Tero Mustonen
“There’s no bigger thing to do than undoing the damages of the past century to survive this century. And what I mean by that is that if we are able to untangle and address some of the social and environmental damages that have happened, I think humanity and our communities will have a fighting chance.”
Tero Mustonen is the President and Co-Founder of the Snowchange Cooperative based in Selkie, North Karelia, Finland. Snowchange is a non-profit cooperative that was originally founded in 2000. It is also a large network of traditional and Indigenous communities around the world.
Despite its green global image, Finland has long relied heavily on the exploitation of Nature for income and debt repayments; Tero Mustonen is working to close that gap by smashing accepted Finnish norms and creating new realities. Mustonen is an academic, a professional fisherman and the President of Snowchange, an organization that leads landscape-scale rewilding projects. He works to protect and restore the unique biocultural diversity of Arctic and boreal regions in the face of climate change in solidarity with the region’s local and Indigenous peoples. He is a vocal advocate for Finland to take a role in progressive, climate leadership while his role as a lead author in the most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is bringing global prominence to how Finland and other Arctic nations can meaningfully contribute to global climate efforts. He is also the head of the village of Selkie, North Karelia, Finland.
(photo Ⓒ Snowchange)
Learn more about his work at http://www.snowchange.org
