I named predators and the largest species of their respective genuses as the most prospering of vertebrates in the contemporary Finland. The group of losers is thicker. Among mammals, the cross is drawn on the mink and garden dormouse, they share the fate of the peregrine. The arctic fox, western polecat and flying squirrel have dwindled greatly. I have not had subjective touch to many mammals; it is peculiar how few mammals an ornithologist encounters on his path. And even then when he meets them, it is indirectly via his birds: mouses, voles and wood lemmings dead in the nests of their owls, bones and tails of weasels, squirrels, rabbits and muskrats in the nests and feeding rocks of goshawks, eagles and white-tailed eagles.

Even the flying squirrel became familiar through birdhouses. 40 years ago it happened, as I was opening actually a couple of starling houses, that instead of a tight, firm and stern-faced starling mother, the astounded staring of a cuddly, silky and silvergray creatures' big eyes greeted me there. A long time ago had flying squirrels vanished from my life. At that time these home glades were sumptuous aspen-, common alder- and walnut groves, which I counted to have 800 bird couples per square km², five species of woodpeckers among them. Now some spruce scourers linger on in them, and bird density is barely 200 couples.

I had a polecat as domestic animal long ago in Kuhmoinen, the time when the children were little, and a large bunch of coneys dwelled in the stables in the horse's company. A polecat arrived to the yard in winter, dug a passage to the stables and began to tax the rabbit young with a good pace. I snared it with a trap, and carried it five kilometers away on my way to the village. After a couple of mornings, its phosphorous eyes were glowing in dark under the haybarn like before.

I can name a long list of current losers in the world of birds, and they do not share common intrinsic characteristics like the victors do; they are spread out to many families. There's the lesser white-fronted goose, black guillemot, lesser black-backed gull, ringed plover, dunlin, cuckoo and nightjar, many woodpeckers and most of all, a great host of sparrows. The capercaille is the stark exception to the rule of families' largest success, and the black grouse can also be included. My own home villages on the shores of Vanajanselkä are an extreme example of the plummeting of the black grouse population. Years long past black grouses crashed to flight at every cape, and a constant courtship murmured on the springly ices. Now only one last, shared, mohican has sounded in a region of three villages for three springs. Then, the last spring was for the first time (assumably after thousands of years) completely silent until the end of February, the ending of the mating season, when an unexpected wandering cock appeared to the void.

A list and classification of endangered ones has been made of the most steeply regressed species, and it is a wonderful thing that they are attempted to take care of with palpable conservation campaigns. Still, it feels as if in mappings of primeval forests, for example, a disproportionate emphasis is given to a few of the most endangered of species, uncommon and rarities; not the whole plethora of animal species. It is certainly obvious, one of the foundational principles of environmentalism, that the extinction of a whole species is the most overbearing of losses. It is irreversible, the worst blow that could befall the biosphere. Though, the question is almost never about that in our fauna, as there are no kinds of ocean isles or isolated mountains in our nature, where the whole world population of an animal species would be limited to a small area. The prevalance of nearly all of our mammals and birds reaches across borders.

Eljas Pohtila of The Department of Forest Research has presented interesting aspects of the problematics of extinction. He thinks our white-backed woodpeckers are the corner patriot's ostensible problem, because the animal has strong populations in Estonia and Russia. Surely he swings his ax to stone as he overstates that our white-backed woodpecker population can fade away, because it is a scarce and untypical population experiment, pushed to the edges of its distribution area. Any animal at all can be quickly driven into extinction by following this tenet: always a newer and newer zone turns into the border of prevalence.

But there is something worthwhile in Pohtila's ponderings. First of all, it is clear that the Saimaa seal is more important than the white-backed woodpecker in regards to biodiversity. And second of all, that the most significant of richnesses is after all the quantity of animals, the sum of life. It is exceedingly fundamental whether there are seven or five million couples of chaffinches living, bustling and rejoicing in our woods. And it is exactly that, as well, what nature is about.

I have the impression that the populations of our most numerous little birds have even sharply diminished in the long run, during the last decades. From the very recent years, I am aware of no more than two significantly abundant birds whose numbers have firmly increased: the greenfinch and blue tit. Even those species that had a grand triumph thirty and forty years ago, have either halted like the scarlet rosefinch and dunnock, or even steeply reverted back and returned to their starting positions, like the lapwing and black-headed gull.

