Simplify Then Magnify

A Finnish Way to Combat Overwhelm and Climate Change

Imagine a reindeer roaming on a winter day through an ancient Arctic forest. Let’s call her Vixen.

Her hooves naturally sharpen in the cold to help her to dig in the hardened snow for lichen, a fungus-plant composite that will be her primary food source of the season.

Vixen is not alone. Other reindeer are about, roaming and digging and eating – collectively clearing the forest floor and leaving behind a smooth, mirror-like surface of white.

And then the magic happens: Their behavior creates a natural shield against climate change. If they weren’t there, the lichen-covered forest floor would absorb sunlight. Because they are there, the pure white surface they leave behind sends sunlight back into the atmosphere.

Now, imagine what might happen if we helped Vixen and friends do more of this.

That is precisely what 44-year-old Pauliina Feodorff is up to.

As Shira Rubin wrote in The Washington Post last week, Feodorff spearheads an effort by Sami Indigenous people to buy up strategic plots of land to rewild the Arctic and summon reindeer to return.

“If Feodoroff succeeds, experts predict the repercussions will be global,” Rubin writes. Regenerating Finland’s thick forests would restore “one of the world’s most potent shields against climate change.”

Simplify Then Magnify

Now truth be told, I have no idea if Feodorff has ever felt a moment of overwhelm in her life. But I know I have (especially about climate change) and find an antidote in her approach.

It is not about focusing on everything that needs to be done, which is a sure-fire path to overwhelm and paralysis. Instead, it’s about choosing one simple thing, in this case, the eating habits of reindeer in winter, and magnifying it.

The benefits of magnification, or scaling-up, have been widely demonstrated. We readily accept there is value in that.

But we seem to need a little nudge to embrace the simple part.

For example, a 2021 study published in Nature showed that when faced with problems, we tend to think about adding things rather than taking them away. Yet that is not always in our best interest.

“A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient,” the authors, Tom Meyvis and Heeyoung Yoon of New York University, write.

More pointedly, they say it’s not that simplification or subtraction is always better than complexity or addition. But we need both, and the simplification part tends to be overlooked.

And at least, in this case, a Finnish woman rewilding the forests of the Arctic so reindeer can help protect us from climate change offers the bonus of being a story worth sharing, perhaps especially with children this holiday season

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