Timo Myllyntaus, Mikko Saikku, Alfred W. Crosby. Encountering the past in Nature.

_Encountering___the_PAst____in_NAture=_

=Essays_in=Environmental=History==edited_by_Timo=Myllyntaus_and_Mikko_Saikku=

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

This short book from a small country [Finland] is rich in imaginative, inno-vative contexts. Ranging expertly over several continents, including NorthAmerica, it argues that nature is everywhere an active presence, a formativeinfluence, in the making of human history. An excellent introduction to thekind of history most needed in the twenty-first century.Donald Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History,

University of Kansas

In a field traditionally dominated by works on the United States, the [bookoffers] a fresh international perspective, finding fertile ground for the study ofpeople and nature in diverse lands.Economic History Review

A deeper understanding of contemporary environmental problems requiresus to understand the interaction between humans and nature in the past.How have human societies affected their environment and vice versa? Whatdoes history tell us about ecological change?

The essays in Encountering the Past in Nature provide various approaches tothe new discipline. Experts with diverse educational backgrounds tackleimportant issues ranging from the intellectual formation of environmentalconcepts to case studies of forest history and animal extinction. Most essaysfocus on the issue of wilderness and the various uses of forest resources.Introductory essays elaborate on the historiography and methodology of thenew field of historical study.

Encountering the Past in Nature is a welcome addition to the introductorytexts currently available in the United States.

Timo Myllyntaus is senior lecturer of economic and social history at theUniversity of Helsinki. Mikko Saikku is assistant director of the NorthAmerican Studies Program at the Renvall Institute for Area and CulturalStudies, University of Helsinki.

SERIES IN ECOLOGY AND HISTORY

designed by Bonnie Campbell

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Timo M

yllyntaus andM

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Ohio

ISBN 0-8214-1358-9

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Encountering the Past in Nature

Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History

James L. A. Webb, Jr., Series Editor

Conrad Totman,The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan

Timo Myllyntaus and Mikko Saikku, eds.,Encountering the Past in Nature: Essays in

Environmental History

Encounteringthe Past

in NatureEssays in

Environmental History

Revised Edition

Edited byTimo Myllyntaus and Mikko Saikku

Foreword byAlfred W. Crosby

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESSAthens

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

Series Editors Foreword 2001 by James L. A. Webb, Jr.Copyright 1999 Timo Myllyntaus, Mikko Saikku, the other

contributors, and Helsinki University Press

First published in Finland by Helsinki University Press, 1999Second, revised edition, 2001

Printed in the United States of AmericaAll rights reserved

Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper

10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1

Cover art adapted from Mark Catesbys eighteenth-century illustration of the Largest White Billd Woodpecker and the Willow Oak, fromThe Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands

(London, 173143)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Encountering the past in nature : essays in environmental history / edited by Timo Myllyntaus and Mikko Saikku ; foreword by Alfred W. Crosby.Rev. ed.

p. cm. (Ohio University Press series in ecology and history)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8214-1357-0 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-8214-1358-9 (pbk. : alk.

paper) 1. Human ecologyHistory. 2. NatureEffect of human beings

onHistory. 3. Forests and forestryHistory. I. Myllyntaus, Timo. II. Saikku, Mikko. III. Series.

GF13 .E5 2000304.2'09dc21

00-057994

TM

Contents

Figures and Table vii

Series Editors ForewordJames L. A. Webb, Jr. ix

ForewordAlfred W. Crosby xi

Preface xvii

Contributors xix

Environmental History: A New Discipline with Long Traditions

Timo Myllyntaus and Mikko Saikku 1

Modernization and the Concept of Nature: On the Reproduction of Environmental Stereotypes

Ari Aukusti Lehtinen 29

Life in the Borderland Forests: The Takeover of Nature and Its Social Organization in North Karelia

Ismo Bjrn 49

The Vanishing and Reappearing Tropical Forest: Forest Management and Land Use in Thailand

Olavi Luukkanen 74

vi v Contents

Home in the Big Forest: Decline of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker and Its Habitat in the United States

Mikko Saikku 94

Environment in Explaining History: Restoring Humans as Part of Nature

Timo Myllyntaus 141

Index 161

vii

Figures and Table

Figures

1. Finland and the Baltic Sea Rim 6

2. The North Karelian Biosphere Reserve 51

3. Thailand 76

4. Major subdivisions of the Eastern Deciduous Forestin the United States as it existed at the time ofEuropean conquest 97

5. The original and late-nineteenth-century distributionof the ivory-billed woodpecker in the United States 105

6. The pyramid of orientations in environmental history 154

Table

Key factors affecting the state of the environment in theNorth Karelian Biosphere Reserve 53

ix

Series Editors Foreword

he Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History ispleased to publish Encountering the Past in Nature, a collection

of essays in environmental history by a group of Finnish scholarsthat was rst released by the Helsinki University Press in 1999. Thisnew edition provides a provocative and eclectic set of six readingsthat is suitable for adoption in both world history and global envi-ronmental history courses.

Three essays deal with change over time in forested zones, indifferent parts of the Northern Hemisphere and in different histori-cal periodsthe northernmost forests of the European taiga, fromthe Stone Age to the present; the subtropical lowlands of NorthAmerica in the period c. 1600c. 1940; and the wet tropics of main-land Southeast Asia, c. 1950 to the present. The other essays addresstopics in historiography and intellectual historythe evolution ofhistorical writing about the environment in Finland and the UnitedStates; the contradictory concepts about the natural world that in-form Western thinking about nature; and the role that the idea ofthe environment can play as an explanatory factor in human his-tory. There are essays in big history here, as well as challengingcase studies.

Encountering the Past in Nature also provides instructive exam-ples of how environmental historians are working with a wide vari-ety of interdisciplinary approaches to shed light on the complex

T

x v James L. A. Webb, Jr.

ecological processes of the past. Environmental historians are forg-ing new perspectives by integrating data and insights from both thenatural and social sciences in order to write environmentally in-formed history that speaks to our present-day concerns.

It may well be that no one of us can grasp the full complexity ofthe historical and present-day transformations in global ecology.However, contemporary environmental history scholarship, pushedby the ecological imperatives of the early twenty-rst century, isleading us to seek in that direction.

James L. A. Webb, Jr.January 2000

xi

Foreword

istorians will always be busynot because the past changes,but because the questions we ask of it change as conditions

in our own times change. For instance, when the Romanovs and theHabsburgs ruled, we often asked questions about dynastic rivalries.Now, with the scions of aforesaid families outranked by movie starsand pollution poisoning our skies, we ask questions about pastenvironments.

Our attention shifted not because environmental degradation isnew. That is not the case: Iraqs southern reaches changed fromfarmland to salty desert a very long time ago, and the Mediterraneanlittoral lost its forest cover at least as long ago. Our attention shiftedbecause environmental problems, once local or, at worst, regional,now loom as global. Worldwide warming of temperatures, expand-ing ozone holes over the poles, the denuding of tropical forestswe,historians and all the rest of us, fought hard to stay blind to suchphenomena, but the problems have won and have muscled theirway onto the front pages of our newspapers and into historiansstudies.

Proper consideration of the environmental threat requires intel-lectual retooling. Scientists have to modify their predilection for thetightly dened problem with high walls around it to keep out extra-neous information. Environmental problems, guratively and lit-erally, spill over the edges of laboratory benches and of reductionist

H

xii v Alfred W. Crosby

denition. Environmental matters do not submit gracefully to sci-entic rigor. The heart as well as the head is often involved becauseour convenience and even our lives are affected; and often the qualityof the data we use to dene environmental matters is miserably poorby the standards of physicists, chemists, and even eld naturalists.

The scientists need the help of scholars, that is, people devotedto exactitude and truth but accustomed to bias (their own in-cluded) and to wringing truth out of dubious data. Scientists needhistorians because historians can place environmental problems intheir chronological and cultural context. The scientists sometimesseem to think that solving such problems is no more than a matterof putting things right, and they have little idea of how subjective aconcept such as right can be. It certainly varies from society to so-ciety and from time to time. For the environmental activist it oftenmeans natural, that is to say, the way things would be but for theintervention of humanity. But, as Ismo Bjrn shows us in his chap-ter, humanity has shaped Finland, for instance, for a very long time,and untouched nature has not existed there since as far back as thelast retreat of the glaciers.

For a politician and economist, right may mean desalinatingthe west Texas farmland so that it can produce a prot and supportinhabitants again. To the dedicated environmentalist, ornitholo-gist, and shotgun manufacturer it may mean letting the river reoodthe elds to reestablish fen country, providing endangered specieswith a home again, giving ornithologists something to investigate,and ensuring lots of ducks, and therefore duck hunters, thereby cre-ating a market for shotguns. It is society, not science, that denesright, and it is historians who can supply a list of alternativedenitions that society can usefully evaluate because it has livedwith them before.

On the other hand, environmental historians have a lot to learnfrom the scientists. A liberal arts education, which is all that mosthistorians have, has prepared them to assess public appreciation ofenvironmental affairs and the intricacies of environmental politics,but not to understand and evaluate what scientists have and have

Foreword v xiii

not discerned about the environment. It is no accident, as TimoMyllyntaus points out, that Pehr Adrian Gadd, an early pathnderin environmental history, was the rst Finnish professor of chemis-try. Historians have to get used to charts, graphs, statistics, and thescientists infuriating preference for the particular when the generalis what one wants to know about. It seems likely that science is hu-manitys greatest intellectual achievement, and historians have tomake their peace with itor retreat to the questions inspired byyesterdays problems.