The course-counting routes of birds have been designed to represent the region's terrain in the correct proportion as an unbiased, unselective survey. When I last used the year 1976's June's mornings to calculations in Kuhmoinen and several villages of inner Ostrobothnia under the command of Olli Järvinen, the lines for the most part traversed through desolate nurseries and woods of poles and shreds, in which only the monotonous triplet of willow warblers, redwings and tree pipits was registered. I recall as a very strong impression, how every now and then the edge of an old forest was visible straight ahead on the compass line, even far away - and likewise, from there to afar the pealing choral of chaffinches and song thrushes. Then, as one dived into the woods, also robins, siskins, goldcrests, tits, pied flycatchers, chiffchaffs and wood warblers were met in multiple numbers compared to the openings, counted by heads and the ear; in the order of each bird's sound volume. Already by then I noted that simply by reasoning; on the basis of the change in habitat, an immense decline in numbers could be estimated in the avifauna. Of course, with the reservation that the capacity of overwintering areas is not being a bottleneck here.

The thoughts Eljas Pohtila inspired of extinction are worth contemplating on even longer. In the end, extinction has a definite substance: it means the disappearing of a species from earth to the last individual. Nevertheless, we have a habit of understanding, experiencing and griefing partial extinctions according to state borders. Also Finnish bird men have been heavily shocked by the extinction of middle spotted woodpecker in Sweden, and fight unrelentingly - to the vexation and amazement of Pohtola - for the Finnish white-backed woodpecker. And it is infallibly certain that if the white-backed woodpecker, or some other animal, vanishes from an equal-sized region in Russia, the loss does not appear as major to us, because it is lost from only a small part of the Russian country.

This is not as silly as it seems. That is, we are quite bound to states in our conservation work; international cooperative campaigns do not reach even nearly the same effect as national ones do. It is wholly inescapable that the list of endangered species and red books are assembled for each country, whether its acreage is tiny or large.

But when nature and the animal kingdom is eliminated and diminishes, it projects as evermore frequent total disappearances in small areas, such as provinces, counties or villages. These are soul-stirring matters, and they are even more disturbing and dramatic, getting the correct emphasis, if also then extinction is being thought and discussed about. For example, the white-backed woodpecker has gone to extinction in the whole western part of Finland. It is the most living and bitter reality for me that on the "home area" of perhaps a thousand hectares at the northern cape of Vanajanselkä, which I have been following like my own pockets since 1948, 20 bird species have become extinct and only two new ones have come in their place.

I was a while ago browsing my bird observation book from 1949, when I was tossing about as a full-time bird man here in the sphere of home villages, as soon as school ended. At that time I did not yet make daily notes, but surveys of five-day or weekly periods. In Midsummer's statement I laconically read of the yellow wagtail: "mothers commonly have nestlings"; and of the northern wheatear: "seems to be extraordinarily rife everywhere at the village". Certainly, single observations, nests and broods are mentioned in addition. Now there hasn't been a feather left of either species in this region for years.

As I eye my banding lists from the year 1953, I notice to have marked 210 out of the 263 starling fledglings in this village - regardless of that the age-old village blacksmith Sandsten would not let me, under any conditions, to search through an especially plentiful birdhouse society on a yard with my hammer. Furthermore, dozens of starling broods grew in holes in common alders and aspens, unreachable. I have rated the current starling population accurately: it has been four or five nests for many years. The ratio of decline, the coefficient is about 20:1.

I have made the observation that as ornithologists generally show changes in the avifauna, of starlings or others, they use much more cautious ratios. The map of Atlas-counting, in which only utter loss is visible, has likely been a major factor of psychological distraction. If a hundred couples of northern wheatears have been discovered from a 10 x 10 km square, and there is one sure nest in the next counting, the map will get the same recording. The herring gull would receive the same circle for every year since 1950 in the box of Vanajanselkä, even though the population has risen from 3 to 165 couples according to exact counting of nests.

In fact, it is the exact countings that point astounding coefficients with many other birds, as well - if there are countings. When I state that the lapwing population grew over five times larger, and then plunged back to a fifth, from the 1950s to the middle of the 1960s in Tavastia - and assumably elsewhere in Southern Finland -, this is merely an estimation, even though I myself believe in it on the basis of touch. But when I tell that wrynecks dwindled to less than a fifth from the 1960s to the 1980s, it is founded on the exact data, carefully maintained constant, of my 668 annually surveyed little birdhouses.

It is usually a matter of dozens or hundreds of individuals with large animals and predators, the victorious species of our fauna. There are many naturally affluent bird species in losers, and their elimination is a matter of thousands, even millions, of individuals. If we were successful in bringing back the tree covering to our sapling plains; the mixed forest, groves and woods of blocky trees to fields of a single species of tree; trenches, weeds, berms, small cattles, meadows and fields to cultivated openings; and even closing off all unnecessary parallel roads and too large courtyards and parking lots; then we would regain a gigantic amount of animal life, as well. This is not utopia at least when small regions are concerned. Every landlord, even with the smallest of house- or villa lots, can take part in the task of returning nature.

