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What does it mean to be self-sufficient and to live sustainably? How should we balance our use of modern technology with traditional living skills? Panu and Thomas discussed these and other questions with guests Mette Hartonen and Niilo Syväoja, who shared their perspectives as young adults from Finland. The group discussed ways to translate the concept of a self-sufficiency community to different cultural contexts – similar terms and ideas can include that of an eco-village, intentional community, or off-grid community, and practices of voluntary simplicity, traditional skills, living off the land, and permaculture, etc. Join us for an inspiring discussion.

Links

• Omavaraopisto School of Self-sufficiency

• European Ecovillage Network

• News Story: Mette, 21, lives independently and spends only 120 euros a month

• A Classic Self-Sufficiency Reference: John Seymour (first published in 1976) The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency

• Basics: 10 Important Traditional Skills

• 10 Off-Grid Communities You Should Consider

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.

Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness, this is our podcast. This is a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues and their relationship with nature and the natural world and the earth and how they make their living, and how they move through their day. And through Panu’s connections in Finland, we're lucky to have two guests with us today.

Mette: My name is Mette Hartonen, I'm 23 years old and I hope to live as sustainably as I can and teach those skills forward to others. 

Niilo: My name is Niilo Syväoja and I'm an actor and right now I want to act as an example and maybe a good elder for future generations.

Doherty: Great. Mette and Niilo, thank you so much for joining us. And Panu, I'll let you get us started. Maybe you can share a little bit about your connections in Finland and we'll be off and running.

Pihkala: Warmly welcome, Mette and Niilo. Very glad that you could make it. We've been meeting each other over the last years in various places. Niilo used to also work with youth workers and I think that's when we first met. I was advising a project which Niilo was organizing about climate change awareness for youth workers in cities and municipalities and things like that. And climate emotions were one part of that. Finland has a nice array of summer events. The sun hardly sets during summer, which gives good time for meetings. And with Mette, we've been meeting at this lovely arts and environment festival in Ärjänsaari, Ärjä Island, pretty far up to the north. That is also geographically pretty close to what is called Omavaraopisto, School of Self-Sufficiency. It has the original translation. We'll come back to some American ways of talking about similar issues like living off-grid and those kinds of things. You both have also, in Finnish media, talked about how increasing those skills of living self-sufficiently or sustainably or off-grid has brought feelings of efficacy and alleviated some eco-anxiety and distress. So, there's plenty of themes to talk about, but it would be lovely to hear a bit about your journeys towards this time and place where you are now. And if you want to talk about the ego or emotional dimensions of that journey, we would be most open for that also. So, whichever of you wants to start would be lovely to hear.

Mette: Yeah, I can begin. So, for me it started in high school when I got the burnout. I had studied really high, aiming for Harvard to study. And I just realized then that I want to live completely differently. I started for the first time to think about what do I actually value in life? And I got a dream of a garden and a quiet, calm place in a forest where I could live in a simple way. And at that time, I also started for the first time to read about the environment and seeing that the food that I buy from the shop can be grown with child labor or in unethical and unenvironmentally friendly ways. So I wanted to know where my food comes from and also the energy I get. So then I felt a huge amount of eco-anxiety and also loneliness because I was living in northern Finland where I was the only vegan in the whole town and I was really longing for finding people who could share the same values and interests. So, slowly I started going towards the dream. I first went to the wilderness guide school in Lapland. It was really nice to learn the skills and also recognize plants and mushrooms and living really simply. We had long camps in the fjälls and long trips. And while I was there, I found the School of Self-Sufficiency which was located really close to my home in northern Karelia. And I got to the course there and I felt really relieved and happy to find a way to live aligned with my values and also find like-minded people for the first time in my life. That was basically the dream I had. There's a course for half a year. There are ten students and we learn how to grow food with our bodywork, so using only hand tools, growing most of our food, then making the firewood from the forest that we use for cooking and baking and also heating the houses. And then we learn different handicrafts and building ecologically with hand tools and also repairing the houses. So I really loved it and felt the relief of being able to live in a way that I knew my food was ethically produced. And it came really close. It was environmentally friendly and I could feel the meaning in my life. Yeah, do you want to continue?

Pihkala: Warm thanks to Mette and before asking Niilo to tell more about his journey, let's just stop for a little while here because this is very inspiring and a great example of how dreams which may seem pretty distant at first may actually come true. It requires determination and perhaps intuition to follow them. These areas in Finland that Mette is talking about are heavily countryside areas and as she mentioned, being the only vegan in town, that still happens in that area and we can talk more about this School of Self-Sufficiency founded by Lasse Nordlund and Maria Dorff, so that's some old Finnish farms which are then used for these purposes. But Thomas, do you have anything on your mind before we give the floor to Niilo?

Doherty: No, I think that was great. I would just echo Panu the idea of the dream. We talk about environmental identity here in our podcast, you know, we have a sense of our identity in relation to nature and the natural world that sometimes it's in a place of becoming. We have a seed of it in ourselves, but it hasn't been allowed to blossom because we're not in the right place. So I think we have a journey to find this sense of place and this sense of environmental identity and I think, Mette, that's a beautiful story of finding your tribe. And that's a very practical concern of people. Being a vegan, for example, and living in a family or a community where that's not common. That would be an issue that many people would understand in the United States as well. Niilo, why don't you say a little bit about your story.

Niilo: Sure. So, like I said, I used to be a child actor and also as a young teenager, I was in films and TV here in Finland and