Dr. Eeva Berglund

Department of Geography

501 McCone Hall # 4740

Berkeley, CA 94720-4740

Center for Sustainable Resource Development

College of Natural Resources

University of California Berkeley

Discussion Paper Series

Lost in the woods? Competing knowledges in

Finland's forest debates*

Eeva Berglund

Introduction

Everything in Finland is related to forests in one way or another, so it is said. Yet many now

claim that this assertion is used to cover up half-truths and lies - for instance about the

continuing ability of the forest sector to provide jobs and affluence, or about the consequences

of harvesting timber from old-growth forests. Increasingly academics, but above all

environmental activists, have taken it upon themselves to reach some clarity about what is

really happening and what the consequences of continued intensive forestry in Finland are

likely to be. Unsurprisingly, there are many groups who tend to disagree with those

environmentalists who would completely overhaul both forest management practices and set

aside remaining areas of unmanaged forest in the name of protecting nature and biodiversity.

How have the conditions for talking about and living in Finland's forested landscape been

created? What are the concerns that enter public discourses, how do they gain legitimacy, and

who or what confers this legitimacy? These questions and their theoretical underpinnings are

the subject of this essay.

Finland was part of Sweden until 1809 when it became part of the Russian empire. In

1917 as Russia was in turmoil, parliament declared Finland an independent republic. Before

that, in the 19th century the Autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland experienced a fast industrial

and educational expansion and in this century, independent Finland has achieved a rather

enviable economic as well as socio-political stability, even if it has been in the shadow of the

great Soviet bear. Despite changes, the role of the forest industries, specifically paper and pulp

production has been and continues to be absolutely crucial to this prosperity. It has also been

an integral part of a national political consensus which has been characteristic of Finland's

political life. But Finland in the 1990s is a different place. It is convulsed by recession and

incredibly high unemployment, around 16% in the last couple of years. A division into haves -

the employed - and have nots - the unemployed - has become worrisome.

With a surface area of 30,5 million ha, Finland lies at the geographical periphery of

Europe, across a sea from Sweden in the west and bordering with Russia to the east.

Ecologically most of it is within the boreal zone, a belt of rather fragile and relatively species-

poor forests. Lakes are ubiquitous but most of the bogs that have given the Finnish name

Suomi to Finland, have been drained and now make room for more forests. According to the

statistics of the Forest Statistics Information Service of the Finnish Forest Research Institute,

86,3% of the total land area in 1994 was forestry land, 65,8% managed forest. In Lapland in

the north, the boreal forest or taiga eventually gives way to tundra. Where southern Finland

had 103,2 thousand ha of state-owned nature protection areas in 1995, the north had more than

twenty times as much, and more on private land. Currently almost 60% of Finland's forest

land is privately owned and over 30% of export revenue is generated in the forest products

industries. Vast amounts of information about Finland's forests and the forest industries are

constantly produced. Aside from their economic importance, considerable professional and

proprietary pride is invested in forests.

The public discourses that have accompanied recent changes in administration, particularly

the critiques of prevailing practices voiced by environmental groups, are my entry point for

exploring some theoretical issues in the politics of nature. How and by whom is nature

defined? What are the connections between social relations and material transformations? The

essay approaches these concerns from a social/cultural anthropological perspective and is an

initial step towards theorising human-environment relations in an industrial setting in a way

that simultaneously recognises the constructedness of Nature (at a variety of levels) and takes

seriously the inequalities of power that play into such constructions. The work is also an

exploration of a historical moment.

Difficult access to information and secrecy on all sides has hampered the policy process.

Rapid change in the international forest products industries as in the political economy of

Finland's potential trading partners continues, accompanied by transnational efforts to regulate

forestry practices. Finland's entry into the European Union in 1995 has meant considerable

changes particularly in rural livelihoods where forest-generated income is significant. The

EU's environmental guidelines can also be used as leverage domestically, just as Rio's

declaration on biodiversity has played a prominent role. The changing science and the

constantly ongoing forest and habitat inventories that are taking place in Finland are adding

detailed knowledge from a variety of contexts to the debates, clarifying but also confounding

the broader picture. Given the cultural, social, economic and ecological importance of forests

for Finns, all this is accompanied by passionate comment and highly personal experience.

Several distinct though related conversations over what matters about forests in Finland

can be identified in the 1990s. Between 1994-1996 renewal of forest legislation rose high on

the national political agenda, leading to new forest laws and a conservation law that went into

effect at the beginning of January (1997). Since the late 1980s, environmentalists have

challenged prevailing practices in the forest products industries with increasing vigour.

