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E-book Green Development or Greenwashing? : Environmental Histories of Finland

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Penilaian

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Finland has been often labelled a ‘green superpower’. In 2016, according to the EPI (Environmental Performance Index) prepared by Yale and Columbia Universities, Finland was the world’s cleanest and greenest country.1 Gener-ally speaking, Nordic countries have tended to be idealised as ‘pristine and green’ compared to the rest of the rapidly contaminating world where the race for markets and profits has generated an accelerated level of consumption.2Environmental historians, however, can detect that the commonly perceived ‘greenness’ of the Nordic countries is partly an illusion. One of the most notable examples of histories in this vein is the recent volume by Peder Anker, who interprets Norway’s green development in the light of the country’s former peripheral position and shows how Norway has become a global green leader, while developing a robust petroleum industry and having some of the worst CO2 emissions per capita in the world.3This volume states that Finland, like Norway, has evolved into being a green superpower at the price of considerable environmental problems: the current leadership position of Finland in sustainable development has been built on the heavy use of natural resources and at the expense of ecosystem health. Consequently, development and profit maximisation have had a significant and long-lasting negative impact on the natural environment in and around Finland. Old-growth forests have been replaced by intensive forest farming for lumber and pulp industries; more than half of wetlands have been drained for agriculture, forest cultivation and peat extraction; wild animal populations have been decimated; and Finland today is confined to the south and west by arguably one of the most polluted seas in the world.The environmental harms of Finland’s development have been widely studied in a number of sustainability sciences. For example, regional environ-mental sciences approaches have sought to understand the societal reasons behind the pollution of the Baltic Sea,4 and criticised the newly emerged consumer lifestyle and massive material footprints of members of Finnish society,5 as well as cases where Finnish industry is globally involved in environmentally con-troversial issues – such as UPM’s involvement in Paso de los Toros in Uruguay, the world’s largest pulp mill.6In Finnish historiography, however, the dominant narrative has portrayed Finland as an economic miracle built upon the country’s vast forest resources. This view may be valid when looking strictly from the human perspective of economic sustainability. Throughout the twentieth century, the wood process-ing industry was Finland’s largest import sector and source of foreign capital, while scientifically managed forestry enabled Finnish forest reserves to actually increase. Not least by exploiting forests, Finland developed from being one of the poorest countries of Europe at the start of the twentieth century into a prosperous welfare state.7 This storyline, however, ignores the enormous impact this ‘economic miracle’ has had on the natural environment, with old-growth forests replaced by monocultures that were often planted on drained wetlands. Pursuing this vein, authors contributing to this volume aim to take a pioneering path and argue that a complex set of social-economic-technological as well as environmental factors helped Finland to build an image as an eco-leader nation while retaining its extractive economic practices to develop first industrial, then post-industrial, capitalism. The authors suggest that, partly due to the harsh climatic conditions of the Northern, subarctic environments, as well as to a long history of economic and technological backwardness, the conditions and implications of the climate, forests and water resources have been some of the main subjects of discussion in Finnish scientific and cultural discourses since the onset of enlightened thinking in Finland in the eighteenth century. This trend expanded by the 1960s–1980s, during a period when Fin-land enjoyed continuous and unprecedented economic growth, albeit with a heavy toll on environmental quality.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

948.1 PAL g

Penerbit

London : The White Horse Press., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

260 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781912186778

Klasifikasi

948.1

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

History of Denmark and Finland

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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