1993

The Finnish society's list of priorities and direction demands a steep change: an about-turn. The society's development of the last decades has been utterly miserable and negative. The only true and sensible goal for a society, the good life of its citizens, has been buried under such false gods as economical growth, efficiency and competition. A societal atmosphere has been created that is more restless, fearful and spiteful than ever. First and foremost, the Finn's faith in future has shaken more seriously than ever before in the known history.

The only meters of the satisfaction, happiness and future faith of the citizen, and the society on overall, are:
- the amount of suicides,
- the need for psychiatric services and medicine,
- the need for drugs and alcohol,
- the permanence of unions between genders, or the number of tormenting conditions after divorce,
- the degree of firmness and warmth between gender relations,
- the degree of harmony and respect between citizens, and
- the quality of the environment.

With the current objectives of the society and the leadership of our present decision makers we have drifted, and will drift into ever greater disaster in all these terms. There are no other indicators. A full reversal means that the decision makers, leaders of the country, begin working without residue only to advance these factors of well-being. Entirely new pathways must be sought.

We demand an about-face, in which demands for performance, rationalization, automatization and renovations are rooted off the society. Most important of all, competition, which is never anything else but immoral and condemnable subduing of others, must be disposed of in all areas of life. Even the thought of vying between nations or economical coalitions must be extinguished. No country is an enemy to Finland that must be triumphed over. For every country their own products are as vital, and Finnish products must not reign over them. The word "kilpailu" [competition] must be eliminated from the Finnish language.

Man, and specifically the northern kind, is first of all an active creature, for which pleasant toil is the prerequisite for life. Unemployment is so severe an affliction, that its magnitude is impossible to be overestimated. According to mood surveys, the Finn holds the secured future of his workplace or trade incomparably more prominent than high material standard of living.

We demand that the destruction of human work is stopped; the replacement of it with machines in the case of physical work, and with computers in regards to mental work. We demand that toiling is largely returned from the machine to man.

The welfare of human existence must be focused on everywhere. Instead of efficiency, workplaces should strive towards that employees have a pleasant and restful feeling in their second home, and that only a moderate amount of absolutely necessary wares and services are produced outside from the enterprise.

The core of a viable and enduring society is always agriculture, including secondary sources of livelihoods: garden cultivation, gathering economy, fishing and hunting. Collapse is the destiny of the kind of society, where in regards to the majority of populace the connection to the basic foundations of life has been severed; leaf green, soil, the production of earth and water.

Professions of providing nutrition are not trades among others. Agriculture is not merely a livelihood among other livelihoods. These trades are the prerequisite of all optional crafts, and thus above them. A nation is as its farming, as long as the human species lives on the globe.

For agriculture we demand that its position as the country's primary source of livelihood is clearly recognized, and that it is reinforced with all the society's reserves. In addition to good production conditions, we ask that the number of farming people, the spine of a society, be quickly increased. A very noticeable part of the unused workforce reserve of the half a million unemployed people - or a corresponding number of people - has to be stationed to farming, both as independent farmers and workers for farms.

All deserted farms, their whole acreage of fields and building base must be taken into use. The significant increasing of farming population also requires slight land reforming, in the manner of settling migrants. Leased fields must be restored as farms of their own as soon as possible.

Agriculture's natural development of profitability must guarantee that an ever smaller area of cultivation is enough for a decent living. The field acreage of a lucrative family farm (in crop production in Southern Finland; in animal husbandry in Central Finland) was around ten hectares in the 1950s. Nowadays it could be five hectares; three or two in the future. We mean the typical production of grain, milk and meat, on which most farms are always built on. The area-need of the special crops of scarcely used agricultural products is generally lower, but the amount of these farms will always be minor.

The profitability of small farms is achieved with the pricing of agricultural products: food. Heightened extra for area is paid in the surpassing phase.

It will be immediately yielded from the current mindless and unjust practice, where a beginner of the farming trade, unlike all other profession groups, is forced to pay grand sums of his workplace that offers only a homely level of income. The change in generation must be wholly redeemed from inheritance- and legacy taxes. Siblings are not paid their shares in such cases, where schooling to a trade that will secure a living has been paid for them from the farm's funds.

The profitability of enlarged and vigorous agriculture implies the returning of the price of food to a sensible level. The contemporary clearance sale of sustenance will remain a brief error in the pages of history.

The profit of a farming household must come as the cost of agricultural products. The subsidy system; recycling the farmer's earnings through tax reserves, is given up with excluding the profit balancing of the smallest farms.

The remarkable growth in nutrition costs means a comparable deduction in entertainment budget in consumer economy. Boastful consumption decreases in the whole society - the use of money lessens in agriculture, as well. These values exchange into sturdy, vital and brisk neighborly cooperation and socialization, in both villages and suburbs.

