The Finns rediscover swidden farming

This is an article/project report on a Finnish national park founded with the explicit purpose of employing and studying swidden farming, at least on a part of its land. I find this very interesting for a number of reasons. It recognizes the potential for sustainability of a swidden agriculture system, a topic I have insisted on in articles on swidden agriculture and the controversies surrounding swidden agriculture. The detailed economic calculations involving biomass, value of extractable lumber, and crops, are interesting and could serve for analysis of swidden agriculture in other parts of the world. The project's use of burning swidden plots even has an explicit goal of favoring endangered species that thrive in burned forest and meadows.

So the idea seems very interesting and inspiring. On the other hand, it's sort of a shame that swidden agriculture, like so many other traditional livelihood practices in the world, seems doomed to be discouraged to the point of disappearing from everyday life, only to be rescued generations later by post-modern people who recognize the value of past traditions yet no longer remember how to do them. It's great that Europeans are leading many efforts to revive and reclaim their heritage, but it would obviously be better if they hadn't lost it in the first place, no? That is to say that it would be best to preserve and encourage our traditional lifeways here and now, when we still have them, instead of artificially recreating them after we've stamped them out in real day-to-day life.