Pollution from paper and pulp mills and the threat of logging in old-growth forests became

issues of public concern, but so did the ability of the forest sector to sustain Finland's export

markets. It can seem odd that old-growth forests, previously unused by the industry, are under

threat from logging, given that for the past decade forestry professionals and the industry have

been at pains to remind the public that more wood than ever is growing in Finland's forests.

The environmental activists whose agendas form a major focus of this study state their

explicit goals as protecting forests from the excesses of an industrial system always greedy for

the cheapest possible raw materials. In the process they articulate models of cause and effect

in the forests, but they also engage in more or less explicit efforts to construct social theories.

Like academic endeavour, part of activism is fuelled by a desire and a need to understand better

and to identify what is new and consequential in any situation.

This partial overlap of the activities of the researcher and the subject of research can be

fruitful for thinking about knowledge, power and social processes. Research on environmental

social movements presents particular challenges. Like all social movement research, it needs

concepts to do justice to the effects of action by people supposedly without power (Beck 1994:

19), and because of the importance of nature in our epistemological schemas, to which I turn

below, it also needs to overcome the paralysing effects of a hyper-reflexivity engendered in

disentangling the discourses of its subject matter from its own analysis. Environmental

activism in a technologically sophisticated, wealthy, and democratically governed country such

as Finland becomes a self-consciously intellectual pursuit which goes to the heart of collective

ways of organising the world.

The problematic category that remains salient in both the discourses I write about as well

as my own conceptual apparatus, and which this paper calls into question, is nature. Despite

much attention to the concept, work remains to be done in elucidating the implications of the

category. The word, luonto, and its cognates are ubiquitous throughout the debates as well as

in everyday language. Their power to convince but also to confound recalls Raymond

Williams' famous treatment of the term nature (1983: 219-224). As he notes, it carries many

of the major variations of human thought, of particular importance, I would add, to a broadly

Judeo-Christian and subsequently Enlightenment tradition. Intellectual endeavour in the

modern project, where scientific certainty and progress are simultaneously defined and

questioned, can never be politically innocent, and thus epistemology, expertise and even

'common sense' have to be examined with an appreciation of the relations of power that

accompany them. The 'common sense' of forest industry executives, government personnel

and environmentalists is often quite contradictory. On the other hand, many things are shared

by all these groups, which do not have to be articulated explicitly but take the form of tacit

knowledge. Research must thus attend as always to silences as well as utterances, since what

everybody knows needs no articulation, much of what is taken-for-granted operates in silence.

Activists (like academic commentators) can, or rather must, sometimes disregard the

requirements for consistency and exactitude that are supposed to inform respectable intellectual

and political conversation, to the extent that their communications are predicated on the

assumption of a certain amount of such tacit knowledge. This includes skill in the use of

objects like maps and reports, and at least some kind of unverbalisable knowledge of things

that are important to people, like forests, nature, love and health, for instance. As words, they

are not simple designations of a world 'out there', but are metaphors that change themselves

and the things they refer to as and when employed. Rather than enter a discussion about

linguistic philosophy, I signal this feature of human-environment relationship here in order to

highlight the impossibility of isolating the agents that make significant differences to the forests

'out there' and the 'values' people bring with them to the debates. I also wish to make known

that as an urban Finn, a woman born in the 1960s with a university education, my own tacit

knowledge and my attitudes towards environmentalism, concerned as I am that environmental

justice be done, fits easily within the statistical majority view of people like myself.

The research is based on interviews, participant observation and written materials

gathered over a nine month period in 1996, and sporadically since then. I am a native speaker

of Finnish, so I have been able to follow media accounts in Finnish (and at times in Swedish,

the country's second official language), to conduct interviews in Finnish and to bring to the

exercise my own personal experience of the ways in which forests articulate with other areas

of life. The current essay is more in the character of a pilot report than a finished piece of

research. The huge complexity, the fundamental epistemological issues that the debates

continue to probe, and the historical depth of the situation are such that to be able to provide an

account that can encompass the multiplicity of the issues without reification or misleading

dichotomisations, requires further work, including archival research as well as interviews.

Further research will also tell us more about the material practices of mapping and inventorying

that have become so prominent in environmentalist claims.

The next section describes how the forest debates operate as a competition for knowledge

as a way of legitimising a political agenda. Then I shall give a brief history of how Finland

emerged as a forest state and the role of expertise in this process. It is this legacy which

informs the uses of ecological knowledge and cartographic expertise in the forest debates. The

last two sections are theoretical. They explore the intellectual habits that seem so tenaciously to

debilitate some groups' efforts to break out of the apparently endless requirement for 'more

research' before taking political action. Whatever critique is inherent in these sections, applies

equally to academic and political forms of validating knowledge.