A strong, dominating agriculture brings forth full self-sufficiency in nourishment by its arrival. Self-sufficiency will hardly be transcended in the present climate, because harvests decline as we come closer to natural tillage, which is imperative for environmental reasons. Also the people's nutrition need grows as industrial energy is being replaced with the muscle energy of man. If we conclude at restoring the working horse stock, a significant acreage of fields is bounded to produce this domestic energy.

Beginning with the present situation, securing the businesses of the few most hard-working farmers and large estates isn't interesting; they will survive anyway. The protection of small, and particularly the smallest, family farms is essential.

Exactly likewise a bank, office and industrial company must guarantee a living for also the slow and unskilled employees, it is focal that a minimum livelihood is secured for also the slow and slacking master and mistress of a small estate or cottage farm. Half of every population are always people more inefficient and less handy than on average. Society's functions must always be constructed according to the weakest citizen.

In a global survey, shortage of crops, food, the hunger is knocking on our door very soon: we all are familiar with these statistics. It has to be kept in mind that even now the conditions of agriculture are worse in a major part of Earth (for example, the whole continent of Africa) than they are in Finland. On a global scale, Southern Finland is excellent area for cultivating crops, Central- and to an extent, Northern Finland as well, are outstanding for animal husbandry.

Also this global point of view is strongly for the Finnish society to concentrate on agriculture. Products of forest economy (paper!) are not necessary at all, food is.

The present climate prediction promises diminishing of the world's granaries by drought, wind erosion and the rising of the sea level. On the contrary, increased harvest is expected for Finland. Even after the concept of overproduction has ceased, the possible surplus of nutrition will be very wanted on the global market in the future.

It follows from these grave facts of the world's nutrition balance that EU must adapt to the Finnish agriculture, and not the opposite way. EU's current policies of societal- as well as agricultural politics are on a badly retarded level. If there will be no adjusting to the facts, the fatally harmful directives have to be systematically left disobeyed or in the worst case, it must be detached from the society.

In Mustiala 30/3 1996

Mankind, the human species, seems to have reached its end. We are in the midst of ecocatastrophes, in the eye of the storm. No natural scientist or serious futurologist likely has promised more than 30-100 years of remaining time. A case of their own are the ordered researchers hired by the fanatical business world, who cry their screams as a small minority of world science. The human language does bend into as insane claims as possible: it is easy to say that the sun rises from the west and sets to the east.

There are plenty of severe warnings. When individual biologists, population scientists, philosophers or thinkers get their own bloody warnings into the public, when a hundred Nobel-awarded scientists compose a declaration, which deems that economical growth must be immediately halted.

In the process of reality, the most wretched vein is of course the extinction wave of organisms, which has been running on massively for decades, and is continuously gaining speed.

It can be said that doomsday omens are old news already. At this century they are completely different from older predictions, which were based on intuition or revelation. The modern prognoses are founded on scientific facts, observation data, calculations, figures. They aren't older news than a full or a half century.

The actual point is that mankind or a nation (I mean the Finnish one now) does not react to this information in any way, or at all. In media, news of the end of the world are drowned in the incomprehensible opulence of news material. Even though news concerning the gradual dousing of life are really the only significant news, the only ones under which all other human aspirings are subject to, they never reach the largest headlines.

The greatest of titles and the most enormous of space is reserved for unbelievably indifferent rubbish: Diana, Clinton, Sundqvist, Vennamo and so on. And foremost of all, the decision maker in politics and business life talks and acts as if there was no threat to life. As a man aware of the conditions of life observes the undertakings of the minister, president or general manager, he doesn't know if a flabby loony or an altogether ignorant brat was a more fitting comparison. Everyone can test the ordinary citizen by asking the question: how do you take into account the endangering of life in your everyday life? A bewildered stuttering is the answer. All the elements of a collective suicide are perceptible in the society.

Menacing, or already occurring ecocatastrophes at ground, water and air are multiple, and besides, they cross and amplify each other. I'll take only one among the many as an example: the climate change, which we perceive with our own eyes to proceed faster than any predictions do.

In short, what follows the warming up of climate is the submerging of wide, fertile coastal plains under the sea level, and most importantly the destruction of the world's most essential crop cultivation areas by drought. Then again, in the North - like in Finland - harvests seem to grow, although the lack of direct sunlight may compensate for the rise in temperature. But the massive increase in rainfall prevents harvest both by machines and handwork. According to another scenario, the Gulf stream will change its course, and Finland along with its neighboring regions shall change into tundra. There are no other scenarios.

We know that the governments' ostensible awakening to the reality of climate change has produced spectacles like the conferences of Rio and Kyoto. Against their buffoonery, business making and cynical swindling there are the calculations of climate researchers and ecologists, which say that to actually stop the climate change would require reducing emissions to ten per cent of what they are now. Also other stopping programs of various ecocatastrophes arrive to the same 10 per cent class; the curtailing of overall consumption should naturally be more than 90 per cent in industrial countries.

