The very distinctive Finnish and American experiences are especially illustrative in this context. There are clearly obvious differences, but a closer examination shows that the two cultures share many previously unrecognized similarities with broad repercussions. While nineteenth-century Finns and Americans generally saw themselves as industrious farmers, landscapes untouched by humans and the images of wilderness hunters greatly contributed to the construction of a national identity and ideals of manliness in both young nations. It could be further argued that the North American experience with its imagined unrestricted access to the wilderness is not as exceptional as scholarly and popular literature would have it. From the seventeenth up to the twentieth century, the Nordic peripheries shared certain natural, cultural, and even legal features with the famous North American frontier.
The history of hunting for sport provides an important, but in many ways neglected viewpoint to the core of national cultures and history of class relations. In the feudal societies of Western and Central Europe, hunting rights were gradually severed from land ownership. Typically, only the royalty and nobility were allowed to hunt big game, and smaller landowners and peasants were forced to become assistants in the hunt, which turned into an elaborate display of aristocratic power. The Nordic experience proves quite different from the rest of Europe. The great national importance attributed to wild landscapes, hunters, and pioneer settlers in both North America and the Nordic countries seems to share common roots, especially when contrasted with the general European experience.
By the turn of the twentieth century, many North Americans and Nordics of the upper and educated classes found recreational hunting and fishing as a new pastime. Big game hunters, sport fishermen, and their organizations were consequently in the forefront of conservation efforts for their game and its natural environment. Somewhat ironically, people fascinated by killing individual animals could ensure their survival as a species.
Many nations in the temperate zones of the globe with a history of recent colonization by Europeans and/or their culture show striking similarities in their utilization of wild lands. Originally peripheral in the greater European economy, these nations typically displayed lower population densities, less governmental control, and more egalitarian systems of land use (at least for a significant portion of the common people) than the core regions of Europe. Today these nations often possess vast swaths of public land and protected wilderness areas (often reflecting the movement of the “frontier” in question), with great cultural significance—and aboriginal land ownership questions—attached to them.