September brings major international events, restoration season draws towards its end, and new book on pastoralism. Fisheries continue with traps and traditional dip netting.
Autumn is here and in fisheries traps are in lake Onkamo and later towards October cleaning of spawning sites of endangered whitefish will continue on Koitajoki river. We will participate in the Low Impact Fishers of Europe summit in Rome in early September, where Captain Karoliina will lead efforts to convey messages from northern freshwater harvests and culture. We also participated in August in river Tornio on the cultural fishery of dip netting at Kukkolankoski which has been recognized in recent years as a cultural heritage. This was the site of the 2018 Festival of Northern Fishing Traditions.
In rewilding and restoration August and early September are devoted to the continued work on Koitajoki and Arctic Circle peatlands. Possoli canyon from Salla, Eastern Lapland marks a major ecological corridor close to the national park at the borderlands as a new site. Also in Salla, a major peatland restoration effort will commence in Autumn in the Koutelo river catchment. New sites will be added in the Autumn.
Pacific Tour will commence in early September 2026. Delegations will catch up with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC events in Sri Lanka, then visits to the restoration sites in Aotearoa, New Zealand will follow, and onwards to Pacific sites on the western coast and areas of Canada. The tour will culminate in late September and early October in a large workshop in Canada on questions of Circumpolar simultaneous peatlands work and Pacific wetlands restoration. More on that later in September.
In other international news, a new book with Snowchange nomadic case study has been released, titled “Pastoralist Voices from the Territories: Stories of Governance, Care, and Resilience“. Pastoralists speak directly about their relationships with land, water, animals and community. These stories illuminate the governance systems, cultural practices and everyday acts of care through which pastoral communities sustain their territories. Together, they reveal both the resilience of pastoral ways of life and the pressures communities face from land conversion, climate change, insecure tenure and exclusionary policies. The whole book can be downloaded here.