Finnish society has a special need for environmentalists, of boththe scientic and historical variety. Its home is in the far north,where the penalties for not paying attention to ones environmentfor instance, whether the temperature has or has not been coldenough for long enough to make it safe to drive the snowmobileacross the lakeare often immediate and irreversible. There is not,I think, a technologically advanced society in the world whose leg-ends and literature are so full of forests, waters, and wild animals.From The Kalevala to Aleksis Kivis Seitsemn veljest to the storiesand poems of the current generation of Finnish writers, naturelooms large.

It looms as large economically as emotionally. For all the suc-cesses of Finnish technologymobile phones, icebreakers, andallthe nations most important export remains forest products.As the old slogan goes, Finland stands on wooden legs. Her for-ests seem to stretch on forever and, therefore, her economic future,but so centuries ago did Frances, so a few generations ago didsouthern Brazils. Environmental historians can supply the Finnswith dozens of object lessons of forests clear-cut to the ground byvillains, and, as well, with true tales of bugs and beetles, rusts andfungi that have spread through forests thinned by the ecologicallyunsophisticated. Finns need their forests for their peace of mind,their export tradefor their futuresand therefore must learn tothink of them ecologically as well as economically.

Finns need to harvest their forests in accordance with the intentof sustainable yields, but these are ambiguous words. The scientists

xiv v Alfred W. Crosby

may be able to tell what they mean, if all that they mean is that everyyear there will be some kind of ground cover in the spring. But whatplants should be sustained? Factory forests with trees lined up likepotato plants? The wild, variegated sort of woodlands as they existedbefore . . . before what? Before industrial lumbering? Before agricul-ture? Historians like Lehtinen and Bjrn can tell us about what Finnsmean and have meant. Otherwise, forest policies will be driven bymythic memories alternating with prophesies of wealth.

Demography and migration and, therefore, environmentalchange in Finland has, for a century and more, been largely a mat-ter of industrialization and urbanization. As recently as a genera-tion or so ago the real Finn was supposed to be tending cattlesomewhere scores or perhaps hundreds of kilometers north of Hel-sinki. That Finn remains the classic Finn, but increasingly mostFinns, or at least a plurality of such, live on or near the southerncoast and travel to the countryside, as Ari Lehtinen puts it, on vaca-tions, in ight from the repressions of modern life in the cities.The forest is reoccupying some of the land it lost to the farmers andloggers; starlings, which depend on meadows for access to theirfood, are decreasing in number. Minor native ora, kept in cornersand under fences by grazing cattle, advance again. Exotic plants es-tablish themselves in reopening ecological niches. Historians canenhance general understanding of such trends by putting them inchronological sequence for us.

The old industrialization of William Blakes satanic mills gaverise to row on row of worker housing and to air and streams pollutedwith soot, sawdust, and sewerage. The historians can tell us aboutthat and about how Finns perceived the threat and how they reactedto it. The new industrialization of shiny white factories and vastparking lots pollutes air and streams in new ways. The scientists cantell us about that. The historians can help their fellow citizens to de-cide not just what should be done about that (which may be obviousin the abstract: stop it), but what measures are most likely to actuallywork, given Finnish experience and general attitudes.

Foreword v xv

If experience were recorded as if by a tape machine in the brain,so it could be played back in total for reanalysis in the light of freshevents, then Finland, small though it is, would have spawned agoodly number of the better environmental historians on earth. I saythat because experience has proved that the Finnish ecosystemsland, lake, and seaare delicate, easily disrupted, and slow to heal.Historians can chronicle that at length and conrm that the rigors ofa far northern climate have always kept the margin for survival forplant, animal, and human narrow. Clear-cut a Savo forest and youwill surely be in your grave before anything resembling the eco-system you destroyed returns. Clear-cut a forest in Lapland, and itwill be centuries, even millenniaif ever.

v

Finns must take care of their country, must move as carefullythrough their forests and fens as though through a house of cards.A northern ecosystem may take longer in actual time than a houseof cards to collapse, but not in the foreshortened view of environ-mentally impoverished grandchildren.

Finlands historians have lessons for all peoples, for instance,those of the United States, with its relatively forgiving midtemperate-zone ecosystems. Even those systems cannot survive rapid and mas-sive change unscathed, as Mikko Saikkus story of the extinction ofthe ivory-billed woodpecker illustrates. The lessons of Finnish en-vironmental history are even more pertinent for peoples who livein the midst of similarly delicate ecosystems, Siberians and Canadi-ans, for instance. And it is not only northern lands that recoverslowly from ecological insult. Amazonia, Congo, Malaysiatheseand similarly hot, wet lands are as vulnerable to irreparable envi-ronmental damage as Finland. Olavi Luukkanen tells us a tale offorest management in Thailand that may differ in its details fromtales of forest management in Finland, but the lesson is the same.Forests are increasingly hostages to general cultural attitudes and topolitical trends.

xvi v Alfred W. Crosby

There seems to be only one group devoted to informing usabout our environments, our environmental attitudes, and our en-vironmental politics. This is the new profession of the environmen-tal historians, of which Finland has already produced several,whose work you may read in the following pages.

Alfred W. Crosby

xvii

Preface

he globe has huge temporal dimensions. For ages barren natureexisted without living things. Life began on earth some 3.5 bil-

lion years ago, but modern humans (Homo sapiens) appeared per-haps less than half a million years ago. Although latecomers amongthe living things, humans as a species have transformed the earth themost. Many of these transformations have not been benecial to theother speciesnor to humans. Today ecological damage is notmerely a set of local phenomena. Environmental degradation is aglobal problem.

Successive civilizations have faced environmental problems andhave sometimes been aware of causal factors underlying these un-fortunate changes. Considering the gravity of degradation in manycases, it is paradoxical that historical research dedicated to the studyof these topics did not begin until quite recently. This book aims tocontribute to the ongoing discussion in environmental history.

The foundation for this collection of essays was laid during theseminars and series of lectures that we organized during the 1990sat the University of Helsinki. On various occasions, we have had theopportunity to share the enthusiasm of students of environmentalissues. We are indebted to the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of So-cial Sciences for providing us with funding for these events. Wehave also had the privilege of becoming acquainted with dozens ofcolleagues in the eld and drawing on their wealth of knowledge.

T

xviii v Preface

We owe warm thanks to Dr. Alfred W. Crosby, Dr. Yrj Haila,and Dr. Yrj Vasari, who have encouraged us to devise academiccoursework in environmental history and compile this anthology.We also wish to express our gratitude to several referees who pro-vided us with constructive suggestions and valuable criticism dur-ing different stages of the writing and editorial process.

In editing the text, we received substantial assistance from Dr.Frances Karttunen, Ms. Debra Rae Cohen, and Dr. Harvey Green,whom we gratefully acknowledge. In addition, cordial thanks areextended to Ms. Milla Laaksonen, our copy editor, who designedthe layout of the rst edition.

In compiling this book, we have had the pleasure of workingwith a group of dedicated and patient historians who have activelyparticipated in the editing process of their manuscripts. The chap-ters in this book are more products of enthusiasm, aus Liebe zurKunst, than bread-and-butter jobs. Of course, without our academicoccupations as researchers and teachers, this book would never havebeen completed. We have had pleasant facilities at the Departmentof Social Science History and the Renvall Institute for Area and Cul-tural Studies to do editing in addition to our daily work. We alsogratefully acknowledge the fellowships and grants awarded by theAcademy of Finland and the Ministry of Trade and Industry for ourprimary occupations.

Timo Myllyntaus and Mikko Saikku

xix

Contributors

Ismo Bjrn, Ph.D., Researcher at the Karelian Institute, Univer-sity of Joensuu.

Alfred W. Crosby, Ph.D., Academician at the Academy of Fin-land, Professor Emeritus of Geography, History, and AmericanStudies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Ari Aukusti Lehtinen, Ph.D., Professor of Geography at theUniversity of Joensuu.

Olavi Luukkanen, Ph.D., Professor and Leader of the TropicalSilviculture Unit at the Department of Forest Ecology, University ofHelsinki.

Timo Myllyntaus, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow at the Acad-emy of Finland and Senior Lecturer of Economic and Social His-tory at the University of Helsinki.

Mikko Saikku, Lic. Phil., Assistant Director of the North Ameri-can Studies Program at the Renvall Institute for Area and CulturalStudies, University of Helsinki.

1Environmental HistoryA New Discipline with

Long Traditions

v

Timo Myllyntaus and Mikko Saikku

nvironmental history has established itself in American aca-deme since the 1970s. A similar development has taken place inEurope, where human-induced changes have a much longer

and more far-reaching history. Although interaction between hu-mans and nature has always been part of European historiography,environmental history in the present sense of the term, with explicitecological consciousness, has been written for less than three decades.

This introduction concentrates on the rise of environmentalhistory as an academic discipline in Finland, and with reference tothe United States. From the viewpoint of environmental history,these two countries have several things in common, and one reasonfor the similarities is that in Finland and the United States the actualtakeover of nature by human populations was accomplished onlyduring the last three centuries.

