Tiina Paloniitty has done well for herself as a mother, wife, daughter, scientist, and leader. And all these aspects reinforce the sensitive person in her who wishes good for others, more importantly, for mother nature.
She is open to what life has to offer. Any description is limiting, yet I venture to list some of her attributes. That she is passionate about the intersection of science and law, especially when it comes to aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity. She is blessed for her passion is also the area of her work.
An associate Professor of Environmental and Sustainability Law at the Faculty of Law (Vaasa unit), University of Helsinki, not just that, Tiina is perhaps the youngest person to Chair the Governing Board of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law and is also a member of the Finnish Nature Panel.
This, much celebrated role of hers, brought her to India, Gandhinagar to be precise, at the Gujarat National Law University (GNLU) where the 21st Annual Colloquium of IUCN Academy of Environmental Law was organised. Here I happened to meet her and was inspired by the person she is to write this experiential piece.
Tiina is, in addition to her IUCN responsibility, actively researching carbon capture and utilization, value chains and EU environmental law, part of a project named Bio-CCU funded by in the Business Finland. She has to her credit many papers in international journals and anthologies, the most recent one being a research monograph Law, Ecology and the Management of Complex Systems: The Case of Water Governance (Routledge 2022, Open Access).
Tiina is a resident of Helsinki and talks with an air of concern about the recent developments that she's not happy about. Helsinki never experienced temperature hovering around 30 degrees Celsius for a month like last year. The houses in Finland are designed to retain heat, and they tend to become akin to a sauna if temperatures soar high, and there’s no respite. Global warming is real. Delhi experienced a prolonged heat wave, I concurred.
She has travelled the world, and dealt with global issues, but at the same time, is so quintessentially a Finn. She celebrates sun (not when it's emanating heat 30 plus degree Celsius), and takes a month off in the summers as a compensation for prolonged grey winters. The sun soaked in summers enlightens her day in the dark winters—when sun shows up briefly, in a rather apologetically manner, between 9 am to 3 pm.
So, for a month every year during summers, she goes incommunicado, residing in her summer home nestled in nature, close to a water body, and she is one with herself, and the golden hue of sun illumines her being. In this one month ‘I’m doing nothing,’ she says with a sparkle in her eyes. Surely, she’s a sunshine person.
Tiina is equally successful in all her endeavours and roles as a mother, wife, and managing home. Also, because of the dignity and paucity of labour in Finland, a country of 5.5 million people (in comparative terms is one-fourth the population of Delhi), domestic chores have to be performed without the aid of a help. And that is too much to do, especially for a working woman. Her husband shares not just the joys but also the burden. That’s what keeps her going. One role reinforces the other, Tiina being a successful professional has a lot to do with her being a successful homemaker.
It's pertinent to point out that Finland, a welfare society, the gender gap has been bridged, and people perform tasks not gender roles, whether at work or home. Finland is perhaps the only country in the world where father and mother get equal paid paternity leave or carry out universal day care. It’s heartening to note that fathers spend more time with school-going children than mothers here.
Having said that, gender parity is not something recent in Finland. It has been the case since the beginning of the 20th Century, when both men and women, shoulder to shoulder, defended their country from aggressors, their immediate neighbours. The Finnish language, that to me is music to ears, encapsulates gender parity beautifully. Tiina points out there’s one personal pronoun for all genders, Hän—don’t specify the gender of the person discussed as it’s not important.
Tiina is equally successful in all her endeavours and roles as a mother, wife, scientist, or leader. Her husband shares not just the joys but also the burden. That’s what keeps her going. Tiina being a successful professional has a lot to do with her being a successful homemaker.
She’s a Christian by faith and the Bible says all people are created equal. According to Genesis 1:27 ‘God made humans in His image’ or men and women have the same value.
Tiina talks about popular culture, one of them is that Finns like to be prepared. Though life is uncertain, it’s good to be prepared, almost an existential requirement, to deal with long grey winters. She was reacting to my sweeping comment that people in the West, particularly Europe, lead a sanitised, regulated lives, that may induce boredom. Quite in contrast India is about elements at play with a high coefficient of uncertainty. As a German friend of mine described, ‘here in India anything can happen anytime—suddenly. The Westerners feel uncomfortable, but also, after a while, this unpredictability engenders them to this land of glorious contrasts.’
She agrees that in this day and age when technology has infiltrated every aspect of living, societies are in a flux, and Finland is no exception. She uses ‘us’ when referring to fellow nationals, and describes herself as a ‘Finn from Finland’ and that’s kind of rare. She has felt the transgenerational trauma of being displaced from their motherland.
She takes pride in being patriotic but clarifies, which is not being a nationalist. She points out the distinction, her love for her country doesn’t make her hate, or feel superior to other nationalities or condemn them. Her goodness doesn’t stem from others’ being bad.
That’s a beautiful thought. If people across the world feel this way about varied nationalities, race, ethnicity, this world will be a better place to live in for all of us. Climate change, after all, is the outcome of the fact that some nations were selfish about their own interests and, therefore, overlooked the larger picture, that of coexistence, interdependence and celebrating (bio)diversity.
Tiina knows this well, therefore, she is an ideal person to lead a multilateral initiative for the betterment of the planet. Since one fifth of humanity lives in India, which accounts for only 2.4% of the world's land area—is the best place to initiate and implement climate mitigation measures in a way that doesn’t hamper the pace of development, or ensure ecologically sustainable development.
I promised to visit her when I’m in Helsinki--one of my favourite cities in Europe. After an hour-long one-to-one interaction across the table in GNLU, I texted her, ‘I like how you have organised your life at an intellectual and philosophical levels.’ And the fact that she’s a scientist and an academic par-excellence just makes it even better. Indeed, she's a sunshine person!
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