The Chinese Wildfire Hoax

Friends and family back in Georgia have been dealing lately with something out of the ordinary and outside my own experience -- a series of big wildfires scattered all across the Southern Appalachian mountains. One of the fires, the Rough Ridge fire in the Cohutta Mountains, is said to be perhaps the largest in North Georgia's history. I've seen satellite images of smoke covering the northernmost third of the state, reaching down to Atlanta and Athens. It seems a bit unreal.

If it's the same Rough Ridge area that I once went camping with my father and brother, then it is some very rugged terrain firefighters have having to contend with.

Of course, in the heavily wooded mountains of Georgia and North Carolina, there have always been the occasional forest fire, though none from the past that really stand out in my mind.

Back in the days when my father was young, there was the habit of burning off the underbrush in the mountains in springtime, all the better for the grazing cattle that farmers let range freely during the summer. But that practice ended long before I was born.

As a kid, I can recall seeing just one wildfire, from a distance at night. It formed a crooked orange line in the dark as it burned on the side of Talona Mountain (which we called Reed Mountain, for some reason), an isolated "monadnock" that rose within easy viewing distance of my family's home.

And when I was in college at Young Harris, essentially at the base of Brasstown Bald, Georgia's highest peak, there was once a fire somewhere in the area. It was serious enough that the Forest Service asked for students to volunteer to help with the fire fighting. My classes wouldn't allow me to join, but some of my friends did and came back to school at the end of the day sooty and looking a bit exhilarated. I did envy them for the experience.

In any case, never when I was living in Georgia would there be so many fires burning at the same time, especially in November. Typically, autumns were coolish, and a bit wet, not what I would think of as fire season. 

The photos and reports that I'm seeing now seems like a smaller-scale version of something out of the American West, where fire is often enough an inescapable part of life. I know a family in Colorado who had to evacuate their house a few years ago due to an approaching fire and can still point to the spot just across the road where the flames thankfully came to a halt. And this is not not far from Storm King Mountain, where 14 firefighters lost their lives in 1994, a grim reminder of the deadly and destructive power of uncontrolled fire. 

A couple of years ago, we were driving across northern Arizona when the news came over the radio that 19 "hot shot" firefighters had similarly died at Yarnell Hill some 60 miles to the south of us. Later that night, we could see a small fire burning on Dean Peak in the Hualapai Mountains near Kingman, the faint smell of smoke noticeable in the car as as we sped down Interstate 40. 

Of course, fire is also a huge concern in Finland, a country made up almost entirely of forests. Fire prevention is taken very seriously here, and a typical feature of the evening news in summer is the latest update on which parts of the country are under metsäspalovaroitus ("forest fire warning"), when open fires in woodlands is strictly forbidden. Sometimes the entire country is under such a warning. That was surely the case in the summer of 2006, which was incredibly dry. Finland avoided major fires then, but even in Helsinki you could sometimes not avoid the smell of smoke reaching all the way from across the border in Russia, where numerous fires burned out of control for days, due to the lack of resources or motivation to extinguish them. 

Luckily, no lives or structures have been lost to the North Georgia blazes, and at the moment smoke is the biggest threat to people. But the smoke, if nothing else, is unpleasant and potentially unhealthy. The Atlanta area was placed under a Code Red air quality alert, indicating the smoke can be harmful for everyone, not only children and those with respiratory ailments. 

And conditions don't seem likely to improve. Apparently, there's a chance of rain this weekend for the area, but before that temperatures are still expected to reach 24 C (75 F), which to me seems unnaturally high for a week before Thanksgiving.

Nowadays, when every little thing gets politicized, I'm amazed I haven't yet seen anyone trying to score political points over these unprecedented wildfires, and I hesitate to do it myself (a bit).

I've always been extremely annoyed by conservative pundits or talk show hosts who poke fun at the notion of global warning wherever there is an usually big winter storm somewhere. Erick Erickson comes to mind, declaring something like, "Well, with all the snow covering Buffalo right now, it sure looks like 'Global Warming' to me. Ha, ha, ha!" Or something like that. Appealing to the common sense of the common man.

Hearing this kind of nonsense always makes me want to pull my hair out, thinking "No you idiot, you have to look at the trend, the overall trend. You can't look at just one isolated event and declare that climate change is bogus." Especially, when the event goes against the prevailing trend.