What is environmental history, and what have the central

E

2 v Timo Myllyntaus and Mikko Saikku

themes in the environmental historiography of the past centurybeen? Are there themes common to both American and Finnishenvironmental history? Furthermore, how is environmental his-tory viewed today by academe, and what will the future of the eldbe? This brief prologue and the present set of essays aim to shedlight on these questions by trying to dene environmental historyand by surveying the research and making comparisons betweendiffering approaches to the eld.

Environmental history, in short, may be described as an at-tempt to elucidate the interaction between humans and nature inthe past. How have human societies affected their environmentand vice versa? In comparison with traditional historiography, en-vironmental history emphasizes the role of humans as an integralpart of their natural surroundings. Modern environmental his-tory strives for a fuller understanding of todays environmentalissues and may even provide data for contemporary problem solv-ing. What ecological models does history offer us? Which havebeen the adaptive and maladaptive human societies through his-tory, and how did they function in their relations with the naturalenvironment?

Donald Worster and other American historians have offereduseful denitions and have suggested approaches to the core of en-vironmental history.1 Important questions seem to center on thevarious productive strategies of human societies, their ideologicalbackgrounds, and their consequences and comparisons across cul-ture and place. What kind of society and environment emerge fromthe interaction between these forces?

In his well-known essay, Doing Environmental History, Wor-ster observes that there are three levels on which environmental his-tory proceeds.2 There is nature itself and the human socioeconomicand intellectual realms as they interact with the natural environ-ment. The most prominent approach in contemporary research isprobably the study of the interaction between human modes of pro-duction and the environment. This eld of study is concerned withconnections between the economy and environmental change in the

Environmental History v 3

past.3 Histories of environmental policy focus on environmentalchange in relation to public control, especially legislation, while eco-logical history attempts to reconstruct natural environments andtheir changes in the past, relying heavily on the natural sciences andtheir methodologies.4 The intellectual realm is prominent in the his-toriography of human ideas about the environment, or the study ofhow humans have viewed the natural world in their science, reli-gion, art, and ethics.5

In environmental historiography, there has often been a delib-erate effort to create an interdisciplinary synthesis, often by combin-ing existing information from diverse disciplines in a new way. Notsurprisingly, the research topic tends to dictate the approach, sourcematerials, and research methods used. Thus the source materialsutilized in environmental history may vary enormously, from oralhistories and traditional written documents to data provided bymodern science, such as dendrochronology, and pollen and sedi-ment studies.

The Rise of Environmental History

Although environmental history as a distinctive academic eldemerged only during the 1970s, its roots go back over a century.Some scholars of the frontier and western schools of American his-toriography, such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Walter PrescottWebb, and James C. Malin, stressed the role played by the naturalenvironment in the formation of American society.6 A similar ap-proach can be identied in the work of their Finnish contemporar-ies, the historian Vin Voionmaa and the anthropologist HelmerSmeds, who claimed that natural conditions had profoundlyshaped Finnish society.7

Current Finnish research in the eld has partly evolved fromthis earlier, instinctive environmental history. In the agricultur-ally unforgiving natural conditions of the Nordic countries, it hasbeen a common conviction that nature has always had a distinctive


impact on human activities; for centuries Nordic peoples have livedat the mercy of nature. In the agricultural Finland of the past,survival depended on the efforts of poorly connected communities.With small local stocks of foodstuffs and weak communication fa-cilities, there was no room for large errors of judgment. Tradition-ally, Finns have been primarily interested in four environmentalthemes: climate, forest, water resources, and landscape. This out-look of the former farmer society has been reected by academicresearch. Like other scholars, historians have dealt with these piv-otal elements of nature in their works.

In Finland, the tradition of research into climatic history has itsbeginnings in the eighteenth century. The French school of econo-mists, Physiocrats, and the Enlightenment in general inspiredscholars such as the rst Finnish professor of chemistry, Pehr AdrianGadd, to register natural phenomena and climatic changes.8 Hepublished widely on climatic impact on agriculture. Swidden culti-vation and the dredging of rivers are other examples of the areasexplored in his multidisciplinary works related to environmentalissues.9

The main emphasis in the early meteorological observationswas on weather conditions during the growing and harvesting sea-sons, as well as annual temperature proles. In the nineteenth cen-tury, special attention was paid to deviations from the expectedseasonal temperatures, such as early night frosts or exceptionallycold periods. In Finland, the growing season is short and unstable.During the latter half of the twentieth century, the average monthlytemperature has annually been above freezing in the southern partof the country for seven months and in Lapland for only vemonths. Snow and frost limit the pasturing season to only a fewmonths. For these climatic reasons, conditions for agriculture havebeen critical for a long time.

From the late seventeenth century to the third quarter of thenineteenth century, marked harvest failures took place in Finlandroughly once in a decade, and three widespread famines per centurywere not rare. In western Europe, the last massive harvest failure and


consequent famine induced by poor weather was experienced inFinland in the 1860s, when over one hundred thousand people, ornearly 6 percent of the population, died within three years becauseof hunger and diseases related to malnutrition or worsened livingconditions. Early Finnish studies on harvest failures and famines of-ten came very close to the form of scholarship now called environ-mental history.10

The environmental viewpoint was even more pronounced inthe geographical work of Ilmari Hustich who, during the 1940s and1950s, explored the historical relationship between agriculture andclimate in northern Finland.11 Weather conditions, temperaturechanges, the amount of rainfall, and their inuence on agriculturehave also been research topics in the United States. For example, theDust Bowl phenomenon of the 1930s has attracted considerable aca-demic interest.12

Finland is often regarded as a small country. However, thatviewpoint is based on population, which is now 5.1 million. Interms of territory, Finland is one of the largest countries inEuropejust behind Russia, the Ukraine, France, Spain, Sweden,and Germany. Its geographical features differ from the rest of thecontinent: there are more relatively untouched natural areas andfewer built environments than in central Europe. For example,lakes and rivers constitute a greater percentage of Finlands surfacearea than cultivated land, which makes up only 8 percent of the to-tal territory of 130,524 square miles (338,145 sq. km). In addition, thecountrys forest resources are the third largest in Europe. Two-thirds of Finland is covered by forest, which forms the countrysprincipal natural assets.13

In western Europe, Finland is the country that most recently cutits huge old-growth forests. In the late eighteenth century, nearlyone-third of the forests in the southern part of the country weregenuine old growth (more than 200 years old). In northern Finland,which covers the area from the region around the River Oulu andLake Oulu in the boreal zone to the treeless fjells in northern Lap-land, the proportion was almost half of the forested area. At present,


the percentage of old-growth forests in the southern part of thecountry is just 0.1, and in the northern part it is still more than 10.14

Traditionally, Finns have highly valued their woodlands becauseforests have supplied them nutrition such as game, berries, andmushrooms, as well as rewood, charcoal, building materials, in-dustrial raw materials, and possibilities for cash earnings beyond

Figure 1. Finland and the Baltic Sea Rim


subsistence exploitation or harvesting. From the Middle Ages to the1990s, the main export itemsrst furs, then tar and pitch, woodenships, and later sawn timber, pulp, and paperwere obtained fromforests. Over three centuries, Finns have debated the most rationalways to utilize their forests. The fate of central and southern Europe,well-known regions that destroyed their forests and timber re-sources, has been a continuous menace for Finns. Generally, it hasnot been enough for them that most of the landed area is covered bygrowing trees. Only old-growth forests have been regarded as realforests by environmentally conscious Finns. Still, the need for re-wood and building materials, the practice of slash-and-burn culti-vation, the production of tar and potash, sawn timber, and laterpaper led to the cutting of old-growth forests. That kind of develop-ment created pressures; traditional values were confronted witheconomic needs. Finnish historians in the last quarter of the twenti-eth century deepened their investigation of the commercializationof forest use and values of modern forest management.

Although old-growth forests have been diminished to a tinyfraction of the total forested area, compared to the signicant pro-portion that still existed some three hundred years ago, ermaa, thecustomary Finnish concept of wilderness, has remained a pivotal ele-ment in Finnish peoples attitudes toward their national landscape.The most worshiped icon of national scenery is that of clean bluelakes in the embrace of the thick green forest, viewed from a highgranite cliff.15 However, it is worth mentioning that the concept ofermaa does not imply completely intact or virgin nature (un-berhrten Natur), although old-growth forests are a central elementof the ermaa.16 In Finnish, ermaa (literally hunting ground) meansa remote, very sparsely inhabited forested region endowed with gamebut not totally undisturbed, because Finns have traditionally be-lieved that at least somebody should have the right and opportunityto hunt and sh there. This concept stems from prehistoric timeswhen ertalous (hunting economy), a subsistence system based onthe mixture of hunting, shing, and agriculture, was common inFinland. Since the small, scattered population of the traditional


ermaa, both Sami and Finnish, was subjected to taxation, this wil-derness was certainly a cross-cultural construct, dened by thedominant culture of the southwestern coast.17

Nearly seven hundred years of Swedish rule before 1809 consoli-dated a centralized taxation system in Finland and classied peopleaccording their economic position in the system. Already in theMiddle Ages, taxation and other economic interests inuenced howdifferent areas and environments, including remote forests, werevalued.

