100 years ago, in 1923, the Finnish National Nature Conservation Act was passed, which is still in force and allows the protection of individual plant and animal species and other natural objects, as well as the establishment of reserves on state or private land. Since 1983, the country has had its own Ministry of the Environment and is working on a first social contract for sustainability: government programmes and initiatives from business, civil society and authorities are to converge under one roof. Forests, lakes and bogs are the main element of the Finnish landscape. Completely untouched forest nature can only be found in parts of Lapland, where the number of Finland's larger predators such as bear, lynx, wolf and wolverine has increased in recent years. However, large areas of northern Finnish moorland have been preserved in an undisturbed natural state; they have not yet begun to be drained. But the first peatlands have already been turned into huge reservoirs in the service of the electricity industry. The energy-intensive production of pulp, paper and metal are central Finnish industries that have been modernised considerably, but per capita energy consumption in Finland is still twice as high as the EU average. Nature conservation is no longer just a scientific and idealistic task in Finland either, but a cultural and social necessity. Coin designer Sandra Prami has chosen a Tragosoma depsarium, a common longhorn beetle in the Palaearctic, as her motif. |
