A new Snowchange Discussion Paper, number 7, has been released. It is available here.
Snowchange Discussion Paper #7: Weather Change Observations of the Puruvesi Winter Seiners 1996-2015 by Tero Mustonen and the Members of the Kesälahti Fish Base describes climate issues in the winter seining community of Puruvesi.
The paper examines, in addition to traditions of the region, the contemporary ice and weather knowledge of nuotta (seine) fishermen of the region. While this community has interacted, for several hundreds of years, with a larger Indo-European society and is a seamless part of the modern Finnish nation-state, by analysing the oral histories and memories of the fishermen and their icescapes another reading of the Finnish boreal and lake system is revealed. The fishery is impacted by both the open markets of the fish production in Finland and in the European Union in addition to the impacts from the global, and more specifically northern, climate change. Yet, the traditional seiners choose to continue their practices in these times of change.