Although ermaa is considered wild, untamed, and dangerous,it does not include a connotation of untouched by humans, asdoes the Anglo-American concept of wilderness. The Swedish con-cept vildmark sounds equivalent to wilderness. Vildmark is a wideareanot necessarily forestthat is neither used for agriculturalpurposes nor inhabited. Forested vildmark has a connotation of vir-gin forest, which is desolate, gloomy, and gruesome. Its counterpartsin Finnish are korpi, salo, and sydnmaa (heart of the land); they allmean the deepest backwoods distant from villages and trafc routes.However, these terms denote a smaller area than ermaa, which can-not be passed through by foot in a day or two. It is important thatneither vildmark nor its Finnish counterparts exclude hunting andother occasional utilization; thus those areas are remote and difcultto reach but not totally outside of human inuence.

In Swedish, another word, demark (desolate land), is morecommonly used than vildmark to describe remote areas of the bo-real zone and is often considered equivalent to the Finnish ermaa.Although both demark and ermaa may represent quite similarforested areas, they still have different connotations; demark ispresumably more an administrative term meaning an uncultivatedand economically inactive forested district. However, this conceptdescribes the present situation and does not imply that the regionin question has always been untouched. Former villages within de-mark may have become desolate for some reason. From the govern-ments viewpoint, demark means a forested area that is notinhabited by taxpayers.18


In the American discourse, wilderness is dened as pure andoriginal nature outside of human inuence.19 Although there aredozens of expressions in Finnish to describe wooded areas, intraditional Finnish thinking, there was no equivalent to the termwilderness. The probable reason for this is that until the mid-twentieth century Finland lacked the clear opposite to wilderness,the built environment of big cities.

If we really must nd the closest Finnish counterpart to theAmerican idea of wilderness, it might be aarniomets, primeval for-est, but that is a fairly poetic expression of literary style and empha-sizes the old age and density of the standing stock.

In the Finnish context, entirely undisturbed, pathless wilder-ness is an abstract concept. Because all of the environment aroundus is at least in theory exploitable by humans, it is the degree of ex-ploitation that, in fact, varies. For centuries, Finns have lived in for-ests and extended their hunting trips into uninhabited regions. Theentire territory was used in some ways already in the prehistoric era.For a long time, it has been acknowledged that any exploitative useof forest, except for reasonable hunting, shing, and collecting thebounty of nature, endangers the existence of ermaa. The utilizationof ermaa by humans easily degrades wilderness to talousmets(economy forest), a forest serving primarily commercial interests.

The landscape of forests and watercourses is anchored to theFinnish identity. At the same time, the use of these natural re-sources has been considered acceptable and necessary. From timeto time, the cult of the national landscape and the use of natural en-dowments have been thought to conict. For a long time, debateshave raged about the limits of conservation and the most desirableforms of the economic utilization of natural resources. Different in-terest groups have had contrasting approaches to this issue, andtheir views have been reected in the writings of historians.

In early-nineteenth-century Finland, a population of approxi-mately 1 million lived in a traditional agricultural economy, withonly a minimally efcient technological apparatus. If such a sparselypopulated country with rather modest economic needs found it


impossible to preserve its old-growth forests, the task to recreatethem on a signicant scale seems utopian for modern society, whichhas industrialized nearly all of its resources, both human and natu-ral, for the service of the national economy.20 Alongside demands toconserve the remaining old-growth forests, which make up 1 to 2percent of the total forested area in Finland, there has been discus-sion of returning parts of the managed economic forests to their an-cient state.

Although achieving a high standard of living has caused no ma-jor environmental catastrophes in Finland, the economic growth,which has been spectacular in European terms during the past 150years, has demanded measures that have resulted in a signicantenvironmental degradation. Awareness of that degradation hasgradually increased in Finnish national consciousness and politicaldiscourse.

What we can now label as environmental history was writtendecades ago by certain inventive economic, political, and intellec-tual historians and cultural geographers in both Finland and theUnited States. A vital difference between these instinctive envi-ronmental historians of the past and the environmental historiansof the past three decades is their degree of environmental con-sciousness. Traditional historians, tangled up in the anthropocen-tric problems of their time, often lacked a clear understanding ofnatural processes, and they maintained a close connection to politi-cal and economic questions, even as they addressed explicitly envi-ronmental issues.

Despite their education in the traditional anthropocentric school,there were Finnish researchers at the turn of the century who had al-ready approached historical problems from an environmentally con-scious viewpoint. For example, the historian Ernst G. Palmncritically investigated the government policy of articially loweringwater levels in Finnish lakes, carried out in order to obtain more ara-ble land. He argued that such a policy would be harmful to naturalprocesses and often proved useless to farmers.21 Similarly, Adolf E.Nordenskild and Ragnar Hult, along with the Finnish learned


societies, campaigned for natural parks and conservation in late-nineteenth-century Finland. At the time, their ideas were new andpathbreakingnot only in their home country but also in the rest ofthe Nordic countries. These efforts showed at least a certain degree ofenvironmental awareness, akin to that of Gifford Pinchot andTheodore Roosevelt in the United States.22

In the interwar years, the conservation movement gained mo-mentum. In Finland as in many other Western countries, it was areaction to rising industrialization and modernization. The trail-blazer of the Finnish conservation movement, Rolf Palmgren, criti-cized the blind materialism of his time. The movement gainedpolitical support, and the parliament passed the rst conservationlaw in 1923. In the following year, Palmgren was nominated to thenew post of superintendent of conservation.23

In the spring of 1938, four academic associations decided to setup the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (Suomen Luon-nonsuojeluliitto). This was a relatively late development; its Swedishcounterpart, Svenska Naturskyddsfrening, had been founded in1909, and in the same year the Swedish parliament passed its rst lawdirected at the conservation of natural resources.24 In both Swedenand Finland, the national societies for conservation were elitist or-ganizations; most of their members came from among the univer-sity faculty. The rst board of governors of the Finnish Associationfor Nature Conservation was composed of doctors with one exceptionPalmgren had only a masters degree.25

The dominance of males is another characteristic of the earlyyears of the Finnish conservation movement. In contrast, Britainsactual conservation movement was headed by women, who op-posed the feather trade and defended the protection of wild birds.Before that movement began, concern for animal welfare had led toorganized conservation activity as early as the 1820s, eventually re-sulting in the Sea Birds Preservation Act of 1869.26

The outbreak of World War II hampered the activities of theFinnish Association for Nature Conservation. Nevertheless, it be-gan to publish a yearbook, Suomen luonto (Finnish Nature), in 1941.


After the war, the yearbook gained popularity, and from 1956 on itwas issued as a quarterly journal. The association emphasized itseducational and ethical goals of stimulating public debate and mo-bilizing citizens to protect nature as a patriotic duty. To recruityoung people to the ranks of the conservation movement, the asso-ciation founded a youth subsidiary, Luonto-Liitto (Finnish NatureLeague), during the war in 1943.27

In the 1960s, a movement with a broader outlook on currentenvironmental issues emerged in various countries. In addition tothe traditional conservation of nature, the new movement con-cerned itself with the larger social and structural issues behind en-vironmental changes in highly industrialized society. The newenvironmental movement provided the impetus for the rise ofmodern environmental history and for a new way of looking at thepast. This is evident in the work of contemporary American histo-rians, such as Alfred Crosby, Donald Worster, Richard White, andWilliam Cronon.28 On the eastern side of the Atlantic, interest inthe new discipline has increased steadily since the 1970s. At thetime, the geographer Ilmari Hustich and the economic and socialhistorian Sven-Erik strm at the University of Helsinki wereinuential in introducing modern environmental history to Fin-land.29 Although they were open to new ways of valuing the envi-ronment and aware of the arguments of both old and newenvironmentalists, Hustich and strm did their research strictlywithin their traditional academic disciplines.30

In intellectual history, criticism of Western rationality and re-source utilization was boosted by the book Science and Reason byphilosopher Georg Henrik von Wright.31 The book argues that thebelief in reason, a basis of natural sciences, has not at all been par-ticularly prudent. Science and technology are at war against nature,and that antagonism has been sharpened because science and tech-nology have been allied with industrialization. Humans are in dan-ger of losing their control of the development, since their mindshave been captured by the rational outlook of the Enlightenment.The book by Wright aroused a lot of interest not only in Finland but


also in Sweden. The criticism of reason stimulated the considera-tion of the development of the entire Western culture from another,more environmental viewpoint.

In Finland, a politically signicant environmental movementemerged in the spring of 1979, when a group of young activists dem-onstrated and organized passive resistance in order to prevent thelowering of the water level in Lake Koijrvi, famous for its abundantbird life. Political activism ensued, and in 1983, the same year as didDie Grnen in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Finnish Greenswon their rst seat in parliament.32 Alongside its Belgian, Swiss,Austrian, and German counterparts, the Finnish Vihre Liitto hasbecome one of the most notable green parties in Europe.33 Since1995 it has also held the post of the minister of environment in theFinnish government.

