By Rae Ellen Bichell (@Rae_Ellen_) - podcats about environmental mediation way up north.
Leena Heinämäki is a researcher at the Northern Institute for Environmental and Minority Law, Arctic Centre, University of Lapland. She discusses the right of indigenous peoples to meaningfully participate in environmental decision making, the international legal machinery for indigenous land protection, and the trouble with sacred natural sites.
Mines in the north are inevitable, says Kai Kokko, professor of environmental law at the University of Helsinki. Society needs minerals. People need jobs. So, a balance has to be struck between economic, cultural, and ecological sustainability. It isn't easy, but it is possible. Kokko explains how.
Oil and mineral prospectors are turning their heads to the Arctic. There, says researcher Markus Kröger, Australian, Canadian, British, and Swedish companies have been surveying, investing, speculating, and drilling. In some cases, he says, dialogue between conflicting parties can be a "trap."
About three months after starting work at a smelting plant in Mombasa, Kenya, Phyllis Omido’s baby boy got sick. A blood test showed the baby had lead poisoning. He’d gotten it straight from his mother’s breast milk. His mother had gotten it from her job at the smelting plant. Omido recently won a Goldman Environmental Prize for her work in Mombasa. In this video, she talks with Päivi Kapiainen-Heiskanen about the environmental conflict that turned her into an activist.
Nuccio Mazzullo, an anthropologist at the University of Lapland's Arctic Centre, talks about a 20-year environmental dispute in Nellim, in the remote northern Finland.
Juha-Pekka Turunen maps large-scale conflicts to figure out where people might be able to find a compromise. One of his trickiest tasks had to do with harvesting peat. It's basically special dirt. But since a third of the country is a peat bog, it was one heck of a job.
Reetta Toivanen, an anthropologist at the University of Helsinki, explains how land ownership flip-flopped in Finland, how the young nation has grappled with unity since before it even existed, and why she thinks this is was the last chance for the ILO 169 to make it into Finnish policy.
Pirita Näkkäläjärvi, head of Sámi speaking TV and radio in Finland, talks about how Arctic activity and the indigenous Sámi intersect.