Season 4, Episode 19: Living Sustainably: A View from Finland with Mette Hartonen and Niilo Syväoja
image credit | Mika Luoma
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
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
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 I was seeing lots of interesting things in this industry. Then slowly, as a teenager, I started getting interested in activism, first human rights and then I heard this word permaculture, and this sustainable lifestyle movement and environmental movement came closer to my life. And I ended up going to this NGO working for youth, like Panu said in the introduction. There, I focused on environmental education projects and slowly I started to feel that I want to go even deeper, and I want my own lifestyle that I had in the city to change to be more rooted. I heard about this place called the School of Self-Sufficiency. It's the only school right now in Finland that gives this type of study. There's several in Sweden, for example, and in other places around the world, but I think in Finland, we are still starting. So, I went there and it was really something that I also had been hoping for, like what you talked about with finding your path and going towards your dreams. And really, I learned a lot there. Now, I think my ambition is to go further and we’re looking for a place to live in that lifestyle ourselves and also to promote this kind of way of living for a wider audience internationally, but especially here in Finland. I think there's a lot of potential and people who want to really start changing the world by starting to live themselves in a more healthy and holistic way, more connected to nature and themselves even. This is a short intro.
Pihkala: Whereabouts are you two living at the moment, just for the listeners?
Mette: We are right now in Sotkamo, where I am from, and so that's in northern Finland also. And we have been looking for a place and I have for a while worked as a journalist in the local magazine and written about environmental topics here.
Pihkala: Might that region then be a place for that kind of place you are describing where that lifestyle could be practiced and promoted?
Mette: Hopefully. Depends just where we find the place and where also people are around and yeah, we are pretty open for all of Finland
Doherty: Yeah, this is great. We were talking earlier before we started recording how, at least here in the US, people are really focused on some really pressing disaster issues. As we're recording now here in early February of 2025, we've had some major disaster issues in the United States with the fires in Los Angeles. And there's different political upheavals and different reactionary political movements happening. It's easy to lose our focus and our connection with nature and the natural world and some of the basic things. So, it's nice to come back and put our feet back on the ground and I think, at least for Panu and I, perhaps some of the work that we're doing. So just to bring the listeners in, we have listeners in many countries and there's different terms and we can translate what Niilo and Mette are talking about into different ways. Niilo talked about permaculture, the idea of planting and setting up your living situation in rhythm with the cycles of nature. That is not a new idea. It's a universal idea that's talked about in many languages. Here in the US, we might have people that talk about being back to the land or living off the land or living off the grid or living a life of voluntary simplicity or using traditional living skills, either indigenous living skills, hunting gather skills or traditional handmade agriculture skills. We have intentional communities and ecovillages. So, this is a universal impulse, I think, and if we look at history, each generation and each time rediscovers this perennial idea for their own time. And we have our special unique time where we're living off the land and also talking on the internet across the globe in real time. So, it's just fascinating. I’m personally curious about this. We talk about managing news and technology and being on screens. How do you both balance and think about your use of technology, modern technologies like this communication we're doing with some of the traditional skills? How does that play out for you? Is that a struggle or do you feel like you find a way or are you still trying to figure it out?
Mette: Yeah, it's a good question. I have been exploring it. When I was first living in the School of Self-Sufficiency, I was probably one year without any smartphone or any connection to the internet except maybe once a month answering some email. So, I only had this old phone. And I really liked it. Then the shock was when I heard half a year later that Finland had joined NATO. So, I was in a bubble there. It was working for a while. If the world was in perfect condition, the surroundings of the place where I'm living would support the way I'm living. It would be possible, and I would love it. I use very little of the devices, I only have that old phone and then I use some random laptop for checking email and doing something else if that's needed. I think we also need a system change besides my own personal life choices. So that's why I want to also use the technology. Some old devices that are being used and thinking really carefully about the way I'm using them. So yeah, for me the shock was when I saw the closest forest near the place I was living was being locked down in two and a half years when I was living there. I realized that we need to do something so that our culture is promoting the more sustainable way of living. Because we were collecting a lot of berries and mushrooms from those forests, and they were really important in every sense just to go to a forest.
Pihkala: You mean that the forests were cut down?
Mette: Yes.
Doherty: How about you, Niilo? How do you manage the benefits and the shadow sides of technology?
Niilo: Yeah, I've studied this topic with myself or trying to figure out my level of addiction to smartphones, for example. And right now, I'm in this situation. It's also a very privileged situation that I'm able to use my smartphone in a way that I put the screen on black and white and I removed even the browser and I use it mostly just for a regular phone and some internet bank account things or what is needed. But I really try to keep it somewhere out of my pocket and try to detach myself from this technological device, that is a high technological device. What we learned in the School of Self-Sufficiency was mostly doing things with low technology and that it's the most sustainable way to go about as a community also. And it was really nice actually having this social bubble where not many people have that much screen time in a day. Many people didn't have smartphones and it was really, really pleasurable to just talk with people who are in the room and not on some social media. So yeah, that's maybe one part of this path that many people choose instead of being on the virtual side of life that you also enjoy the connection with nature and other people that are living beings next to you.
