“It wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s that masses of people finally
went to cities. Before that we were forest people,” said Leppänen as
we walked the soft forest paths. “We haven’t had opportunity to
escape nature. It’s very thin, this urban layer. You can still today see,
we are walking here in the capital city and it’s seven kilometers to the
heart of the city, yet this could be from hundreds of kilometers away.
This is an intact nature landscape. It could be different, if we were
living many generations in an urban setting.” To him, civilization is
like the spring sea ice, transparent, the wild pulse below still sensate.
Being just two generations removed from the land—and being a
nation with few immigrants—means that nearly everyone still has a
grandparent on a farm or woodlot. Those grandparents still live in
country houses, or they own a modest, seasonal country house even if
they’ve moved to the city. Finland has 5 million people, and 2 million
kesämökki, or “summer cottages,” so almost every family still has a
rural, nature-based anchor. It’s a middle-class real estate paradise.
Finland scores high on global scales of happiness. Many people
assume this is because there isn’t much income disparity here. But
perhaps it’s also because everyone has access to what makes them
happy—a bunch of lakes, forests and coastlines, combined with
ridiculously long, state-sanctioned vacations and a midnight sun. (Of
course, there is a flipside, the grim, dark winters, when Finns drink
too much and act up, unless they’re skiing.)
Like many Finnish Gen-Xers, Marko Leppänen grew up chasing
butterflies. He spent nights in trees by himself as an eleven-year-old
while his American counterparts were playing Pac-Man in suburban
split-levels where the only moss was the color of the shag carpet.
Until recently, Finns have lived off the land, both emotionally and
economically. Sure, Finland came up with the flip phone, Angry Birds
and the wildly popular set of comics by Tove Jansson built around
Moomin the talking snowman. But the nation’s dominant industry is
forest products, in the form of renewable fuel for clean-burning