The Institutionalization of Environmental History

In the United States, the new environmentalism of the 1960s and1970s stimulated interest and research in environmental history.Historians in the eld joined together and established an organiza-tion, The American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), in1975. The following year, the society began publishing the journalEnvironmental Review. In addition, the biennial (later annual) meet-ings of the ASEH have provided a forum for discussion and oppor-tunities to establish social and research contacts among Americanenvironmental historians. Scholars in the eld have also organizedpanels at the national conventions of the Organization of AmericanHistorians and the American Historical Association. One reason forthe fairly late rise of organized environmental history as an academicdiscipline was the lack of communication between social and natu-ral sciences, impeding the wholesome understanding of ecologicalproblems.34

In postwar Europe, some branches of environmental history


have developed within certain older disciplines. Earlier historicalresearch related to the environment was carried out under variousother disciplinary paradigms, such as economic history, anthropol-ogy, and geography, because concepts such as environmental his-tory, ecological history, ecohistory, histoire de lenvironnement,historische kologie, Umweltgeschichte, historische Umweltfor-schung, milieugeschiedenis, miljhistoria or ympristhistoria wereunknown at the time. The great variety of new terms reects the di-versity of points of departures and approaches.

In the 1980s, environmental history received a great deal ofpublicity in Europe. New interpretations were published in variouscountries, such as West Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain. Forexample, Cambridge University Press began to publish the seriesStudies in Environment and History. At least at rst, however, itconcentrated on printing books containing a clear emphasis onAmerican topics. Among the rst books in the series were NaturesEconomy: A History of Ecological Ideas by Donald Worster, Ecologi-cal Imperialism: The Biological Expansions of Europe, 9001900 byAlfred W. Crosby, and Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Ge-ography by Michael Williams. Nevertheless, many of those worksfollowed the traditions of the French Annales school, which hadsince the interwar years promoted the geographication of histori-cal research. The schools emphasis on anthropological and re-gional approaches was reected in the works of the environmentalhistorians of the 1980s.

In 1988 a group of scholars from eleven eastern and western Eu-ropean countries held a symposium in Bad Homburg in West Ger-many and founded the European Association for EnvironmentalHistory (EAEH) to continue discussions on the historical interac-tions between humans and the environment. The founding meet-ing was attended also by a Finnish representative, botanist YrjVasari, who has studied human-induced changes in the rural envi-ronments of northeastern Finland.35

The beginnings of the European association were promising.The proceedings of the First International Workshop on European


Environmental History were published as an impressive book.36

Furthermore, the association began to publish a yearbook, Envi-ronmental History Newsletter, which was edited by the Landesmu-seum fr Technik und Arbeit in Mannheim, West Germany. InFinland, Yrj Vasari was active in contacting researchers in variouselds and encouraging the study of Finnish environmental history.As a result, a younger generation of Finnish environmental histori-ans organized an international symposium on environmental his-tory in Lammi in 1992.37 Some of the papers presented in thisworkshop were published as a special issue of the new British jour-nal Environment and History.38

Various factors served to exhaust the enthusiasm for theEAEH.39 For instance, lack of nancial support forced the Landes-museum in Mannheim to give up publication of the EnvironmentalHistory Newsletter in 1994.40 Links between European environmen-tal historians loosened, and the EAEH was not able to organize asecond symposium. However, throughout the 1990s environmentalhistorians have kept on meeting each other under the umbrella oflarge international conferences. For example, environmental histo-rians held their special sessions at the International Economic His-tory Congresses in Leuven (1990), Milan (1994), and Madrid(1998).41

In April 1999 a fresh start was made in Europe. Representativesfrom eight European countries held a meeting near Munich to en-hance communication between European environmental histori-ans and to institutionalize the discipline on this continent. Theorganization was refounded under the name European Society forEnvironmental History (ESEH), and plans for a newsgroup, ahomepage, and a conference in St. Andrews, Scotland, in Septem-ber 2001 were launched.42

In Europe, environmental history thus has made a real break-through in the 1990s. The present decade has yielded plenty ofprominent European books on environmental history. A case inpoint is A Green History of the World by Clive Ponting, which be-came a European best-seller.43 The scope of the eld has expanded


considerably, and new approaches have emerged. Considering thebackground of European environmental historians, ve disciplinesseem to have dominated. These are economic history (e.g., B. W.Clapp, Christian Pster, and Jan Luiten van Zanden),44 politicalhistory (Thorkild Kjrgaard and Clive Ponting),45 intellectual his-tory (Sverker Srlin and Gottfried Zirnstein),46 geography (HelmutJger, David Pepper, and I. G. Simmons),47 and natural science (Pe-ter Brimblecombe).48

The Shared Traditions of Finns and Americans

Some common themes in American and Finnish environmental his-tory have become apparent. Both countries were originally on theperiphery of the greater European economic system and sharedcommon features, such as vast timber resources and a great numberof sparsely populated areas. The present territory of the United Stateswas colonized by several European powers, and the thirteen originalcolonies on the Atlantic seaboard gained their political indepen-dence in 1776. In the late Middle Ages, Finland, in turn, was con-quered by Sweden and was governed by that country until 1809.Under Swedish rule, Finnish peasantsparticularly those in thesoutheastern provinces, who specialized in slash-and-burn cultivationpushed the frontier of the permanently inhabited area toward thenorth, penetrating to the land of the Sami people. In that way, theyconquered new territory for the Swedish kingdom. Under Russianrule (18091917), Finnish provinces were united and managed to de-velop their own state apparatus. During the turmoil that followedthe October revolution of 1917 in Russia, Finland declared its politicalindependence.

The peripheral status of colonial North America and Finlandforced them to ship raw materials and semirened products to theirruling kingdoms as well as to the rest of Europe. In the nineteenthcentury, they also competed with each other as suppliers of tar and


sawn timber to Britain. Ultimately, their indigenous natural re-sources, such as timber and hydropower, were of vital importancein the industrialization of these two countries.

Both countries also experienced a fairly late population growth,and their industrialization and urbanization took place later than inmost of western Europe. Nineteenth-century Finland was predomi-nantly an agricultural country in transition from a subsistenceeconomy to a market economy. Until the outbreak of World War II,more than half of Finns lived in rural areas. Although industrializa-tion had accelerated during the interwar years, it was only in the1950s and 1960s that Finland became an industrialized country. Inthe postwar decades, the Finnish rate of urbanization was the mosthectic in western Europe. Thus the middle-aged generation of Finn-ish people still feel that their roots are in the countryside. The num-ber of summer cottages, more than four hundred thousand, is anindication of town dwellers longing for the countryside and a logsauna by the lake in the shelter of the forest. Finns have more sum-mer cottages per capita than any other European nation.

The idea of wilderness has played a vital part in the culture ofboth countries. The conservation of old-growth forests and otherlandscapes have been persistent issues in their environmental de-bates since the late nineteenth century, as agriculture and manufac-turing industries exerted pressures to cut old-growth forests bothfor timber and farmland.

In both countries, the native peoples (Native American andSami) ways of life have often been contrasted with those of the ex-pansionist Anglo-American and Finnish/Swedish cultures.49 Boththe American Indians and the Nordic Sami believed that land be-longs to all collectively and opposed private land ownership. Thisnotion to a certain degree has also been shared by Finns. Central tothe current Finnish land law is the so-called public right of accessthat allows everyone to walk, ski, camp temporarily, and pick berriesand mushrooms in anyeven privately ownedwoodland.50

The vast environmental effects of slash-and-burn agricultureand the efcient utilization of forest resources have also been popular


research topics on both sides of the Atlantic.51 In both countriesthere are regions where the pivotal natural resource has been timberand where economic development has been dominated by the wood-processing industries.52 Forest history remains a major subeld ofenvironmental history, although it is important to point out thatnot all forest history can be classied as environmental history. Therelationship between humans and wildlife, especially large preda-tors, has also attracted the attention of scholars in both the UnitedStates and Finland. American and European attitudes toward largepredators, such as wolves, wolverines, bears, raptors, and seals, havebeen volatile and conicting.53

In central Europe, environmental historians have often focusedtheir research on cultural landscapes, built environment, pollutionin urban areas, emissions by industry, and epidemics.54 In theUnited States and Finland, wilderness, forests, and the problems ofprimary occupations have attracted more of the attention of re-searchers. In both countries, some environmental historians haverecently claimed that disproportionate attention has been paid toissues of wild lands and agriculture and that more research isneeded on social and urban issues. Greater inclusion of race, gen-der, and social class in environmental history has broadened itsscope signicantly. Recent issues of Environmental History and En-vironment and History, the leading international journals in theeld, offer a good general view of contemporary environmentalhistory and its research topics.55

Environmental history has sometimes been considered merelyas an offshoot of the new social history and even an academicfad that will soon subside. Although at present environmentalismis recognized as an inuential social movement, environmental his-tory is sometimes regarded as something of a trespasser on Finnishacademe. Environmental history has often been mechanically coupledwith environmental activism without paying attention to the longscholarly tradition of the discipline.

When Donald Worster evaluated the contributions of environ-


mental history, he claimed that one of its lessons is to reject naiveassumptions about a static, pristine, virgin world of unspoiled na-ture. Thus the role of an environmental historian is to help peopleclarify issues under current debate and not simply to provide sup-port to the arguments of environmentalists.56 William Crononidenties further the role for environmental historians: to counter-balance ahistorical and antihistorical impulses within environ-mentalism.57 Finnish environmental historians have continued toargue that nature always changes and that humans have extensivelycontributed those changesbut not always in harmful ways. Al-though an environmental approach to history has been growingfor a long time, we still lack an up-to-date general work on Finnishenvironmental history, which would provide an integrated synthe-sis of the interaction of humans and nature as well as a historicalperspective to counterbalance both technocratic fantasies and uto-pian environmentalist visions.