All these programs, figures and percents are retouched in the way, that they do not require the most essential: stopping the extinctions of organisms and the human species drawing back from their domineering position. So that the avalanche of extinctions would halt, in other words; the remaining organisms would return to the so called natural frequency of extinctions, which is about one thousandth of the current one - or somewhere around, I don't recall the exact numbers -, undoubtedly also the numbers of mankind should be cut down to around ten percent, without delay.

I shall hold on to that reduced program that aims only towards the preserving of mankind and their few companion species, when I am drafting some directions, quick sketches of those changes in society that the stopping of the climate change would really demand.

It is possible that even this objective would require lightening the intolerable population burden - although not down to a tenth, but somewhere around two billions. That figure is the world's population at the time a bit over half a century ago, when the grand natural systems of the world moved, began to shock and collapse. A hypothesis of some value can be proposed: that the globe could handle a population load of almost the same size, obviously with the material consumption of the time.

Nevertheless, I shall reduce furthermore in this presentation: I want to begin with a reckless attempt where the existing population burden is sustained and diminishing is striven towards only through the method of controlling birthrate. This policy is deeply humane - and because of that, likely too soft. In any case, a full reversal from the stray paths of the Western culture to the guidance of reason is demanded.

I will proceed in the order that I'll first give some practical solutions and only in the end will I express philosophical and psychological outlooks.



The population program

The cornerstone of a minimal population platform is the dismantling the freedom of birthing, the most senseless form of individual freedom. Puzzlingly, it has been realized so far only in the oldest cultured country, China.

Birth-giving is based on licence, and the amount of births per woman is one on average for so many generations that we have reached a sustainable population load. The quality of the population must be taken care of in all circumstances, however. So, the birth-giving licence is not granted for genetically or growth environment-wise worthless homes, while families that are first-rate in regards to their incentives, are permitted several licences.

Contraceptive means and different methods and abortion are free, available anywhere.

The truly wretched welfare extra that is now prevalent, is deducted from the people's body size by regulating, controlling and norming the nutrition and vitamin- and hormonal levels of adolescents. A realistic, easily reachable drop in the average height may be twenty centimeters and the drop in mean weight twenty kilos, respectively. This is a very important and remarkable - and the most humane of all possible ones at the same time - thinning action of the population load and consumption burden.



Energy economy

Fossil fuels, including peat, are completely removed beginning with the very first day of the policy becoming valid. Even the production and distribution of electricity - harnessing of which can probably be seen as the truly great misfortune of mankind - is mostly ceased. It can likely be preserved as an energy source for the media and for illuminating rooms, strictly allocated into quotas per person and room; outside lighting will end. Manual methods are being moved over to in households, as well as in other lines of activities.

Firewood is the warming energy, tightly regulated. The efficiency of fireplaces is developed to the extreme. Inside, firstly the body is warmed with clothing instead of warming cubes of air.

The necessary electricity is produced by wind power - while keeping in mind that a wind power plant, especially at its construction phase with its transportations and materials, but also at the utilization stage with its acreage losses and transfer lines, is a considerable environmental disadvantage.

Other power plants will be demolished. The structures of the worst kind of electricity production, water power, are the first to go. Indeed, water power has caused the third great ecocatastrophe alongside the clearing of fields and forest economy: the faltering of our whole water economy. In other words, the natural state of waters is returned.



Collection of carbon dioxide

The only large-scale method of removing the colossal surplus carbon burden, which has already been released to the atmosphere, is absorbing it to vegetation, firstly into trees and bushes. In Finland the mean cubic volume of living trees on growing forest land is now 70 solid cubes per hectare, and it will be raised to about 400 cubes per hectare that is the default in the natural state. Additionally, a significant amount of carbon is included in fallen trees, the more the norther the woodland is, and the slower the decomposing is. Fallen wood transfers a part of the carbon into peat, as well, if the tree is left alone.

That figure will probably be reached in a hundred years. For that while, the forest industry will mostly close down. Still, delivering the authorities' orders and announcements to the populace, news media and literal culture, which must be held on to sustain the society's wholeness, demand production of paper, even though it is the most strictly regulated commodity; perhaps two per cent of the nowadays' level.

A remarkable deficit to trees' absorption of carbon, and correspondingly carbon emissions into the atmosphere, is born with the use of firewood, even when spared and controlled as described. Firewood is grown from quickly growing deciduous trees on small, carefully outlined areas. It will be survived very far by burning the waste wood of the suicidal society.

There's no room for forest fires when binding carbon. Fire-fighting troops are trained to efficient action on terrain without a network of forest roads.

