ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the nature–culture binary tends to get blurred in past and present small-scale farming, forestry and restoration-related land-use practices. As an ethnographic example we use the environmental history of and current restoration efforts in wetlands surrounding the village of Hetekylä, along a tributary of the Kiiminkijoki River in Finland. We illustrate how artificial intervention emphasising mitigation practices concerning climate change and biodiversity loss, such as constructed wetlands, are not only a common approach in current environmental management but also continue the historical blurring of the nature–culture binary. These technofix-style, active approaches seem today to be surprisingly easy for locals to accept. Meanwhile, more passive methods, for instance the compensated protection of standing forests or implementing less intrusive forestry methods to increase carbon storage, are not as easily accepted. We argue that this is because artificial intervention-based approaches fit painlessly into a culture that is based on productivist agricultural and silvicultural mindsets. We discuss the terms in which these current mitigation measures fundamentally differ from the historical management practices, as well as what social-ecological impacts active and intrusive methods may have – and may not have – and the degree to which this fits the goals we wish to achieve.