By the same token, you should also guard against making too much of an unusual weather pattern when it seems to confirm the reality of climate change. You never hear folks like Erick Erickson doing that.

That said, rare drought conditions and historically bad wildfires certainly seem to fit predictions of a rapidly warming planet. You would think the warm, tinder-dry conditions in the Southern Appalachians in late autumn would make local people, many of whom voted for Donald Trump, stop and consider that maybe this is a sign of global warming. Maybe it's not a Chinese hoax after all, despite what Trump has claimed over and over again.

You would think they might finally take the issue seriously and be alarmed that the next head of the Environmental Protection Agency might well be a climate change denier.

Or, maybe not. Maybe they'll just breathe in the pungent smell of burning timber and, with a sense of self-satisfaction, think to themselves, "Ah, nothing to worry about. That smells like Trump's America to me!"

Wildfire in California, 2008. 
Photo: Bureau of Land Management.

Honoring Tater Patch

This summer, President Barack Obama made a much-publicized trip to Alaska, during which he emphasized the effects of climate change on the state. In addition to photo ops involving glacial backdrops and face-to-face meetings with native Alaskans on the verge of losing their village to rising sea levels, Obama’s trip took him above the Arctic Circle, making him the first sitting US president to venture so far north.

Obama also attended an international conference named GLACIER, as in “Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience”. Kudos to the PR person who managed to make that cumbersome acronym work. Mostly.

The GLACIER conference agenda reads like a workshop for high-level bureaucrats, which it kind of was. I was a bit surprised to see on the evening news Finland’s Foreign Minister Timo Soini hosting one of the GLACIER panels. But, of course, that does make sense, as Finland is in that select group of eight nations with territory within the Arctic Circle, or as they say in Finnish, Napapiiri.

Still, it seems that the thing that got the most attention in the US during Obama’s trip was the announcement just before the trip that he was renaming the highest mountain in North America.

It was amusing to see how some American conservatives fell over themselves to complain about the move, though this act by the Obama administration has, in fact, long been desired by the people of Alaska, Democrats and Republicans alike.

The mountain previously known as McKinley.
Courtesy the National Park Service

Denali, as the mountain has traditionally been called locally (and will now be known officially nationwide), was given the name Mt. McKinley in 1896 by a gold prospector who was a supporter of presidential candidate William McKinley. The prospector favored McKinley’s strong position on the gold standard (as any self-respecting gold prospector would), so his christening of the mountain was a bald-faced act of branding for political purposes. The name caught on, however, especially after McKinley was assassinated in 1901. 

Caught on, that is, except in Alaska, were locals have reportedly always referred to the mountain as Denali, its name in one of the local indigenous languages. Since 1975, the State of Alaska has lobbied the federal government to change the name, but politicians from McKinley’s home state of Ohio have successfully prevented any such “disrespecting” of their native son. It is the very essence of petty politics.

Anyway, this whole episode brought to mind something I read recently, something much closer to home than Denali.

I have a book about the history of my home county in Georgia, published in 1965 by George Gordon Ward, the husband of my second grade teacher. The book is not a straightforward history, as such, though at some 600 pages it is in many ways a comprehensive one. It consists of a sometimes randomly organized collection of interesting bits and pieces about Gilmer County and the people who lived there in the past. As the author was also something of a small-town “booster” with an eye toward advancing the county’s prosperity and economic progress, he even included in his book some suggestions for improving the county’s image. One such suggestion was the renaming of a mountain.

Mr. Ward felt that some of the local mountains had decidedly hillbilly-sounding names that reflected poorly on the up-and-coming prospects of a county like Gilmer. As he saw it, "some of these early-day designations were temporarily applied by pioneers as a joke or without thought the names would stick." Sounds a bit like how Mt. McKinley got its name. 

As an example of an "absurd" pioneer-era name, he singled out "Tater Patch", as locals usually refer to Potatopatch Mountain, a high ridge dominating the horizon north of my teenage home. For this 3560-foot (1085m) knob on the edge of the present-day Cohutta Wilderness area, Mr. Ward proposed the more respectable name of “Mount Ivan Allen”, in honor a prominent Georgian at the time. 

Tater Patch Mountain, the ridge line to the right in this photo.