Environmental history has, nevertheless, been included in thecurricula of various Finnish universities since the late 1980s. The1990s has witnessed a number of masters, licentiates, and doctorstheses in the eld.58 The discipline, however, does not have anyteaching posts or study programs of its own. In these respects, Fin-land lags far behind the United States.59

However, in the European context, the country can hardly beclassied as a latecomer. Finnish researchers have continued previoustraditions in this eld of history while at the same time opening upnew directions of inquiry. Furthermore, they have not restricted theirresearch to the environmental history of their home country buthave contributed, for example, to the study of African, Caribbean,European, and North American environmental history.60 In additionto active participation in conferences abroad, Finns have also orga-nized international meetings on environmental history in their owncountry.61 Today it can be claimed that the study of environmentalhistory in Finland has had an auspicious start, and the challenges ofthe third millennium can be met with certain condence.


Deeper understanding of contemporary environmental prob-lems requires us to know where we come from. The study of environ-mental history will help us nd some common ground in that quest.

Notes

1. A good introduction is the round table panel in Journal of AmericanHistory 76 (March 1990): 1087147, with contributions from DonaldWorster, William Cronon, Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, StephenPyne, and Alfred Crosby.

2. Donald Worster, Doing Environmental History, in The Ends of theEarth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Wor-ster (New York, 1988), pp. 289307.

3. Good examples include Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The SouthernPlains in the 1930s (New York, 1979); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire:Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1985);William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecol-ogy of New England (New York, 1983); William Cronon, Natures Me-tropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991).

4. For a study with a legislative emphasis, see Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fish-ermans Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 18501980(New York, 1986).

5. This approach is central to Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and theAmerican Mind (New Haven, Conn., 1982); Roderick Frazier Nash,The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison,Wis., 1989); Donald Worster, Natures Economy: A History of EcologicalIdeas (New York, 1977).

6. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Signicance of the Frontier in Ameri-can History, Annual Report of the American Historical Association for1893 (Washington, D.C., 1894); Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains(Boston, 1931); James C. Malin, The Grassland of North America: Prole-gomena to Its History (Lawrence, Kans., 1947).

7. Vin Voionmaa, Suomen karjalaisen heimon historia [A history of theKarelian tribe in Finland] (Helsinki, 1915); Helmer Smeds, Malax-bygden. Bebyggelse och hushllning i sdra delen av sterbottens svensk-bygd. En studie i mnniskans och nringslivets geogra [The Region ofMalax: Settlement and the economy in the southern part of a Swedish-speaking region in the Province sterbotten: A study of human andeconomic geography] (Helsingfors, 1935).

8. Pehr Adrian Gadd, Tal om Finska Climatet och Dess Fgder i Landets


Hushllning: Hllet fr Kongl. Vetensk. Academien [Speech on theFinnish climate and its impact on the national economy, delivered atthe Royal Academy of Sciences] (Stockholm, 1761); see also Jari Nie-mel, Vain hydynk thden? Valistuksen ajan hytyajattelun, luonnon-tieteen ja talouspolitiikan suhde Pehr Adrian Gaddin elmntyn kauttatarkasteltuna [Just for utility? Relationships between utility, science,and economic policy in the era of the Enlightenment in the context ofthe lifework of Pehr Adrian Gadd] (Helsinki, 1998).

9. Pehr Adrian Gadd, Ovldige tankar om jordens svedande och kyttande iFinland, Frsta delen frsvarade af Anders Agricola; Senare delen frsva-rade af Pehr A. Bartholin [Just thoughts on the slash-and-burn of for-ests and the burn beating of peatlands in Finland, the rst part of thedissertation defended by Anders Agricola and the second part by PehrA. Bartholin] (bo, 175354); P. A. Gadd and G. N. Idman, Frsk til enoeconomisk afhandling om strmresningars nytta och ndvndighet iBjrneborgs ln, resp. Gustav Niclas Idman [An economic research onthe benets and necessity of the dredging of rivers in the Province ofPori, dissertation defended by Gustav Niclas Idman] (bo, 1772).

10. Selim Lemstrm, Om nattfroster och medlen att frekomma deras hrj-ningar [Night frosts and remedies for them] (Helsingfors, 1893); OscarVilhelm Johanson, Bidrag till Finlands klimatogra enligt ldre ob-servationer IIV [Contributions to Finnish climatography accordingto older observations], in Bidrag till knnedom af Finlands natur ochfolk 76, no. 1 (Helsingfors, 1913); Jaakko Kernen, On the Dependence ofthe Harvest upon the Temperature in the Foregoing Winter and May,Suomen valtion meteorologisen keskuslaitoksen toimituksia, no. 15(Helsinki, 1925). See also J. V. Tallqvist, Missvxter p 1860-talet ut-vade p den ekonomiska fretagsamheten i landet [Harvest failuresof the 1860s and their economic impact], in Ekonomiska SamfundetsFredrag och Frhandlingar 1, no. 3 (Helsingfors, 1898); Eino Jutikkala,The Great Finnish Famine in 169697, Scandinavian Economic His-tory Review 3, no. 1 (1955): 4863.

11. Ilmari Hustich, Om det nordnska jordbrukets utveckling och rligaproduktionsvariationer [The development of agriculture and the vari-ations in annual production in northern Finland], Fennia 69, no. 2(1945): 394; Ilmari Hustich, Yields of Cereals in Finland and the RecentClimatic Fluctuation, Fennia 73, no. 3 (1950): 332; and Ilmari Hustich,The Recent Climatic Fluctuation in Finland and Its Consequences,Fennia 75 (1952) [Includes a bibliography on climatic changes during thenineteenth and twentieth centuries, compiled by V. Erkamo, pp. 11828].

12. Cf. Malin (1947); James C. Malin, History and Ecology: Studies of the


Grassland, ed. Robert P. Swierenga (Lincoln, Nebr., 1984); Worster(1979); Mathew Paul Bonnield, The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and De-pression (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1979). See also William Cronon, APlace for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative, Journal of AmericanHistory 78, no. 4 (1992): 134776.

13. Statistical Yearbook of Finland 1999 (Helsinki, 1999).14. Yrj Ilvessalo, The Forest of Finland: The Forest Resources and the Condi-

tion of the Forests, Metstieteellisen koelaitoksen julkaisuja, no. 9 (Hel-sinki, 1925), pp. 1425; Ilkka Hanski, Ikimetsn lajeja hvi [Speciesof the virgin forest are disappearing], Helsingin Sanomat (15 April 1996).

15. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, symbolist, pa-triotic painters elaborated this national scenery by several paintings.Well-known examples are The Great Black Woodpecker (also calledWilderness) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, signed in 1893, and Wilderness byPekka Halonen, painted in 1899. Torsten Gunnarson, Nordic LandscapePainting in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London, 1998),pp. 26069.

16. Joachim Radkau, Was ist Umweltgeschichte? in Umweltgeschichte.Umweltvertrgliches Wirtschaften in historischer Perspektive, ed. WernerAbelshauser (Gttingen, 1994), p. 12.

17. Pekka Aikio, Beyond the Last Line of Forest Trees, in Story Earth:Native Voices on the Environment (San Francisco, 1993), pp. 193200.

18. In the 1970s, there was a Nordic research project, det nordiska degrds-projektet, that studied peasant farms that according to ofcial registersbecame desolate between the early sixteenth and the early seventeenthcenturies. See Birgitta Odn, Miljhistoria i ett lngsiktgt perspektiv[A long-term perspective on environmental history], Milj har en his-toria, Aktuellt om historia (Lund, 1992), p. 11; and Anneli Mkel, Hat-tulan kihlakunnan ja Porvoon lnin autioituminen myhiskeskiajallaja uuden ajan alussa [Depopulation of the Hattula jurisdictional dis-trict and the Porvoo province in the late Middle Ages and in the earlyModern Time] (Helsinki, 1979), pp. 1421.

19. Yrj Haila, Wilderness and the Multiple Layers of EnvironmentalThought, Environment and History 3, no. 2 (1997): 12947; John Opie,Natures Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (FortWorth, Tex., 1998), pp. 37174.

20. Timo Myllyntaus, Technological Change in Finland, in Technologyand Industry: A Nordic Heritage, ed. Jan Hult and Bengt Nystrm(Canton, Mass., 1992), pp. 2852.

21. Ernst G. Palmn, ldre och nyare sjfllningar och sjfllningsfrski Finland [Old and new attempts to lower the surface of Finnish


lakes], Fennia 20, no. 7 (Helsingfors, 19021903); Ernst G. Palmn,Suomessa tapahtuneista jrvenlaskuista [On lowering the surface ofFinnish lakes], Valvoja 23 (1903): 36585.

22. Adolf E. Nordenskild, Frslag till inrttandet af riksparker i de nor-diska lnderna [Proposal on establishing national parks in the Nordiccountries], in Per Brahes Minne 1680, 12 September 1880 (Stockholm,1880). Also published in Ragnar Hult, Nationalpark i Finland,Geograska Freningens Tidskrift, no. 3 (1891): 26769.