Also the increasing of woodland acreage is necessary. All wastelands, banks and fields that absorb carbon a little or not at all, are afforested. In the different passages of this program, little increments are gotten to the forest acreage in a multitude of ways.

Reforesting a significant part of field acreage is the most notable of turns, which will be made possible by replacing grain with mostly animal protein in nutrition. Taking the production of inland- and coastal waters into use, that is wholly unutilized in the suicidal society. Annual profit, or interest, is reaped from the whole fauna of fish, and also from the fish species that have been titled as junk fish by the whims of fashion and prejudice, which are just as excellent food. Fish catch can be sustainably multiplied a hundred times, and perhaps a third or a half of the nutritional content of grain and other vegetables can be substituted with first-class animal protein. A corresponding share of the field area is afforested as a truly significant carbon binder.

Also hunting is made more effective, although its maximal profitability is rather small when compared with fishing. Small mammals, and also periodically producing rodent populations - perhaps also invertebrate animals - are added to game species. It is taken care with detailed researches both in hunting and fishing, that food chains remain whole and functional. Only the interest affordable to man, although plentiful, is used from them.



Agriculture

Farming is moved to small units, when machines are abolished and a major part of the population moves to practise agriculture with light, work-focused methods. Already the limiting of transportations requires that the populace scatters beside sources of sustenance and raw material: close to farming, fishing and gathering. Most of the other people have at least a parcel of vegetables; also a garden of fruits and berries in the south. A comprehensive network of advisors operates to guarantee harvest.

The hall spaces released from machines and the inner road network of farms are added to cultivated area or afforested. It will be considered to return half a million horses for the heavy duties of farms as fast as the production of foals gives in - even if it would mean as many hectares of field to produce fodder.

Full collection, transport and use of human and animal manure is organized in the agriculture.

Greenhouses function, if at all, only by solar energy during the warm season. Fresh vegetables, fruits and berries are available only on their natural riping seasons. Preserving - drying, souring, salting - is a part of every household. Forest berries and mushrooms have great importance both in nutrition and satisfying the need for vitamins and minerals. Lingonberry is the most preferred, because it will keep up as purée in its own juices for years. On good berry years hundreds of millions of kilos of it will be gathered to safe storage for many years to come. The same applies to mushroom harvest on good years.

The country is over self-sufficient in food production: there are also batches reserved for export. It will be allocated to the research of plant cultivation - as well as fish- and game economy -; especially subspecies that withstand moisture are developed.



Traffic

Traffic conditions will sharply change. The main rule is that the population lives on their native area, the home district. Services are scattered to be reached by foot, skiing, cycling, rowing and paddling. There is functional public traffic on roads and waters for long trips. The guesthouse institution will be restored according to the olden model.

Private car- and motorboat traffic will cease. Only vehicles of public transport, and a small share of goods cars, will remain in road traffic. The majority of heavy goods traffic will be directed to go via railroads and by waters, and moreover as short distributing transports.

As metal-, plastic- and rubber junk will be in little need in the future as well, the most of car base, household machinery and other metal- and plastic waste will be moved off as pressed blocks and focused container transfers to the unproductive rocky grounds of junkyards; firstly all mine shafts are filled. Most of the road network is cleared and reforested, the grid of forest roads and the whole of vacation housing's roads, among others.



Foreign relations

After all international trade agreements have been revoked and all trade coalitions detached from, foreign trade will drop to the minimum. Mostly metals amiss from the country and salt carriages are needed, because the use of salt will increase abruptly because of preservation. After decades, when railroad- and bus equipment will probably ruin in the end, despite the developed repair techniques, we may need equipment and parts that cannot be manufactured in the homeland.

Products of handicraft and woodworking and foodstuff, for example fish and berries, are used as exchange currency.

Mass traveling will end and be replaced with hiking at the home area. Only professional correspondents, negotiating officials, and persons and delegations that practice cultural exchange, will travel abroad. Ship traffic will operate on sparse intervals for them and mail. Most of the trips and transports will occur on open waters. Ships will not travel on stiff wind.

Foreign visas can be granted to hikers moving by foot and bicycle, who can be assumed to survive with bag lunch and by working in the countries in question. The customs is able to check the backpacks and bags of these people without any hassle.

Air traffic will cease. The equipment will be scrapped, airfields and terminal grounds reforested. The main part of the ship base, icebreakers and structures of most coastal harbors are demolished excluding what is left for inland traffic. It can be considered to maintain minimal ice-breaking equipment, and the upkeep of the only winter harbor in Hanko, for emergencies.



Industry and wares

Industrial manufacturing will turn licenced in respect to considered necessity. No product will get a manufacturing permit, unless it has an orderer who presents an acceptable need for its use. Like at other times, the ecological balance of the undertaking is a central basis of evaluation.

