the Finnish State, now titled Terra Fame. Terra Fame is expanding its activities and is now applying for the environmental permission to collect Uranium ore. Natunen and Lankinen have been successful in suing Terra Fame for negligence in terms of environmental security and full disclosure of their activities in their reports. Their next court case in preparation will be in regards to Uranium.

Visiting Omavaraopisto in Valtimo (School for Self Sufficiency), funded by Lasse Nordlund, Maria Dorff, and Marko Ulvila.

The next day we met up with Raili Eskelinen, a local milk cattle farmer and Stop.Talvivaara activist. She wanted to take a water sample from the lakes nearby, to do her part to follow up on the possible continued contamination of the waterways in Kainuu by the mine. We parked at the the gates to the mine and within 10 minutes we got company from the security staff of the mine. We marveled at the significant expansion of the mine since the State takeover. Since we are not allowed inside the mine area (exceptionally, the forests and lakes around Terra Fame mine are off limits to the public. The official reason is security - which makes me worried, since I wonder what there might be in the lakes and forests in the area of 60 square kilometers that is so dagnerous that humans are not allowed there? What about the animals and plants? And what about water and airborne contaminants?)

Mustarinda, Hossa, Ruka and Latitude 66 Cobalt Oy

From Terra Fame we continued to Hyrynslami and the Artists Residency Program / Self sustainability Experiment Mustarinda

Next on the agenda was Hossa National Park. We arrived there in the afternoon and after putting up our tent we made a 3 hour hike to the northernmost rock painting in Finland, Värikallio.

The following morning we drove to Kuusamo and met with Mika Flöjt, member of Kuusamo City Council. Over pizza at Ruka tourist village (a buzzing commercial site organised around some beautiful rocks formations and ski slopes) Mika told us about how it is possible that Kuusamo, as the singular municipality in Finland, persistently resists extraction industries from entering their land.

According to Mika, Kuusamo is the ancient site of "forest sapmi" indigenous people (Kuusi Sami = Kuusamo). These were handed the rights to their land by the Swedish king already in early modern times and have since held on to these rights. Due to national power politics, the king insisted on turning these sami into Finns (to secure the lands as belonging to the Swedish rather than to the Russian Czar).  This history has taught the people in Kuusamo, that if they are to survive as a people, they have to protect their land from empires as well as multinational forces. In addition, as far as I can see, this history has taught the people in Kuusamo, that they need not fall for the fiction of being a poor land and people in desperate need of outside industries to come and lift them out of their poverty. This is an often used narrative to persuade local people to support extraction industries in their area. In most places, however, the economic gains of extraction industries tend to fill other than local pockets, and indeed tend to leave behind a much bigger bill of cleanup and restoration (if restoration is even possible). More details about this history can be found in
Lapponia: id est, regionis Lapponum et gentis nova et verissima descriptio (1673) by Johannes Schefferus.

I asked Mika about Talvivaara - why the mining still continued despite the fact that neither the obtained Nickel nor Zinc could yield enough profit to cover even a fraction of the costs. Mika confirmed the suspicion of many: the Uranium that is found in almost all of the ores in northern Finland is of such high value, that it pays to mine it even in very small amounts. Mining companies choose to officially mine for some other rare earth or mineral and accrue the Uranium ore as a "byproduct". But the actual goal is to sell the Uranium ore to refineries outside Finland. 

After pizza, Mika took us to the site of the possible future Cobalt mine. The site is a test quarry and some ore has been lifted up from inside the rocks. We parked our car at the top of the hill. Walking towards the site, big boulders sideline a gravel road and on both sides of the road one can see newly formed ponds. The ponds are the quarry. As they earth had been drilled open, ground water had swelled into the open pits. Yielding a Geiger meter, Mika locates rocks emanating quite high levels of radiation. A young man wearing a helmet and work gear approach us. I greet him with enthusiasm, since I want to know ask about the salt that I spot around one of the boulders - is that Sulphuric Acid, the same stuff that had destroyed so much of the waterways in Talvivaara?

Mika and Alice now continued walking to the car, while the young man tells me he does not know what the salt is, but indeed, there is a lot of Sulphuric Acid in the area. He looks around himself, says that the ponds around us are green because of that. It was indeed a beautiful color.