23. Reino Kalliola, Luonnonsuojelusta ja sen tehtvist [On conserva-tion and its tasks], in Suomen Luonto (1941): 9.

24. Dsire Haraldsson, Skydda vr natur. Svenska Naturskyddsfreningensframvxt och tidiga utveckling [Protecting Our Nature. Early phases ofthe Swedish Society for Conservation] (Lund, 1987).

25. Cf. Andrew Jamison, Ron Eyerman, Jacquiline Cramer, and JeppeLsse, The Making of the New Environmental Consciousness: A Com-parative Study of the Environmental Movements in Sweden, Denmark,and the Netherlands (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 1621.

26. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in 1824,and the Zoological Society of London (1826) had a marked impact onpassing the 1869 Sea Birds Preservation Act in British Parliament. In1889, Emily Williamson established the Fur and Feather Group thatbecame the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in 1904, when itreceived the royal charter. David Evans, A History of Nature Conserva-tion in Britain, 2d ed., (London, 1997), pp. 3342.

27. Niilo Syrinki, Luonnonsuojelun ksikirja [A handbook of conserva-tion] (Helsinki, 1954).

28. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and CulturalConsequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972); Alfred W. Crosby, Eco-logical Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 9001900(Cambridge, 1986); Worster (1977); Worster (1979); Worster (1985);Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and theEcological Imagination (New York, 1993); Richard White, Land Use, En-vironment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washing-ton (Seattle, Wash., 1980); Richard White, Its Your Misfortune andNone of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman,Okla., 1991); Cronon (1983); Cronon (1991).

29. For example, Hustich participated in the ground-breaking conferencethat resulted in the book Mans Role in Changing the Face of the Earth,ed. William L. Thomas (Chicago, 1956). Ilmari Hustich (19111982) wasappointed to the Academy of Finland in 1975. strms Natur och byte:Ekologiska synpunkter p Finlands ekonomiska historia [Nature and ex-


change: Ecological aspects of Finnish economic history] (Ekens,1978) is a pioneering effort in the Finnish context.

30. For more on the historiography of Finnish environmental history, seeTimo Myllyntaus, Suomalaisen ympristhistorian kehityslinjoja[Developments in Finnish environmental history], Historiallinen aika-kauskirja [Finnish Historical Journal, special issue on environmentalhistory] 89, no. 4 (1991): 32131.

31. Georg Henrik von Wright, Vetenskapen och frnuftet, Ett frsk till ori-entering (Helsingfors, 1986; Stockholm, 1987).

32. The rst green party, the Value Party, was registered in New Zealand in1972, and during that same decade green parties were also set up in Brit-ain, France, and Belgium. In 1979 the Swiss greens were the rst to wina seat in the parliament. Timo Myllyntaus, Ympristaktivismi yhteis-kunnallisena toimintana [Environmentalism as a societal activity], inLiikkeen voimaKansalaistoiminta ympristkysymyksen muovaajana,ed. Timo Myllyntaus, Research Reports, no. 122 (Oulu: University ofOulu, Research Institute of Northern Finland, 1994), p. 23.

33. Sara Parkin, Green Parties: An International Guide (London, 1989);Ferdinand Mller-Rommel, Green Parties and Alternative Lists un-der Cross-National Perspective, in New Politics in Western Europe:The Rise and Success of Green Parties and Alternative Lists, ed. Ferdi-nand Mller-Rommel (Boulder, Colo., 1989), pp. 1419.

34. Donald Worster, History as Natural History: An Essay on Theory andMethod, Pacic Historical Review 53, no. 1 (1984): 113; Richard White,American Environmental History: The Development of a New His-torical Field, Pacic Historical Review 54, no. 3 (1985): 33334.

35. Christian Pster, Bad HomburgBirthplace of the European Asso-ciation for Environmental History, Environmental History Newsletter1 (1989): 13.

36. Peter Brimblecombe and Christian Pster, eds., The Silent Countdown:Essays in European Environmental History (Berlin, 1990).

37. J. Donald Hughes, In the Neighborhood of the Great Bear: An Environ-mental History Workshop in Finland, ASEH News 4, no. 1 (1993): 13.

38. Richard Grove, Timo Myllyntaus, and Mikko Saikku, eds., Environ-ment and History 2, no. 1 [Special Lammi Symposium Issue] (1996).

39. Some of the problems faced by European environmental history havebeen analyzed in a previously cited article by Radkau (1994), pp. 1128.

40. Environmental History Newsletter, no. 5 (1993), published in March1994, was the last issue of this yearbook.

41. See Myron Gutmans nal report on the session in Madrid: http://www.prc.utexas.edu/plains/seville/ (updated 8 December 1998).


42. For further details, see http://www.eseh.org/ (the homepage of ESEHwas made available in June 1999).

43. Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World (Harmondsworth, 1992).44. B. W. Clapp, An Environmental History of Britain Since the Industrial

Revolution (London, 1994); Christian Pster, Wetternachhersage, 500Jahre Klimavaritionen und Naturkatastrophen (14961995) (Bern,1999); J. L. van Zanden and S. W. Verstegen, Groene geschiedenis vanNederland (Utrecht, 1993).

45. Thorkild Kjrgaard, The Danish Revolution: An Ecohistorical Interpre-tation (Cambridge, 1994); Clive Ponting, Progress and Barbarism: TheWorld in the Twentieth Century (London, 1998).

46. Sverker Srlin, Natur kontraktet. Om naturumgngets idhistoria,[Contract on Nature: Intellectual history of the interaction with na-ture] (Helsingborg, 1991); G. Zirnstein, kologie und Umwelt in derGeschichte (Metropolis Verlag, 1994).

47. Helmut Jger, Einfhrung in die Umweltgeschichte (Darmstadt: Wissen-schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994); David Pepper, Modern Environmen-talism: An Introduction (London, 1996); I. G. Simmons, EnvironmentalHistory: A Concise Introduction (Oxford, 1993).

48. Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in Lon-don since Medieval Times (London, 1987).

49. For example, see Cronon (1983); White (1980); Richard White, TheRoots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Changeamong the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, Nebr., 1983);Ilmo Massa, Pohjoinen luonnonvalloitus: Suunnistus ympristhistori-aan Lapissa ja Suomessa [Conquering northern nature: An orientationto environmental history in Lapland and Finland] (Helsinki, 1994).

50. However, trespassing in private yards and gardens, as well as damagingelds and trees, is forbidden. For centuries, laws and conventions havelimited the rights to hunt, sh, and fell trees.

51. For some hypotheses on the Finnish impact on the use of forests in theUnited States, see Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups, The AmericanBackwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (Balti-more, 1989).

52. Some early examples of Finnish forest history research include G. Gro-tenfelt, Det primitiva jordbrukets metoder i Finland under historiskatiden: En redogrelse [Methods of primitive agriculture in Finnish his-tory] (Helsingfors, 1899); G. Grotenfelt, Suomen polttoviljelyn historia[A history of Finnish swidden cultivation] (Porvoo, 1901); Olli Heikin-heimo, Kaskiviljelyn vaikutus Suomen metsiin [The impact of swid-den cultivation on Finnish forests], Acta Forestalia Fennica 4, no. 2


(Helsinki, 1915); Olli Heikinheimo, Metsnhvityksen ja polton vaiku-tuksesta metsmaahan [The impact of forest destruction and burn-ing on forest soil], Acta Forestalia Fennica 8, no. 3 (Helsinki, 1917). Seealso strm (1978); Jussi Raumolin, ed., Special Issue on SwiddenCultivation, Suomen antropologi 12, no. 4 (1987): 183280.

The best general text on American forest history is Michael Will-iams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (Cam-bridge, 1989).

53. See, for example, Oscar Nordqvist, Hylkeen hvittminen Itmerest,Laatokasta ja Saimaasta [The destruction of seals in the Baltic Sea,Lake Ladoga, and Lake Saimaa], Suomen Kalastuslehti, no. 4 (1892): 5460; Rolf Palmgren, Vildanden och mnniskan: reexioner och kritiker ijaktlagsfrgor [Wild ducks and man: Reections and criticism on issuesconcerning hunting laws] (Helsingfors, 1915); Rolf Palmgren, Natur-skydd och kultur III [Nature conservation and culture III] (Helsing-fors, 1920), also in Finnish as Luonnonsuojelu ja kulttuuri III (Porvoo,1922); Rolf Palmgren, Om naturskyddet i Finland [Nature conserva-tion in Finland], Danmarks naturfredningsforengs aarsskrift 193031(Copenhagen, 1931), pp. 3944. See also Erkki Pulliainen, Studies onthe Wolf (Canis lupus L.) in Finland, Annales Zoologici Fennici, no. 2(1965): 21559; Jouko Teperi, Sudet Suomen rintamaiden ihmisten uh-kana 1800-luvulla [Wolves as a threat to people in the densely populatedregions of Finland in the nineteenth century], Historiallisia tutkimuk-sia, no. 101 (Helsinki, 1977) [Mit einem Auszug auf Deutsch].

Scholars in the United States have shown great interest in the his-tory of wildlife conservation. See, for example, Thomas Dunlap, Sav-ing Americas Wildlife (Princeton, N.J., 1988); Susan L. Flader, ThinkingLike a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Atti-tude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (Columbia, Mo., 1974); StephenFox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement(Boston, 1981).