Reading about this long-forgotten proposal-in-passing made me cringe a bit. While someone bearing the name Ivan Allen had been active in public life in Georgia for some 70 years, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the name, even now, is office supplies. As in paper, pencils and desks.

The company founded by and named after Ivan Allen was an Atlanta institution, I guess, and well-known far beyond the city. In my youth, the company’s adverts reached across North Georgia, though perhaps not quite as far as the secluded and forested summit of Tater Patch. At least, they must have stuck with me somehow.

When I ran across our homegrown historian’s suggestion of assigning Allen’s name to natural spot I remember well, it struck me as very wrong. For my taste, the Allen’s name reeked too much of commercialism to deserve being honored in that way. 

As I researched (read, "Googled") Allen's background, I learned that he was quite the civil booster himself, active in service organizations and writing booklets promoting business in Atlanta. He also donated land that he owned on a mountaintop near my home for the creation of Fort Mountain State Park, a recreation area I have a long history with. This act of charity is probably what prompted our homegrown historian to think of bestowing Allen's name on a different, but (as he felt) poorly named, mountain nearby. 

So ingrained was the name of the Ivan Allen Company in my mind that I didn’t even remember that Ivan Allen's son, Ivan Junior, had been a leading light in his own right during my childhood and a two-term mayor of the big city a couple of hours south of my birthplace. Obviously, I didn't follow the news a lot back then. 

I have now come to realize how progressive, for the times, Ivan Junior was as mayor. He evolved from his early segregationist leanings to embrace civil rights in a sincere way and ushered in a relatively smooth racial transition for Atlanta during the turbulent 60s. He was even asked by President Kennedy to advise Congress on the creation of what would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

He deserves recognition for, if nothing else, defeating the hard-core segregationist politician (and Georgia’s best-known embarrassment) Lester Maddox, who was then also running for mayor of Atlanta. Sadly, Maddox went on to become governor. My hometown, to its discredit in my mind, named a prominent street after Maddox.

Still, despite gaining some long-overdue appreciation for the legacy of the Ivan Allen name, especially Allen the Younger, I’m grateful that Mr. Ward's notion of changing the local map never caught on. I still prefer “Tater Patch”, a fine name just as it is. 

Foraging

Once, when I was a kid, we had a visit from the family of my mother’s uncle, a preacher who at the time was living in Macon, Georgia. For some reason, we decided to take them, including his mostly grown sons (my first cousins once removed) on a little excursion to one of our favorite spots in the foothills of the Cohutta Mountains, a place called Bear Creek, a place I’ve taken my own children many times for picnicking during summer visits back to the States. 

I only remember this little outing because, as we walked along the graveled Forest Service road deep in the woods, my brother, sister and I spotted some ripe blackberries growing on the sunny slope of the road bank. We immediately started helping ourselves to the berries, while our city cousins looked on, almost regarding us as feral children, wild people of the mountains. At least they declined to join in the berry picking themselves.

I thought of this earlier this summer when my wife and I were walking along a similarly graveled road near the little sauna-cabin we’ve been building not far from Helsinki. We spotted some ripe wild strawberries (metsämansikoita, or “forest strawberries”) on the side of the road and started sampling them. No one passing by would have batted an eye at this. 

Foraging for wild food like this is extremely typical in Finland, and one of the local customs that unexpectedly echoes a familiar way of life in faraway North Georgia. 

In the past few weeks, all along the road to our cabin we have been seeing cars parked in every little pullout or side road, a sign that the blueberry- and mushroom-picking season is well underway. With the summer so cool and rainy this year, everyone is expecting the season will be exceptionally good, and in fact we’ve already found keltavahvero (chanterelle, Cantharellus cibarius) in places where you don’t normally see them. I didn't grow up foraging for fungi in Georgia, and I'm far from being an expert. Even now, chanterelles, along with suppilovahvero (winter mushroom, Cantharellus tubaeformis), are the only ones I can safely identify by myself.

My first haul of suppilovahvero, winter mushrooms.

Growing up in Georgia, we didn’t really do much foraging for blueberries, either. What we did go after was blackberries. I remember our whole family, donning boots and long-sleeve shirts in the middle of the sultry Georgia summer heat to wade chest-deep into a thicket of blackberry vines (as we called them), an almost impenetrable tangle of thorns. It was worth it. My mother would turn our haul of fruit into jellies and jams and usually more than a few blackberry cobblers that I can still almost taste.

