As for Alice in wonderland, so for New Zealanders visiting Estonia, parallel worlds obeying different laws. What we call pests and weeds in NZ are a part of nature in Estonia - mice, rats, hedgehogs, rabbits and hares, weasels and stoats, and blackberries, willows, bird cherries and sycamores. Where humans have toppled ecosystems in New Zealand, millennia of history have fused Estonians with the natural world in which they live.
It's an unsettling thought. Which setting is more natural? New Zealand with its abundant natural ecosystems and beautiful landscapes, though often altered, and, in some places, all but beyond repair. Or Estonia where, granted, its weedy-looking ecosystems are heavily modified by human intervention, however, over so much time it’s possible a new equilibrium has formed.
Photo taken from Paradise of the North blog
Perhaps, the answer to the above depends upon one’s point of view, and that both ideas are equally valid – with a qualification. NZ’s reliance on exotic species for our agriculture and forestry stands in contrast to Estonians’ managing largely northern hemisphere species in a millennia-old tradition. The latter is sustainable to a degree, whereas NZ is less so.
Something to think about when cycling through pine forests carpeted in blueberries, tasting the last of the red currants, cooking parasol mushrooms at RMK campsites, burning logs harvested from nearby birch stands – this is living within nature, not as an intruder or spectator but as an active participant. One could almost say, living within a dream.
For New Zealanders, there is a fairy tale element to Estonia (and to Europe generally), birds and other animals on display that we do not have at home – woodpeckers, storks and cranes, ravens and crows, squirrels, moles, foxes. Sighting these creatures was like being drawn into some of the stories I used to read and enjoy as a child, CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia among them.
I find myself taking note of Valdur Mikita when he describes Estonians’ sense of home “as if living inside an ancient myth”. Going back through the looking glass into New Zealand reminds one of why the early settlers brought their beloved animals and plants from England with them.
The result, of course, was less a sense of home than an ecological disaster. It’s difficult now for conservation-minded New Zealanders to accept that the future may well be a heavily modified new ecological balance, as has already happened elsewhere in the world. The country is still evolving, and rapidly.
In Estonia, it is gratifying to know the pace of change in nature is occurring at a slower pace.
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