Book review | Ville-Juhani Sutinen’s writings can be a guide to surviving in a world that is broken

Essays

Ville-Juhani Sutinen: User manual for the broken world. Zeal. 318 pp.

Climate panel The IPCC report from 2022 says it: the earth is warming at such a rate that the prevailing way of life of mankind is in danger. Expect “widespread chaos”.

American essayist Rebecca Solnit (b. 1961) reminds us that the earthquake in San Francisco and the hurricane Katrina that afflicted New Orleans made the best aspects of man awaken.

Ville-Juhani Sutinen (b. 1980) works with Solnit. At the beginning of the corona pandemic and when Russia attacked Ukraine, spontaneous support and assistance networks were also created in our country.

The military operations made the business world compromise its profits and the politicians to look for alternative energy.

Why can’t this kind of attitude be found in the face of a disaster threatening the entire planet?

Sutinen thinks one of the reasons is that we live in a car accident in slow motion. The world doesn’t end in one fell swoop like in disaster movies. There are countless messy processes going on at the same time.

We only experience minor annoyances. In the Global South, traditional livelihoods are becoming impossible, cities will soon drown in the sea or sand. Millions of climate refugees will inevitably be on the road.

Others live without worrying about tomorrow and are looking forward to the “green hump”. Others dream of a new beginning without the nature-destroying market system.

Essayist and travel writer Sutinen is refreshingly critical in many ways. He goes where he goes and avoids preaching to like-minded people. They come to mind Riikka Kaihovaara (b. 1980) painfully personal eco-essays.

Broken World User Guide emphasizes many times that there is no going back to the way it used to be. Besides, we tend to remember our childhood landscapes as more idyllic than they actually were.

The best fish shop in Sutinen was located next to the Styrofoam factory. Another good place was below the hydroelectric plant. The discharge pipe of the water treatment plant collapsed on Grandma’s beach.

What if animals were forced to return to the wild? Would they end up in the grass growing near the high-voltage poles, the moss on the roof of the logistics warehouse, or the steppe spreading under the highway bridge?

Humanity does not have the opportunity to rewind history hundreds of years and erase the traces of its own actions. There’s no way we’re going to be illiterate hunter-gatherers anymore.

Therefore, it’s just better to accept the artificiality of our environment and roll up our sleeves. The nature of the future is located in wastelands, in the middle of scrap and rust.

You can learn to live almost anywhere. Humanity’s blessing and curse is its incredible adaptability.

“Is not very interesting, how can we die, but how can we live in a world that is broken”, sums up Sutinen.

He investigates places where equipment is prepared against the first waves of an eco-catastrophe. Unless you’re already in the mood for battle.

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There is no way to stop a car accident in slow motion.

Six container islands are anchored in Copenhagen’s cargo port, in the landscape of cranes and warehouses. The sea containers of the Urban Rigger community offer spacious student housing. An abandoned harbor ruin has been given a new, hipster-inspired life.

No wonder we are in the home of Lego blocks. Floating container villages or islands are currently being planned in many directions. Helsinki is also featured.

On the southern shore of the North Sea there is a saying: “God created the earth, but the Dutch created Holland.” The construction of ramparts, dams and locks has traditions dating back to the Middle Ages.

The current “Anthropocene installations”, the protection structures of the Deltawerken and the Maeslantkering flood gate remain as monuments of our time. Just like the Roman Colosseum and the Cloaca Maxima or the Great Wall of China tell their own stories from thousands of years ago.

Sutinen also takes his readers to the middle of Iceland’s lava fields. The Orca pilot plant of the Carbfix company runs there, powered by geothermal steam.

The alchemists’ dream was to turn stone into gold. Orca turns atmospheric carbon dioxide into stone, four thousand tons a year.

In slow motion there is no way to stop a car accident. The most unfavorable scenarios are still preventable, with countless small and large means.

Intensive meat production is one of the biggest global warming factors and a huge ethical black hole. According to Sutinen, we have a “meat paradox”: a father can cook meatballs for his child and at the same time teach that the smaller and weaker in the world must be protected.

People at least guess that the meat in the local market comes from factory farms. Still, “somewhere” there is still Piippola’s farm, with its happy pigs and dairy cows dying of old age.

Sutinen doesn’t offer a cure for whining and denial. The food of the future can taste shamelessly good.

The essayist, who has lived in Berlin and the San Francisco Bay Area, recalls the two meccas of vege gourmet. Sutinen will also visit Meetat’s offices in Espoo’s Tapiola. The start-up in the vegetable meat industry was just awarded at the World Food Innovation Awards competition.

The future of the industry may be the utilization of both seaweed and fungal mycelium.

And there is nothing new in the alternatives to animal meat. Tofu and seitan were made in China two thousand years ago. The vegetarian restaurant Reform was successful in Helsinki at the beginning of the 20th century. In the United States, soy burgers were popularized in the middle of the 1930s depression.

Sutinen is moving also in the footsteps of 17th-century forest Finns in Sweden’s Värmland, in Guatemala on the ruins of the Mayan culture, and in present-day California ravaged by water shortages and forest fires.

Sometimes the amount of viewpoints and sheer factual information threatens to become overwhelming. The book is held together by Sutinen’s 1980s scout backpack, which cultivates everyday humor as an essay.

The subjects of the amazingly prolific Sutinen range from Finnish tribes to the Arctic and the traces of the Soviet Gulag system. Sometimes we go with literary history, like the one brought by Tieto-Finlandia Worth the trouble in the work (2022).

It’s as if individual books are interim accounts from a life-long road trip.

Now in a carrier bag or a baby born at the end of 2022 travels in a stroller a bear-baby.

Broken World User Guide offers current generations alternative development trajectories and glimpses of the future. For Otso’s generation, it can be an important survival guide.