Wind and Sun
Dome for camera capturing the aurora at Kilpisjarvi
On the bus to Kilpisjarvi, I ran into Leena Valkeapää, a filmmaker and scholar married to a man from a well-known family of Sami reindeer herders in the area. As we talked about climate change and how it had been affecting the reindeer herders, Leena said something surprising. She said that reindeer herders and other people who live in Northern Finland are used to living in a landscape of constant movement. The mass of ice, snow, wind and water that moves through the regions every season has a transformative power that is part of the way of life of inhabitants. Leena talked especially the wind determines the movement of reindeer herders as they follow reindeer which always travel behind the wind. Thinking about the Katabatic wind in Antarctica, I asked her if there were names for certain winds, and she said that she did not know of any names because rather than being constant like the Katabatic, the wind in Kilpisjarvi continually moves in complex patterns. The wind as a source of life for the reindeer herders and the strange experience of living in the midnight sun made me think about what Paul Hawken once told me, that the ultimate source of all wind on the planet is the energy of the sun. Somehow this combination of wind and sun feels much more important to me here than in other places.
View from Saana Mountain
In addition to her work as a filmmaker, Leena has been researching the use of wireless communications by the reindeer herders, specifically a collection of over 14 years of text messages to her in Helsinki from her husband. From their home near Kilpisjarvi, text message is the only way to communicate, but she has found a beautiful poetry in the simplified messages, which, although she didn't say they were, I romantic in me likes to imagine them as love poems. This simplicity of form perhaps relates to the simplicity of the ecosystem in this area. The extreme climate in and Arctic can support a limited number of life forms, and many scientists work here and in the Antarctic to study the basis of how organisms interact. This simplicity does not in any way make the ecosystem any more stable, in fact quite the opposite. The simplicity of the ecosystems in the Arctic and the Antarctic are in fact more fragile than those of other places on Earth. The changing ecosystem here is something I hope to learn more about from the scientists while I am here.
Radio array for measuring the aurora