Ghosts of the landscape: how folklore and songs are key to rewilding Finland’s reindeer | Environment

The Finnish folk musician Liisa Matveinen lives in a mustard-coloured house in Ilomantsi, 12 miles (20km) from the Russian border. Large books of folk songs line her walls. Sitting in her kitchen, Matveinen sings a about a humble hunter going into the woods to find reindeer.

The song tells us how they were “honoured” providers of food, clothing and a sense of place, says Matveinen, who is recognised as a doyenne of Finnish folk music.

Singing takes Matveinen back to a vanished world of hunting and fishing in the Finnish and Russian region of Karelia, where she was brought up and now lives.

“I always come back here like a boomerang,” says Matveinen. She has a deep love for this remote part of eastern Finland, a place covered in vast peatlands and rivers where the oral poetry tradition stretches back 3,000 years.

Few people now know these songs. And along with the songs, the reindeer themselves have disappeared. The last wild forest reindeer was shot in the Koitajoki area in 1919. Its horns are on display in a local restaurant, not far from Matveinen’s house.

Now, a plan is being hatched to reintroduce them. The peatland has been restored and the first wild reindeer will be released here in 2028. The aim is to eventually have a herd of 300. Scouting animals – known as “ghost reindeer” – are already coming back down from their range farther north to look at these peatlands, suggesting the habitat could be suitable for them.

Bringing back reindeer, however, is only one part of this rewilding project. The other components are part of an approach called “deep mapping”, which includes rejuvenating the culture and folklore associated with these animals to rebuild people’s connection to the land around them.

Western organisations that protect wildlife have tended to overlook biodiversity’s links with culture and language. Recently, there has been criticism of species reintroduction projects for not thinking enough about the people who live alongside them.

“Deep mapping appreciates an understanding of linguistic, cultural and biological diversity as all being important,” says Tero Mustonen, who is leading the reintroduction. He is a professional fisher and a lead climate scientist on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

“We are the guardians of the reindeer and they are the symbol of the boreal forest,” says Mustonen.

Rejuvenating cultures

The hope of the project is that once reindeer are reintroduced, communities will want to preserve them, and understand why they are important animals culturally and ecologically.

For more than 24 years, the Finnish environmental non-profit organisation Snowchange, founded by Mustonen and his wife, Kaisu, has been carrying out research on oral histories among reindeer-hunting communities.

The way people think about their responsibility to animals is important, says Mustonen, who would want people to hunt the reintroduced reindeer once again – provided it is done in the traditional way, with respect and in sustainable numbers. “Oral poems represent hundreds of years of knowledge,” says Mustonen. “They are just like a compass. We’re trying to rebuild culture and ecosystems as best as we can.”

For reindeer to thrive here again, however, they must have habitat to return to. Close to 3,500 hectares (9,000 acres) of boreal peatlands are being restored by Snowchange, thanks to funding from the University of Cambridge’s Endangered Landscapes and Seascapes Programme.

One of these landscapes is the peatland in Rahesuo. Two years ago, 160 hectares of this land began to be restored and ditches were filled in to raise the water level. Sphagnum moss is now starting to proliferate – a sign that this site is in recovery. Black-tailed godwits, northern lapwings and ptarmigans are among the bird species that bred on this bog last year. “The birds tell us it is recovering,” says Tero Mustonen.

Reindeer can give birth on these peatlands, which should be relatively devoid of trees so they can see and smell predators. It will be 15 or 20 years before this peatland is fully restored (quicker than usual because the damage was only done in the 1970s).

Reindeer are not the only ghosts of this landscapes. Old societies would have taken advantage of the birthing grounds and used this area to hunt. “This landscape is filled with knowledge, if you can find it,” says Mustonen, who describes peatlands as “our cultural memory”.

Protecting the future

Making people care about landscapes – and understanding their connection to them – could also help protect them in the future. In the past, these fragile, carbon-rich places have been destroyed for forestry plantations.

In the early 1900s industrial logging and pulp companies saw these landscapes as empty spaces and so they took them over. Old-growth forests, peatlands and wetlands were lost as commercial forestry spread.

Today, despite 76% of Finland being forested, woodland birds are declining because of the replacement of ancient forests with plantations. Few trees are more than 100 years old. The Siberian jay has already disappeared from southern Finland because it requires old-growth forests.

Kesonsuo bog is one of the largest intact mires. You can see for a couple of miles in every direction: a flat landscape covered in brownish grasses, small trees and little ponds that glisten blue under a big sky.

It is late September and the boreal winter is approaching. A flock of 200 geese fly clumsily in to land on their journey down from the Arctic tundra. Much of the Koitajoki region would have looked like this before industrial forestry was introduced, but now only 20% of the original peatland is left.

“It’s a big symphony to live in the boreal with these dark forces and dramatic seasonal changes. Now we have this last burst of light before the boreal winter,” says Mustonen.

Despite providing such inspiration for painters, musicians and writers, this landscape is vulnerable to extractive industries, he says. Adding meaning and revitalising people’s connection to the land is another way to protect it in the future.

Mustonen does not want the past to repeat itself: “Without people, nature and culture, this land is empty for the taking.”