Viljami Kankaanpää is a 25-year-old Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Social and Cultural Anthropology major and a member of The University of Helsinki Greens (Hyyn Vihreät aka HyVi). Here he tells us how he got involved with party politics, why he loves working within the Greens and what he thinks should be the major themes of the upcoming parliamentary elections.
How long have you been involved with HyVi and the Greens?
More or less since 2009. I got involved with party politics in the Young Greens of Helsinki the summer before starting my studies at the university and during freshman year I was also a candidate at the HYY Representative Council elections but didn’t get in at the time. I was more involved with general Young Green politics, animal rights groups and environmental organizations before getting active with HyVi at 2013 when I got elected at the Representative Council elections.
Why did you end up with the Greens? It’s not very common these days to be a member of a party.
I’ve always been very interested in biology and my mother is a climate researcher so my childhood home was very environmental thinking. When I was a teenager I became a vegetarian and later a vegan and got involved with Animalia. Then I moved to Helsinki and got more active with politics. I don’t remember why exactly I got involved with party politics but at the time the Greens were a natural choice for a young animal rights activist and environmentalist. Maybe if I had to choose now, I could also consider joining the Left Alliance but at the time they weren’t very forward-looking with their environmental politics.
What kind of things do you do in HyVi?
The organization does all kinds of things as an independent organization, like organize parties and seminars, but we also represent at the Representative Council where we have a fairly big group with quite a lot of influence. So one of the things we do is coordinate all the people we have in different positions of trust within HYY. In short, parties and politics.
My own role isn’t that big anymore. From 2012 until the end of last year I was involved with almost everything that was done in HyVi like being the chair of our representative group, being in charge of the elections and I also had several positions of trust within HYY. However, then I decided that it was time to give space for the new generation so these days I work more in the sidelines and try to be helpful.
But you’re still active with the Green party in general?
Yes, I’m a board member in the national Green Youth organization (ViNO).
How would you describe Green people in general? Are they all hippies?
No, at least not anymore! There are all kinds of people involved these days. One of the reasons why I like working within the Greens so much is that most of the people are really interesting and like-minded, even if they’re not all vegan left-wing animal rights activists. The Young Greens is a great community.
Why does Finland and our university need the Green party?
I’d like to think that the Green party represents a new wave of more open and participative politics and they also take the 21st century issues, like climate change, more seriously. But this is more of the potential of the party and what it should strive for, not necessarily how things are already.
What works well in our university and what would you like to change?
In general, things work pretty well and I love studying here. But personally, I think that even though things are good at the moment, we are constantly going in the wrong direction with many issues. It feels like austerity and neo-liberal thinking are invading the university quickly.
In my opinion, we should strive to be a more open community and integrate students better with the scientific community. That’s also a question of spatial solutions within the university. Where can students hang out and meet faculty members? This is a problem especially in the central campus where, apart from lectures, students can meet faculty members once a week during their office hours but there are no places where students and staff members could spend time and meet each other. This works better in Viikki. I know many other universities do better with this and I think we should improve on this, too.
Still, I feel that our student union isn’t very interested in this kind of “fluffy” community building stuff but are more focused on hard educational politics, instead.
What do you think will be the most important theme in this spring’s parliamentary elections?
I think these elections will be about what will be cut and from where, not necessarily about why. There’s a sense of crisis in politics and economy and the elections are going to focus on different parties’ answers to that.
However, I think that climate change should be the main concern in these elections and in every other elections in the future since not much has been done. The Paris COP will also be held this fall. I was demonstrating in the 2009 Copenhagen one and then there was a feeling of “now or never”. Apparently, “now” wasn’t then. I think there should be at least the same, if not a bigger, sense of urgency now, too. It seems that all the other parties except the Greens and the Left Alliance have forgotten that we are in a terrible hurry to do something about this. And now that it seems inevitable that the Centre Party is going to be the prime minister party, there’s a risk of all the basic environmental and conservation issues being forgotten since they have very different priorities.
Other themes that I think should be important in these elections are basic income and educational politics. For example, universities are constantly under attack and that should be stopped.
Why would you encourage all students to vote this spring?
Actually, I’m not one of those people who are obsessed about getting everybody to vote just for voting’s sake. But I think it’s a huge problem that the older generation votes much more actively than the young one and they vote for people and politics who represent only them. When talking about climate change, for example, there are actually not that many differences between different parties as there are between different generations. In this question, the older generation is robbing the younger one its future with their poor political choices and they won’t be here to witness all the consequences. Still, I don’t think that getting all the youth to vote is going to save the politics or the country – but I guess it would be a good start.
In this series we celebrate the upcoming parliamentary elections by interviewing students involved in HYY’s political organizations about their values and political opinions. We want to encourage a multivoiced university and dialogue between different political groups by giving voice to these brave and visionary fellow-students. Different views – same university!