Most enterprises end. There are only a handful of large corporations: for example those making public transportation equipment, bicycles and paper products. They are state property. Avoiding long haulings is favorable for small units, little firms. Many persons work in decentralized handcrafting trades.

It is moved to sturdy equipment that will last from one generation to another. Mending and maintaining of objects is one of the focal areas of society. Willfully abandoning an usable thing will be punished for.



Constructing

New building will stop. As the looseness of living lessens by the passing of households' machinery and equipment, there is a manifold base of houses usable in the country when contrasted with need. The existing deserted houses on rural areas are enough for the spreading population, sometimes with small repairs. Most of the building base will be taken apart in suburbs, and building grounds and areas of yards and streets will be afforested.

A minimal amount of public buildings will be deliberately left intact, which will be used as schools, conference rooms and in cultural happenings at various times of day. The smallest of gatherings will occur in private households. Sports will be outside in the rhythm of the seasons.

The vacation building base will be deconstructed as holiday trips move on to terrain and tents. The wooden parts of holiday buildings - like other wooden material to be disassembled - is cautiously stored, protected from damage by moisture and decay, until they are gradually used as firewood, saving living trees.



Schooling and teaching

The schooling system will be cherished as the society's most precious one. In elementary schooling, foreign languages drop off (are transferred into the extended education of the thin staff managing foreign relations), mathematics lessen; the main weight is on all-round education (natural sciences, history, mother tongue), sports, arts and most importantly, on the teaching of civil skills (at which also the adult population is schooled). Throughout the year there are camp schools in the terrain.

Civil skills include teaching about responsibility of one's neighbor, nature and mankind, social skills, behavioral education and also practical abilities. Every citizen is capable of mending, patching, using the most common tools, making a shaft for an axe, filing a saw, gutting a fish, skinning an animal. Handling food is taught painstakingly: everyone can bone a fish so that only the largest glimmering ribs are left; use one's teeth in mincing the food; eat the skin, insides, fats and bone marrow without loss. There will be extremely little biological waste.

The schooling system shall root all competition from the society from the very beginning.

Universities will be maintained up to the upper limits of the economical state's resources. They will focus on the spiritual capital, and buildings and tools will be modest. Basic research has the main emphasis: humanistic and natural sciences, philosophy. Fields of science and research that require the most expensive of equipment are removed. Applying sciences concentrate on the versatile research and adjustment of the saving economy, developing of soft technology, repairing of buildings, production and preservation of foodstuff. Commercial sciences will come to an end as material-based way of living has finished and trading minimized.

Arts and music shall be widely practised and taught, but the heavy and bulky equipment and the special realties for practising arts will be abolished. At the area of literature, the government of education will grant printing permissions only for fictional and non-fictional works of high quality; the category of throwaway reading will vanish. The inherited capital of public and private libraries will be carefully tended for. Afternoon- and other pulp papers will cease. The number of pages in papers will be reduced, when adverts in their current form will be no more, announcements are only text, and the repeating of the same news in the same publishing will be criminalized. The backgrounds of news, happenings and trends will still be thoroughly illuminated.

The schooling system, like the whole of the society, will be extremely prejudiced towards technology. A lesson, that every developmental phase of technology is more destructive than the previous one, is legacy of the era of the suicidal society. It has also been learned that technology is never a servant, but always the master. It will be held on to solutions tested for decades, preferably centuries. Discoveries unrelated to repairment- or saving technology, innovations, are not allowed.



Law and order

The worst bullies of economical growth and competition, the likes of Ollila, Niemelä, Siljola, Härmälä's, Niinistö, will be transferred to mountains and highlands to contemplate and for retraining. Mostly the properties that have served as tuberculosis sanatoriums, located on pine ridges and a healthy climate, come into the question. Also the buildings in Saariselkä and Levi that are left without use may serve as additional places.

The staff of the supervising body, in which work the tasks and authorities of teacher and police merge, is trained to be aware of objectives and determined to achieve them with effective schooling. There will be enough of supervising staff decentralized in the whole country, both in uniforms and civvies.

It is intrinsic for the interpretation of criminal law that property crimes are harshly punished for. The scale of sentences shall be hardened generally, as well.

The economic society cannot endure drugs and the damage for health and disruption of order it creates. It forbids drugs, including tobacco. Alcohol has been directed to only the largest of festivities by pricing. When the population is permanently in caring control, no home distilling will occur. Borders are closed from smuggling.



The surplus economy

Saving economy will penetrate the whole society. Most commodities are regulated, "on coupons". The coupon portions of foodstuff are closely scaled according to the citizen's age, body size and type of work. Thus even the bulkiest doers of heavy work are guaranteed sufficient nutrition, but then again, obesity does not occur. However, self-sufficient cultivation and gathering products are free of control.