Pihkala: Yeah, and the School of Self-Sufficiency method has sort of revived interests into early 20th century farming methods and machinery, for example, because those machines don't require a lot of electricity. They are quite durable, and the community element is much present. It used to be in the Finnish countryside that for some things you had to do, you had to invite others. There usually wasn't enough labor in the farmhouse, unless you were really privileged and living in a manor, but that was a different thing, sort of a community aspect and helping each other out. So, in a way, this is a return to some of those dynamics. This could lead into discussions about back to land movements and also about decrease of purity. So, for example, should one cut him or herself off completely from modern technology and life. But, for most of the Finnish Omavarais self-sufficiency folks I've met, they haven't gone for that completely. As I hear you say that there's some aim to be as little dependent on that as possible, but also then living practically or pragmatically in the contemporary world where sometimes, contemporary healthcare is quite good to have and so on. I think also for the topic of eco-emotions, this idea of not aiming for moral purity is very important because otherwise people may get up into endless loops of guilt or trying to strive for perfection and we have talked about this with Thomas in several episodes in the history of the podcast, but Thomas what's on your mind when listening to this?
Doherty: Oh, I'm enjoying the conversation. Yeah, many, many thoughts. I'm working on a book on coping with eco-anxiety and I've been thinking about a lot of these things and reading. I mean, what's old is new. If we had a time machine and we could go back to the 1840s in the US, we could bring Henry David Thoreau, who was talking about self-sufficiency at Walden Pond and growing his own food and building his own cabin and looking at society. And at that time, he was making fun of the telegraph because they had this newfangled telegraph machine that could tell you what was happening in Europe and people were scrambling to know what was going on in Europe. And he thought that was kind of silly. He says, why do you need the news? Why don't you focus on what was never old? So, it's like this idea we talk about how the news is outside your door. The news is your life. Your life is the news is what I tell clients when they're doing a news fast. Just open your door and walk outside. That's the news. That's the important news. The natural world and your family and people that are truly making change in the world aren't sitting watching the news. They're doing their life, you know? There's something very empowering and yeah, trying to be radical about it in the sense of standing up for your values, but not being so grim that you're judgmental on people and cultish about it is always a challenge. I'll just say, we've spoken to people in Nigeria, Jennifer Uchendu, and we've talked to folks doing different, similar voluntary simplicity lifestyles here in the US. So, listeners I think all of us have a strand in this and when we talk about it, it opens it up for us a little bit, this possibility.
Pihkala: Thanks Thomas for that and that leads me to a question I wanted to ask you, Niilo and Mette, which is how did your close ones react to this path that you have chosen? I bet that there have probably been different reactions by different people close to you and perhaps changes over time. But I would be interested in hearing about some of that social dimension. I hear that you have got a lot of new meaningful relationships via the process, but how about it all?
Mette: Well, my parents have always been really open. They just wanted me to be happy. So, I think that's a huge privilege and we have thought that maybe that's also a key thing that we have been able to make those radical choices or choices that seem radical in this society. Well, my grandpa, he wanted me to go to university. He still tells me to, but I can just understand him. Maybe some of my old friends found it difficult if they had no environmental interest at all. So then I feel a bit more distant towards them, but the closest ones have even been inspired. My grandma said that she would come to the school if she was even a bit younger because that's the childhood she has also lived, growing up in the countryside and growing food and living simply.
Niilo: Yeah, like Mette said, we have been privileged to have parents that have supported all kinds of things that we've been aiming in life and taking this maybe not so traditional path has been possible because of that. It's very important, I think this is connected also to talking about this social media and these global, virtual communities that we have right now. Being connected to old friends and people who think differently or live different types of lifestyles. I think it's really important when you make your own life choices that you also keep people around you that also think differently and then you can learn and they can learn also. So, the point in the school also is not to create a bubble for any community that I would like to stay in, that you would just try to find very cultishly like-minded people, but really to have this kind of wide range of thoughts and ideas also about environmental topics or anything that you can think of in life. So, I'm also happy that I have friends who do very different things in life. I just called a friend of mine who is an airline pilot a few days ago and we have very interesting conversations about energy and society and all these kinds of topics. I think that's something that's very important that I feel grateful for also, thanks for reminding me about it.
Doherty: Yeah, I think there's a possibility to be what I call a ‘climate cosmopolitan’ where you understand different subcultures and there are many people around the world who care about nature and the natural world and issues like climate change and they approach things differently. And I think the ideal is where you could be comfortable going to spend some time at the School of Self-Sufficiency and then maybe go find some scientists that are working on some interesting research and maybe go find some social activists that are working in the inner city and realize we're all part of a larger, diverse community but we all believe some of the basic things and being able to kind of speak many languages I guess you could say is one way to think about it.
Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for sharing that and very good to hear about it. Niilo, you mentioned you have this history of acting and also via our conversations, I know something about your creative efforts for both of you. But I'd like to ask you what role do you think that creativity and art play in your life and work? Handicrafts were mentioned, so I'm talking about creativity here in a wide sense. But would you like to share something about that?
