Changing spatial imaginaries in Kainuu, northeast Finland

Remote, quiet, resource rich, Arctic Lakeland, and so on, Kainuu has a lot of nature. Besides numerous rivers, rapids, swamps, mires and lakes, expansive forests and scenic fells, its residents enjoy Nordic levels of welfare provision. In that sense Kainuu appears as a particularly Finnish part of Finland. Furthermore, with its large expanses of boreal forest, much of it state owned, and its history of forest-based livelihoods, it reflects the country's intense and often remarked-upon economic dependency on forests.

Forests have been vital for livelihoods here for centuries. They are woven into culture and everyday life. Their economic benefits have come from gathering and hunting, from exporting tar and, with the roll-out of industrial production, timber, pulp and paper. Many municipalities, and of course the regional capital Kajaani, grew and became modern on the back of the forest industries. In the 1980s the forest-products industries began to decline, however. For some years, with Finland's entry into the European Union in 1995, economic horizons in Kainuu appeared bleak.

Conflicts and struggles over land use and economic futures became heated. They have, though, been a recurrent feature of the political landscape since the early days of the industrial use of forests. Today, conflicts and disagreements about how forests should be treated increasingly link to bioeconomy projects that are driven by international climate crisis as well as national economic ambitions.

Mining is a growing sector in the region, which brings its own challenges. A related manifestation of current economic thinking, also characteristic of Finland in general, is the cluster of high-tech and capital-intensive activities in a former paper mill in Kajaani. A supercomputer and data centre have been running there since 2019. Kajaani supports this and, in particular, the gaming industry through local applied sciences education.

What of nature tourism, then? As forestry jobs disappeared across the surrounding municipalities, to compensate for lost incomes and capitalise on international trends, policies were put in place to support nature tourism. Despite early scepticism, there have been successes. Besides the sizable Hossa National Park, there are numerous smaller conservation areas and many protected and well-loved landscapes for recreation near residential areas.

Even before COVID-19 nature tourism was on the rise in the region. The pandemic and its effects were therefore not all bad news as Kainuu received record numbers of visitors. Both 2020 and 2021 have been good for its nature tourism, and investments into services to support it are to continue. After all successful escapes into wilderness areas depend on supporting infrastructures, from maintaining trails to providing car parking. On the other hand, since there are big differences in the economic habits of domestic and overseas tourists, the economic impacts of these recent shifts at local level are not evenly spread across different types of entrepreneurs.

Nature is a crucial part of Kainuu's overall brand. Even when the main tourism draw is culture, it tends to be associated with the expansive nature. A good example is Kuhmo, a town of about 8000 residents that recently became a UNESCO City of Literature, and has been host to an internationally acclaimed chamber music festival for over 50 years. What appears valuable in these contexts is increasingly a heritage that explicitly combines the natural and the cultural. Lake Lentua and the Lentuankoski rapids, pictured at the top here, are good examples. They are valued and marketed for their natural features but also for their associations with national romantic art and the premodern infrastructures that once supported the region's tar production and export.

Perhaps because of its economic reliance on forests, Kainuu also has a rich legacy of thinking about what it means to be human in a forested, modern, landscape. I will thus be building on local insights about practicing expressly nature-based but modern livelihoods, like tourism.

I will return to field-sites that I first came to know in the 1990s when forest conflicts were on the rise. I will be learning about changing environments with people who have always known that human history is always also more-than-human-history. The results will include texts and images in different registers and media that will align with local projects. I will draw on Kainuu landscapes to think differently about the wild, to develop skills for sustainable livelihoods and cultivate respect for planet Earth and its inhabitants.