Losses are attempted to be eliminated until the last bits in stages of production, transport, distribution and usage, as well. There will be no crust of bread thrown away in the state.

The hysteria of freshness and hygiene, which has caused fateful squandering and overly dense intervals in carriages, has been utterly extinguished. The population has been trained immune to the most common bacterium strains like salmonella and others since childhood. In other ways, as well, there will be an about-turn in medical science from the path signed by Pasteur to practices fit for the legacy of Darwin.



Money

Rivalry with money, without material counterparts, will come to its end. Stock markets shut down, investing business halts.

The only functions of banks are to store money and small-scale withdrawal- and deposit loaning. Other payment traffic happens everywhere man to man, face to face. Automatic systems will be seen only in museums.



Information technology

When the human life and society return from their most morbid odyssey, from virtual reality to the concrete, material reality, information technology is attempted to be moved into the thrash bin of history for archiving. It is nevertheless feared that the bubble will burst, and nothing will remain at the bottom of the bin.

*

Some reader, who has stuck up to the formulae of the modern surrounding absurd world of delusions, may think that what has been presented above is humor, dark humor. The thought is not altogether stupid, because humor grows from anguish, for all we know.

This program truly buds from agony: from agony and the fear of collective death, the dread of extinction. But in this case, it doesn't result in dark humor, but an absolutely serious document without a trace of a smile. In fact, there is hardly any spot (with respective appliances in different societies) in the policy's draft that wouldn't be necessary, if we want the human life to continue on Earth. Figures and proportions are obviously unverified.

A few truisms form the basis of the program. The greatest of all pronounceable insanities is the faith in human. If man knew what was good for him, would the history be chock-full with wretchedness, war, murder, oppression, torment, misery - and would mankind have piloted itself to the brink of total destruction by following millions of false light buoys?

It is a part of the axioms that likewise very few, one of a thousand or hundred thousand, is capable of being a first-class fine mechanic, trapeze artist or pilot, exactly similarly only very few are able to solve the matters of the nation and humankind. Only rare people can perceive the connections between matters in the big picture, and to unravel the key questions: what caused each fact and what will it lead to.

At this phase of history and this part of the globe, we madly hold on to democracy and parliamentarism, although we all are well able to see that they are some of the most irrational and hopeless experiments of mankind. In democracies, countries of the parliamentary system, the world destruction, the sum of ecocatastrophes is incomparably at their most advanced: these things walk hand in hand. The sole glimmer of hope lies in centralized government, in untiring control of citizens.

I shall yet repeat: the course and direction of politics based on indulgence is the foundational, crushing error. The society and form of life are planned according to what a human desires, and not by what is the best for him. These two things are as distanced from each other as east is from west.

I will arrive at an amusing observation in the end. Besides guaranteeing its main goal, the preservation of life, the formulated model of society would provide surprisingly also an incomparably better standard of living. What are those sweet, dear things of the modern world that man would lose? They are: record statistics of suicides, panting competition, unemployment here, job stress there, renovations and insecurity in work life, alienation, desperation, mountains of psychic medicines measured in tons, the decline of body and diseases of the living standard, the unbelievable arrogance of the individual, quarrel, corruption, crime...

What man would be left with: unhurried socialization between people, the endless spectrum of arts and hobbies: singing, music, dancing, paintings, sculptures, books, games, plays, riddles, shows; the whole enormous museum activity, research of history, home area, dialect, family; the millions of biologist's themes, handcrafts, gardens; clear waters, virgin forests, marshland plains and fells; the seasons, trees, flowers, homes, private life - by definition: life.

Why, then, strict centralized government is needed? I already referred to the shameful history of mankind. If the ordinary man, the people, masses, can choose, it will again and again plunge after the shiny ones like a magpie, like a butterfly into the fire. The government of a few wise ones is necessary to guard the people from the people, the man from himself.



Power

The reader may surmise that I will leave open the question that how those few wise ones will get to power, how the program of life's preservation will begin - because I do not know the answer. Will the salvation come at the final moment after large, truly massive catastrophes, are there shards of life anymore left to be saved; or will it happen suddenly, without notice, through some collective whiz, like the utterly unpredictable collapse of socialistic systems? Or perhaps it will not come to pass at all? That is by far the most plausible scenario. In all its horror, the extinction is not special to the biologist in any way, it is an ever-present option.

But: I have wanted to tell how immensely distant the life of the western man, the Finnish man, is from all reason, how hopelessly deep we have sunk into the swamp. And, I have wanted to present of what manner of things, what kind of options, and on what level all societal discussion must be held on, what kind of questions the politician has to work with in this state of the world. Everything else, everything that surrounds us now is clowning, clowning around with death.

1999