Blackberries (called karhunvatukka, “bear raspberry”) don’t grow wild in Finland, but their cousin, the raspberries, do. The converse is true in North Georgia – raspberries are the less common of the two, as I recall.

The woods where I grew up didn’t off much in the way of blueberries. There was something we called “huckleberries”, growing low to the ground and bearing tiny, round fruit full of gritty seeds. They were probably poor specimens of what the British call “bilberries” (Vaccinium myrtillus) and basically the same thing as Finnish blueberries, only apparently not as well suited to the habitats of Georgia.

The “huckleberries” we knew as kids weren’t very good or abundant, and reaching down to pick them at ground level seemed a risky proposition in the snaky country I grew up in. It was therefore a revelation when we discovered a higher alternative.

It was on a short hike with our parents one summer day to the summit of Springer Mountain (3780 ft., 1150m), the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, literally at the very edge of my home county. On the approach trail, we noticed blueberry bushes, not at ankle level, but five feet or more in height. And they were full of large, tasty berries.

Although spending a lifetime in the woods, we’d never run across these “high-bush” blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum) before, and maybe they’re not all that common in Georgia anyway. We only ever encountered them in the cooler, open forests of the state’s higher ridge tops, a fairly limited environment after all.

The much more mountainous landscape of western North Carolina is another matter, however. I used to go hiking regularly in a slice of that landscape called Shining Rock, a federally protected wilderness area of stark, 6000-foot peaks that are mostly bare of the dense forests more typical of the Appalachians. The scenery there is much more “western”, completely out of place in the Southeast.

Often on the way to Shining Rock, I would stop at a spot along the Blue Ridge Parkway where a slope of brush and grass, interspersed here and there with clumps of trees, rises gradually from a high-country stream. This place, Graveyard Fields, already a bit magical and mysterious, was also rampant with high-bush blueberries.

When the berries were ripe, the “fields” would be filled with Cherokees, from the small reservation nestled next to the Smokies, foraging no doubt in the manner of their ancestors.

You might think the berries there would also be a big draw for foraging bears. I never saw one in Graveyard Fields itself, though I know of at least one instance in which a bear got a taste of its berries.

This was on a camping trip with my parents along the Parkway one summer. We had picked some berries at Graveyard Fields that day, and my mother had used them to whip up a pie back at our campsite. Since we weren’t able to finish the pie before bedtime, we put the rest in an ice chest, which we (unwisely) left sitting on the tailgate of our truck. It didn’t sit there unnoticed for long. We awoke in the night to the sound of the ice chest crashing to the ground and a bear devouring what was left of the berry pie.

I haven’t heard of any encounters between people and bears in Finland over blueberries, but the competition between human foragers can sometimes get tense, as well, despite the fact that Finland's "everyman's rights" allow anyone to pick berries anywhere they please, including private land.

Last month, a popular tabloid asked its readers to share stories of the altercations they have experienced with other berry pickers. The resulting examples of marjaraivo ("berry rage") included tales of pickers being threatened by dogs, tractors, and a red-faced old lady, and in one instance the air being let out of a berry picker’s tires.

Normally, foraging competition is limited to keeping your favorite mushroom-picking spots a closely held secret, especially when it comes to the highly prized keltavahvero. 

Chanterelles from the Finnish forest.

(My parents exercised the same kind of secrecy when it came to the locations of ginseng, a slightly different kind of wild forest product that they loved to search for in the mountains of Georgia.)

Showing off the harvest from your undisclosed mushroom location on social media, is of course extremely typical. In summer, photos by Finnish friends of basketfuls of chanterelles or buckets of blueberries appear on my Facebook feed with the kind of regularity that American friends post memes praising Jesus. Foraging is that central to the Finnish way of life.

I once took an advanced Finnish-language course designed for immigrants to the country. In addition to grammar lessons, there were outings arranged with the purpose of introducing us foreigners to various aspects of Finnish life and culture. These included a visit to a Baltic herring festival, tours of a couple of national museums and, of course, a mushroom picking expedition.

