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Lasse Nordlund (1965) is a Finnish social thinker who is known for his experiment of living completely self-sufficiently in the Finnish countryside, producing his clothes and tools and cultivating his food from his small farm and what he gathered from the surrounding country.
The Foundations of Our Life
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nordlund, Lasse 1965 births Living people Finnish writers Simple living advocates Deep ecologists Intentional living Self-sustainability Sustainability advocates Degrowth advocates Finnish people of German descent
Lasse Nordlund (1965) is a Finnish social thinker who is known for his experiment of living completely self-sufficiently in the Finnish countryside, producing his clothes and tools and cultivating his food from his small farm and what he gathered from the surrounding country.
History
Born inHelsinki
Helsinki () is the Capital city, capital and most populous List of cities and towns in Finland, city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About people live in the municipali ...
to a Finnish father and a German mother, Nordlund spent a typical youth in Germany and was interested in studying physics. However, he began to doubt the viability and meaning of conventional living and decided to try to live a self-sufficient lifestyle.
The background to Nordlund's experiment is his conviction that only subsistence living is materially sustainable on a long-term basis.
The Experiment
Nordlund could not, by his own admission, distinguish between apine
A pine is any conifer tree or shrub in the genus ''Pinus'' () of the family Pinaceae. ''Pinus'' is the sole genus in the subfamily Pinoideae.
''World Flora Online'' accepts 134 species-rank taxa (119 species and 15 nothospecies) of pines as cu ...
or a fir
Firs are evergreen coniferous trees belonging to the genus ''Abies'' () in the family Pinaceae. There are approximately 48–65 extant species, found on mountains throughout much of North and Central America, Eurasia, and North Africa. The genu ...
tree when he started his project, but started by studying books and experimenting to produce goods and obtain food. Eventually, he was able to live in Valtimo, in Finnish North Karelia, for the years between 1992 and 2004 in complete self-sufficiency.
According to Nordlund, one person needs about five ares
Ares (; , ''Árēs'' ) is the List of Greek deities, Greek god of war god, war and courage. He is one of the Twelve Olympians, and the son of Zeus and Hera. The Greeks were ambivalent towards him. He embodies the physical valor necessary for ...
(500 m2) of farmland to live on without buying any additional food. The most important food crop for him is the rutabaga
Rutabaga (; North American English) or swede (British English and some Commonwealth English) is a root vegetable, a form of ''Brassica napus'' (which also includes rapeseed). Other names include Swedish turnip, neep (Scots language, Scots), an ...
, a common Finnish staple. In his self-sufficient economy, Nordlund consumes 200 kg of mushrooms per year and about the same in berries preserved without additives or sugar. He forsook livestock because he projected the maintenance (for example, animal feed) to be too time-consuming to make sense. Though he does accept the value of animal husbandry as wool and leather are handy clothing materials able to outlast cotton cloth. Nordlund became accustomed to life without salt, though many believe it to be life-threatening. He argues that he has been able to live without salt for years, although initially leaving out salt caused him some health issues. Instead of toilet paper, he uses dried sphagnum moss
''Sphagnum'' is a genus of approximately 380 accepted species of mosses, commonly known as sphagnum moss, also bog moss and quacker moss (although that term is also sometimes used for peat). Accumulations of ''Sphagnum'' can store water, since ...
. In the early years of self-reliance, Nordlund's days were full of work, but eventually he was able to relax and take up hobbies from his youth, such as flute
The flute is a member of a family of musical instruments in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, producing sound with a vibrating column of air. Flutes produce sound when the player's air flows across an opening. In th ...
playing and working on equations.
Recent
He is an author and a speaker on sustainability topics. Today, he lives with his family, still mostly self-sufficiently. In 2008, Palladium books published a work written by Lasse Nordlund and Maria Dorff "The Foundations of Our Life, Reflections about Human labour, Money and Energy from Self-sufficiency Standpoint".See also
*Back-to-the-land movement
A back-to-the-land movement is any of various agrarianism, agrarian movements across different historical periods. The common thread is a call for people to take up smallholding and to grow food from the land with an emphasis on a greater degree o ...
References
External links
* Original page text in Finnish with references. * His published booklet online in EnglishThe Foundations of Our Life
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nordlund, Lasse 1965 births Living people Finnish writers Simple living advocates Deep ecologists Intentional living Self-sustainability Sustainability advocates Degrowth advocates Finnish people of German descent