Dr Mikko Saikku has always been interested in both history and nature. His year as an exchange student in Idaho kindled in him an interest in the special characteristics of not only the culture of the United States but also the nature of North America. For a while he even considered a career in biology but finally ended up studying history, which turned out to be an excellent choice. In the end the inspiration of Alfred W. Crosby, the grand old man of environmental history, made combining his interests straightforward. Dr Crosby, famous for coining the expressions “ecological imperialism” and “Columbian exchange,” was a visiting professor at the University of Helsinki when Dr Saikku was beginning his studies. In his classes, the history fresher had a moment of clarity. Already in his student days, Dr Crosby and another Fulbright professor, Tom Wendel, introduced him to researchers who were to become some of the leading lights of environmental history in the United States. Richard White, William Cronon, and Donald Worster are all acquaintances of Dr Saikku from the 1980s.

As an undergraduate, Dr Saikku soon managed to combine his interests in environmental history with his cultural interest in the Deep South of the United States. His interest in the lower reaches of the Mississippi had sprung from popular culture, literature, films, and music – the books of Mark Twain and William Faulkner, the plays of Tennessee Williams, and blues music have been particularly near and dear to his heart since his early teens. When writing his proseminar paper, Dr Saikku combined ornithology with his interest in the nature and culture of the Deep South of the United States into an environmental history study. Taking the extinction of one species of bird as an indicator, he analysed how and why humans in the Southern United States had transformed nature, and how rapidly the changes had progressed. He later polished this proseminar paper into his first internationally refereed article, which is still being cited (see, e.g. birdlife.org).

This led Dr Saikku to choose the long-term environmental changes of the so-called Mississippi Delta, in the north western corner of the state of Mississippi, as the subject of his dissertation. He noticed that while the region had traditionally been quite central in research into culture and race relations in the South, it had been largely neglected in environmental history. So the subject was crying out for an author. This region provides a prime example of the environmental change wrought by Europeans in North America and its ideological background. Before Europeans settled the region in the 1830s, it was a virtually untouched wilderness, but in one hundred years it was irrevocably transformed through human activity. Dr Saikku polished his dissertation into a monograph published in the United States that has become the seminal work on the topic.

The local culture of the Mississippi Delta has also been coloured by its relationship to nature. Dr Saikku remembers the media circus that arose in the United States in 2005, when researchers from Cornell University claimed to have found the ivory-billed woodpecker, assumed extinct, in the swamps of Arkansas. The story ended up on the cover of Science, and Dr Saikku was also interviewed. Unfortunately, it turned out that the species hadn't arisen from the dead but remains to be rediscovered. According to Dr Saikku, the excitement generated by the claim is nevertheless indicative of the symbolic value of nature and animals in American culture. In the Southern United States, the ivory-billed woodpecker is a symbol of the vanished primeval forest, a bird that was even esteemed by the original Native American inhabitants of the region. Such symbols interest the locals even today.