Our little class assembled one autumn morning in Paloheinä, part of Helsinki’s Keskuspuisto (“Central Park”). Before we got started, our teacher briefly instructed us on which mushrooms were easily identifiable as safe, and which were obviously ones to avoid. She stressed that if there was any doubt, we should first check with her before picking something. Most of the class, those students from Algeria, Vietnam, Bangladesh and other such exotic places, stuck pretty close to the teacher as we combed the forest floor for edible fungi. I did likewise, since, even after over two decades of living here, mushroom picking is one aspect of Finnish culture this American has not yet managed to pick up.

One group of students, however, immediately disappeared, spreading out into the forest mostly on their own. The Russians. Well, the Russian-speakers, that is, which included Russians, Ukrainians, and one Azerbaijani. If there was one thing they required absolutely no help in, it was mushroom picking.

If anything, our boreal neighbors in Russia are even more dye-in-the-wool mushroom pickers than Finns are. I guess it’s one of those cultural things that transcends borders and languages when there are tasty things growing in the forest well worth foraging for. 

Everyman's Rights

Where I grew up in rural north Georgia, it often seemed to us locals that when “outside” people bought land in the county, the first thing they did was put up “Posted” or “No Trespassing” signs all along the perimeter of their property.

Now, maybe that’s not being completely fair, but that was the impression in my family. We – admittedly with a possible dose of hillbilly chauvinism – saw this practice as an example of city-dweller paranoia. Folks moving to the country from Atlanta often seemed to instantly suspect that the yokels that they had decided to live among were all itching to step foot on their newly acquired parcel of country paradise. They were, as we saw it, importing a “city” mentality into the countryside.

To be sure, not all newcomers were like that. And there were also some county natives well known locally for posting their woods. They were also locally famous for being unusually ornery characters, and not especially friendly.

In any case, it’s not as though most people where I grew up necessarily made a point of traipsing across other people’s land, though in my youth we sometimes did that.

As kids, we often roamed through the woods that surrounded our home situated below the 2000-foot Appalachian foothill that we partly owned. And when I say “woods”, I am talking about some pretty big tracts. Heading more or less due north, we could have walked from the barn behind my parents’ house all the way to Tennessee, over 15 miles away as a crow flies, without encountering another building or paved road. This was because what mostly stood between our place and the Volunteer State was the Cohutta Mountains, home to the largest federal wilderness area in the Southern Appalachians.

As a protected area, the 36,977-acre portion of the Cohuttas that made up the federally designated wilderness is public land. But nearer to our house, the woods on the backside of our little mountain were private. I think I know whose woods those were, but his house was nowhere near. Not in a village though. In fact, he was a local farmer who had quite a bit of land, and I’m sure he would not have been bothered by us kids crossing his property line to wander around a small part of it.

Part of the Chattahoochee National Forest,
where I roamed in my youth.

It’s not as though local people didn’t take property lines seriously enough in most cases. After my parents built their first house, the one I grew up in, my father had built a dog lot for our beloved English setter, named Rock. Like our later home at the foot of the mountain, the neighboring land on the backside of this property was unoccupied woods. Still, at some point the owner of that land noticed that, by accident, my father had built the dog lot about a foot or less over the mostly unmarked property line.

My father apologized. And, he felt it was a serious enough transgression that he offered to give Rock to the man as compensation. The neighbor didn’t want the dog, and he didn’t even want the lot changed, as I recall. He just wanted to make sure that the breach of property rights had been noticed, I guess in case there was ever any future disputes.

So, we were certainly conscious of property rights. I remember once, when fishing on a creek that passed right in front of someone’s house, we made sure to keep well on the far side of midstream, since it was well known (so we understood) that a landowner’s rights extended halfway across a waterway. (Though, if the house hadn’t been right there we probably wouldn’t have worried about it.)

And there were times when we did hunt or fish on private land, but I’m sure that was with prior permission or as part of a standing agreement my father had with the landowner.

Usually when we hunted or fished, however, it was on public land. Our house was just within the boundaries of the Chattahoochee National Forest, which covers a big swath of northernmost Georgia. It’s not all public land, by any means. Our home wasn’t.

Still, with at least 600,000 acres (almost a quarter-million hectares) of mountain land open to the general public for hunting, fishing, hiking, whatever floats your boat, my part of Georgia – especially compared to the rest of the state or, for that matter, the rest of the eastern US – did offer quite a bit of territory for free ranging recreation.