54. R. Delort, Recherches franaises en Histoire de lEnvironnementEnvironmental History Newsletter 1 (1989): 1014; F.-J. Brggemeier andJ. Sieglerschmidt, Historische Umweltforschng in Deutschland, En-vironmental History Newsletter 1 (1989): 1520; E. E. Manski, TheNetherlands, Environmental History Newsletter 1 (1989): 21.

55. For example, see Mart Stewart, What Nature Suffers to Groe: Life, La-bor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 16801920 (Athens, Ga., 1997);Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Sciencein New England (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989); Martin V. Melosi, Garbagein the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and Environment, 18801980 (College


Station, Tex., 1981); Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: In-dians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 15001800 (Cam-bridge, 1990).

The American journal Environmental History has been publishedunder that name since 1996, when the Environmental History Reviewand Forest and Conservation History merged. The Environmental His-tory Review was published as Environmental Review from 1976 to 1989.Forest and Conservation History was published from 1957 to 1958 as theForest History Newsletter, from 1959 to 1974 as Forest History, and from1975 to 1989 as the Journal of Forest History. Consult www.h-net.su.edu/~aseh/membership.html# envhist. A selection of eighteen trailblazingarticles in Environmental History Review and its predecessor is editedby Char Miller and Hal Rothman and reprinted in the book Out of theWoods, Essays in Environmental History (Pittsburgh, 1997). The Britishjournal Environment and History has been published since 1995. Con-sult www.erica.demon.co.uk/EH.html.

56. Donald Worster, Nature and the Disorder of History, EnvironmentalHistory Review 18, no. 2 (1994): 2.

57. William Cronon, The Uses of Environmental History, Environmen-tal History Review 17, no. 3 (1993): 10.

58. As an example of completed doctoral dissertations, see Ismo Bjrn,Kaikki irti metsst. Metsn kytt ja muutos taigan reunalla itisim-mss Suomessa ertaloudesta vuoteen 2000 [Capitalizing on the forest:Use, users, and change in the forest from the wilderness economy onthe edge of the taiga in eastern Finland through the year 2000] (Hel-sinki, 1999), English summary, pp. 25465.

59. Environmental history is not, however, without ofcial recognition inFinland. The eld is well represented among members of the Academyof Finland. Three historians, all showing interest in environmental his-tory, have been granted the title of academician. The rst was Finnishhistorian Eino Jutikkala in 1972, followed by Swedish economic histo-rian Birgitta Odn in 1990 and the American Alfred W. Crosby in 1995.

60. For example, see Antti Erkkil and Harri Siiskonen Forestry inNamibia, 18501990, Silva Carelia 20 (1992); Harri Siiskonen, Defor-estation in the Owambo Region, North Namibia, since the 1850s, En-vironment and History 2, no. 3 (1996): 291308; Laura Hollsten, Globalhistoria, milj och sockerplantager [Global history, the environment,and sugar plantations], in Miljhistoria p vg: Artiklar presenteradevid Miljhistoriskt Mte 1995, ed. Bjrn-Ola Linnr and John Svidn(Motala, 1996), pp. 6270; Eeva Hellstrm and Aarne Reunala, ForestryConicts from the 1950s to 1983. A Review of a Comparative Study of the


USA, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, and Norway, European ForestInstitute, Research Report, no. 3 (Joensuu, 1995); Eeva Hellstrm andMartin Welp, Environmental Forest Conicts in Germany: From Na-tional to International Concern, European Forest Institute, WorkingPaper (Joensuu, 1996); Mikko Saikku, Down by the Riverside: TheDisappearing Bottomland Hardwood Forest of Southeastern NorthAmerica, Environment and History 2, no. 1 (1996): 7795; Haila (1997).

61. See notes 36 and 37 above.

29

Modernization and theConcept of NatureOn the Reproduction of

Environmental Stereotypes

v

Ari Aukusti Lehtinen

People rarely perceive the irony inherent in the idea of preserving the

wilderness. Wilderness cannot be dened objectively: it is as much

a state of the mind as a description of nature. By the time we can

speak of preserving and protecting wilderness, it has already lost

much of its meaning: for example, the Biblical meaning of awe and

threat and the sense of sublimity are far greater than the world of man

and unencompassable by him. Wilderness is now a symbol of the

orderly processes of nature. As a state of mind, true wilderness exists

only in the great sprawling cities.1

Nature as Wilderness

The conclusion above by Yi-Fu Tuan is based on an evaluation ofthe two contradictory images of wilderness expressed in the Bible.

30 v Ari Aukusti Lehtinen

The wilderness was a place of desolation, an unsown land fre-quented by demons. It was a land condemned by God, to whichAdam and Eve were driven, and it was the cursed ground whereChrist was tempted by the devil. But the wilderness was a place forrefuge and contemplation, too: the land where the chosen werescattered for reasons of discipline or purgation. Thus, it was a holyground from which to see the divine more clearly.2

The dual, oppositional meanings of wilderness were main-tained in the ascetic tradition in Christianity; the wasteland and thesymbol of freedom were both included as features of the wilder-ness. Over recent centuries, however, the meaning of vast and wildnature has changed dramatically. For the white pioneers of thewestern plains of North America, for example, wild nature becamean obstacle to be overcome. And for the modern westerner, wilder-ness is seen as something that must be conquered, and as some-thing from which one might draw ones livelihood. Humanity hasbecome the guardian and cultivator of nature, fullling the divinetask of populating the earth with humankind.3

The landscape that resulted from the white settlers invasion ofthe wilds of North America also helped to bring the modernnature conservation movement into existence. The rapid disappear-ance of wild nature and the destruction of indigenous landscapeswere increasingly criticized during the late 1800s. This reaction waslinked to the biblical notion of nature as holy ground. Some reform-ers were intent upon preserving at least some holy ground un-touched by civilization before the pioneers and their children inthe industrial era completed the task of turning nature into prot.The modern idea of nature conservation is based on romantic vi-sions of wild nature in need of protection.4

The Western idea of nature, thus, has been dramatically modiedby the conditions of modernization. It is still marked, however, by athoroughgoing dualism: nature has been considered both as the rawmaterial for industrial development and as an object to be conserved.What has been the role of the natural sciences in modernizing theolder, Biblically based conceptions of nature? To what extent have we

Modernization and the Concept of Nature v 31

been liberated from medieval Christian myths? Did the paradigmshift from geocentrism to heliocentrism really point the way out ofthe anthropocentric misconceptions of nature?

The recent initiatives to include the social sciences as a part ofnature research has placed new challenges and confusions on theagenda. It may be that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in na-ture research, from an emphasis on abstractions about nature (ce-lestial ideas of nature) toward studies of human-inuencedenvironments (terrestrial ideas of nature) and toward environmen-tal histories, environmental sociologies, and human and politicalecologies.

Nature as the Other

Conservationists want to conserve a nature that is outside the hu-man domain and that functions according to its own laws.5 Thisidea of nature, however, is problematic: how can we even conceiveof a pure and wild nature, external to us as human beings, exceptthrough our human culture, through constructs of language thatare lled with our own prejudices? Can we even contemplate a na-ture that is unbounded by the cultural constraints that shape us ashuman beings?

This chapter argues that the concept of nature as lying beyondthe human realm is an abstraction that dominates our understand-ing of and interrelations with nature. In Western consciousness,nature is out there, beyond us. In dening nature, however, as ex-ternal to us, we remain unaware of the sociohistorical conditionsthat have modied and produced the nature that we see. We forgetthe basic anthropocentrism from which we cannot free ourselves;we forget that we nd nature out there exactly as we have learnedto know it.

This point of view helps us to understand the Copernican revo-lution in a new light, as precipitating a shift toward scientic and so-cietal modernization. The shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism

32 v Ari Aukusti Lehtinen

also was a critical step in creating a new human identity in relationto a new external reality. The project of understanding, and therebytaking control of, a new celestial natural order out there, laid thefoundations for a new understanding of nature on earth. This newunderstanding had elements of the Christian idea of caring for na-ture and of a masculine hubris expressed in the idea of conqueringthe universe.

Heliocentrism, thus, should be understood as a new version ofanthropocentrism, one that expressed again the human subjectivityin our relations with the external and unknowable. This does notmean, of course, that the earth does not rotate around the sun.Rather, it questions whether the scientic understandings of phys-ics, at either the cosmic level or the molecular level, are of any helpto us in dealing with human environmental problems. Are our re-search and development programs going to continue to exploreworlds distant from us or will they focus on the everyday hardshipsfaced when coping with our environment?6

Techne and Poesis

The entire era of modernizationthe last ve hundred yearscanbe understood as a period of European colonization and the globaldiffusion of Western values. Western emphases on human reasonand rationality, as well as beliefs in linear progress and absolutetruth, have been successfully exported to societies around the globe.This process has been driven by developments in the natural sci-ences in the early modern period that paved the way for new techno-logical and industrial applications.7 The natural sciences also createda new way to see natureas a taxonomic system, as a system of spe-cies and ecosystemsthat evolved according to its own laws.

Thus the natural sciences produced a world view that dichoto-mized nature.

Timo Myllyntaus, Mikko Saikku, Alfred W. Crosby. Encountering the past in Nature.

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