Mette: Yeah, well, I think it's really important to be able to express myself in all ways. I think also in the School of Self-Sufficiency, I was able to think about more sustainable ways in doing that. Painting with coal or dancing and singing and what are immaterial things and also finding new ways in doing the work we have because the work is done with our bodies, so it is possible to, with good planning, use creativity and also create beautiful things to our surroundings. And I also see gardening as an art. It takes immersion skills to be able to grow forward. It can be so beautiful by creating a beautiful garden that's also giving us food that we actually need for living. So my path for looking for creativity is a big way on that also.
Niilo: Yeah, I can continue because gardening is really artistic work. Especially now I just realized that in acting, for example, the timing is the most important thing. And when you think about gardening, it's also very important to know what to do and at what time. You start sensing things around you, like on a theater stage or in a film scene, you also sense things like other actors and objects and what's going on. In nature and in gardening you also have to see that okay is it raining today, or do I need to water today, or these kinds of things and you can take it into very fine levels that the founders of the school, Lasse and Maria, have done. So, it was very interesting to see their artistic process and just watch them doing things. Whether it's building a log house or just breathing and resting or doing whatever, it's a holistic art of being. When you try to live more sustainably, there's no breaks in between you. The whole lifestyle is an artwork, if you would like to see it that way
Pihkala: That's profound and for the English speakers to know, in Finnish language there's a concept called käsityötäide, literally meaning handwork art or handicraft art. And I hear you testify also to that, but to many other things.
Doherty: Yeah, things made by hand. Again, that's popular here where I live in Portland, Oregon. There's a lot of local artisans and craftspeople and what they call farm to table eating in restaurants where there's more direct connections between the city and the rural areas and the farming areas. So yeah, I do think that’s a universal human impulse. Every time there's an industrial revolution of some sort, there's a counter movement to bring back some of the things that we've lost. Sometimes to idealize old ways, but there's that practical thing, like you say, literally being with our bodies and our hands and our senses, we're kind of you rediscovering what it means to be human. From an evolutionary standpoint, our bodies are the same. Human bodies are the same as they were 200,000 years ago, exactly. It's the same, but our world around us has changed so much, but then oddly we have the ability to recreate almost every kind of human settlement if we want to. It's pretty fascinating.
Pihkala: Yeah, also fascinating has been this conversation which we soon have to start wrapping up to stay in our usual roughly 30-minute limit. There's been a lot of things closely related to coping with difficult eco-emotions here, either implicit or explicit, having a connection to others and to the modern human world, so-called nature, feeling the joy or pride or contentment when you are participating in growing something or seeing it grow or repairing something and doing something. And that dimension of emotions about the modern human world is perhaps not so often talked about, but I think it's hugely important these feelings of contentment and joy and even healthy pride sometimes. It's inspiring what you share with us, Niilo and Mette, and for the listeners, we don't want to give a picture that it's always easy to start these kinds of things. We haven't discussed the challenges and hardships very much and it hasn't always been easy for the Finnish School of Self-Sufficiency either. Let's not go into that in detail now. We don't have time for that, but through determination and collaboration, people have persevered. We'll put links in the show notes. There's an English introduction to that school also and some of the things that Niilo and Mette want to share. Any thoughts that you would like to briefly share before we start wrapping up, Niilo and Mette?
Mette: Yeah, I want to share the inspiration for learning. It was really a surprise to me that I could learn to grow food and most of my food and make firewood with an axe. And so, that's what I want to share. You can learn and there are people who are doing it. You can find them and then you can give yourself mercy in the learning that it takes time and you can listen to your pace and the possibilities and chances you have in life at each moment.
Niilo: Well said and yeah, what Panu was also pointing to is that there's a need for healing and regeneration in this time and this very meaningful lifestyle that you can find that has this holistic way of approaching things and also honestly about, for example, the energy descent that is happening right now. We are not basing our current society on any wisdom that is actually based on any truths. It's a bubble that is going to burst. That's maybe a harsh fact and a deep topic in itself to talk about the peak oil and all that kind of stuff. But if you look into that, maybe we can put the Nate Hagens link in the description or something like that to go deeply into this topic. This time is a changing event in human history. We are really at a point where energy is not going to be cheap in the future anymore. So, we need to change our way of how we see energy and how we work and how we build our life completely in a new way. So healing and regeneration are a very integral part of this change. I hope that everyone has this ability to share this caring and loving attitude to your own self and also others around you. Thank you.
Doherty: Well, that's also well said Niilo. And yes, the personal and the planetary are connected. So this is all good. This is such a great conversation. It brings me back to many positive things that I've done in my time that are similar to what you've been describing. So, listeners, I hope that this inspires you to follow these trends in your own life, wherever you happen to live, because this is a universal impulse at any place in the world. Listeners, thank you for your time. Panu, Niilo, Mette, I hope to meet you all sometime, possibly in person on the land. But as it was, it was really great to share this time with you all. Take care.
Mette: Thank you.
Niilo: Thank you both. And also, thanks Panu for inviting us and being a very strong person in the Finnish scene of climate emotions. It's also been very useful on my path.
Pihkala: Thank you, Niilo. And thank you both for joining us.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
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