This was a fact much appreciated by my father, who used to talk about how these public lands provided an opportunity to enjoy the great outdoors for “the little guy”, you might even say for the “everyman”. Which brings me to Finland.

One of the things I truly value about life in this country is jokamiehen- oikeus (Everyman’s Rights). Basically, this is the legal right, based on ancient custom that allows anyone to cross anyone else’s land, kind of like forest without borders. It essentially means no one can post their land. For conservatives in the US, this probably would sound like a socialist nightmare. I think it's great.

As with all legal rights, there are some limits. While you may walk (or ski) across anyone’s land at will, you cannot do so in the immediate vicinity of a house. You can’t be destructive, so no cutting trees, littering, driving off-road, damaging property, wading through grain fields, etc. You cannot disturb wildlife or nesting birds. You can swim in private lakes and camp on private land, but not build fires or hunt without permission.

What you can also do – and this is why jokamiehenoikeus is so important to the Finnish way of life – is pick berries and mushrooms. Notably, collecting lichen and moss is not allowed – but other than my wife (who has studied bryophytes, among other forest life forms), I don’t know many people who would do that anyway.

Chantarelle, a prized takeaway from the Finnish forest.
Credit: Phobulos

While Finns, the most ardent nature-lovers you can imagine, don’t need much of an excuse to wander the forest, the gathering of berries and mushrooms does provide additional, even fruitful, motivation to get outdoors. Especially, this time of the year.

Along a winding country road that I’ve been driving frequently, I’ve seen cars parked lately at practically every turnout, indicating that mushroom hunters are somewhere out there scouring the woods. I’m sure none of them has a clue whom the woods belong to, and it doesn’t matter. The mushrooms (and berries) growing there belong to everyone.

I think this is an enlightened attitude, and not something you’d find in most other countries, though it’s not entirely unique to Finland. Similar rights to roam exist in other Nordic countries, and apparently also in Estonia. And I think Switzerland has a somewhat similar approach to common land use.

I was hiking once with my Swiss brother-in-law above the village of Disentis when he pointed out the irony of the sheep grazing around us. As someone with strong leftist sensibilities, he was amused how the villagers in the valley below, no doubt otherwise right-thinking capitalists, saw nothing inconsistent about grazing their sheep and cows on a common Alpine pasture, owned by no one and used by the whole community according to an ageless arrangement.

Finland’s Everyman’s Rights is an equally “ageless arrangement”, but has in recent years developed a thoroughly modern wrinkle.

Because the blueberries carpeting the forests here are free to be by anyone and sold tax-free, it does represent a business opportunity for folks willing to spend hours combing (almost literally “combing”, using special handheld berry scoopers) the forest floor.

Most Finnish berry pickers don’t bother, collecting instead only enough fruit for their own use. Starting around ten years ago, however, a new type of berry picker began appearing in the forests, seasonal workers from outside Finland, in fact from a country not normally associated with blueberries at all – Thailand.

A typical scooper for harvesting blueberries.

I’m not sure how picking wild berries in Finland became a niche for Thai seasonal workers. I suspect the practice spilled over from Sweden, where it seems years ago Thais started coming to harvest the vilda blåbär there.

Nowadays, three or four thousand Thais arrive in Finland every summer on tourist visas to pick berries, recruited by Finnish berry processors or middlemen who arrange food, lodging and transportation, at a cost, of course. It is by all accounts very hard physical work, with long exhausting days, but potentially rewarding – if it’s a good berry season.

While there are plenty of berries to go around for the most part (an estimated 90% go unpicked nationwide), the influx of south-east Asian harvesters hasn’t been without some friction or complications.

There have been complaints by locals of over-picking in some areas or litter left behind, but also concerns over the welfare and possible exploitation of the seasonal workers themselves, who often take on large loans in Thailand in order to travel to Finland. They are currently not covered under union agreements. The visiting Thais are not officially seen as independent entrepreneurs and, perhaps partly because the berries they pick are wild, free to everyone and not taxed, neither are they considered to be employees like the seasonal migrants (most from Ukraine) who work on Finland’s commercial berry farms.

That might be changing. In line with a recent EU directive on seasonal labor, the Finnish government is working to clarify the berry pickers’ status, hopefully providing more protections for next season’s legion of foreign pickers exercising an ancient right by foraging in the Finnish woods.