Activism as expertise

The forest debates, as with so much environmental conflict, are about power and legitimacy as

much as anything else. When the new Forest Act that came into force at the beginning of 1997

was first discussed by policy makers, the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation was

the only NGO represented on the committee that drafted the first report. The Association is

partly funded by the state and is considered conservative by many other environmental NGOs.

Nevertheless, along with all the other organisations that were lobbying for stronger

conservation measures, it was attacked in the media for jeopardising the economy of so-called

marginal areas. An independent consulting firm's interim research results, for instance, made

public in the spring of 1995, were interpreted to mean that conservation would cause massive

financial hardship in northern Finland, an already disadvantaged region. This interpretation

was not unreasonable, given that the summary states - unequivocally at this point - that at

current prices the effects of conservation in the region would result in considerable losses of

local income. The study was not directly relevant to drawing up the act, but despite

subsequent retractions and clarifications by the researchers involved, the Association and other

environmentalists had to spend huge resources in time and publications to demonstrate that it

was not conservation that was causing the majority of job losses, but so-called 'restructuring'

within the industrial sector itself. The initial interpretation continues to be invoked by

proponents of industrial expansion as an argument against conservation.

Organisations such as the Association for Nature Conservation are frequently pitted

against the powerful interests of industry and also government, but they too have access to

political power through certain media. It is not possible to treat their agendas as expressions of

'beliefs' as against 'facts' or their motives as 'value-driven' as opposed to rationality, realism

or common sense. Neither can the foes of environmentalism simply be charged with wilfully

creating facts that simply support their political and economic projects. Part of the difficulty of

explanation lies in the extent to which the parties in the debate use science as an ideal form of

true knowledge as if itself it were free of, or prior to, social commitments.

So what has been upsetting environmentalists? Throughout the last ten years (and

sporadically before then) activists, loggers, police, local populations and others have clashed

in actions within specific forests, as for instance when a company has been charged with

logging in areas set aside, or under consideration for, conservation. In the last few years

Finnish companies operating across the eastern border in Russian Karelia have been followed

by environmental activists from Finland and beyond (German, Dutch, North American) in

anti-logging campaigns that are an extension of the domestic political conflicts.

Most forests used by industry are privately owned but their management is overseen by

experts. These operate through numerous organisations from local Forestry Associations to the

Forestry Centre, an important statutory organ under the supervision of the Ministry of

Agriculture and Forestry. State-owned forests are managed by the Forest and Park Service,

jointly run by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and the Ministry of the Environment.

Depending on what forests are deemed most useful for, those given charge of managing them

might be foresters and loggers but equally also conservation biologists. Regional interests in

preserving employment in rural areas, as well as other concerns of the Ministries of the Interior

and of Employment, not to mention the concerns of trade and industry organisations, are

continuously part of the debates. Significantly, they influence how environmental NGOs

behave in any given situation, that is, which companies, interest groups and ministries do they

single out for attention or, in some cases, choose as allies.

Apart from the various industry representatives and myriad environmentalists, others too

have a keen interest in the forests: private households, tourists, and of course many animals

and plants also make use of them. The political debate over forests - the decisions which will

limit the parameters for the future chances of all interested parties - is nevertheless carried out

as a highly intellectual pursuit, a competition between knowledges, where the separation of

language and the world hardens as long as the discussants disagree about what is really

happening. In promoting an appreciation of biology in dealing with forests, activists claim that

the employees of the Forestry Centres who devise actual management and harvest plans have

little or no qualifications to appreciate even the scientific significance of preserving biodiversity

or the importance of remaining old-growth areas.

It would be misleading to refer to two sides as fixed opponents because the debates cover

so many institutional arenas and political agendas. Yet the various environmental organisations

who campaign in very different styles and with different kinds of supporters, have worked

together on the forest issue, despite occasional problems. For ease of exposition I shall refer to

the various groups and individuals campaigning for increased conservation measures as

environmentalists. For my present purposes this is not misleading despite the fact that it erases

many interesting differences.

The issues that today's prominent activists raise are more scientific ones than issues of

wilderness, landscape values or even economic ones. Their most favoured forms of action -

lobbying industry and government on the basis of biological facts and detailed surveys of

forests - operate comfortably within a thoroughly modern framework, striving for objectivity

and aiming towards technical solutions to problems. Despite rhetorical nods to social and

economic sustainability, forest debates have often taken a hue of strict biologism or ecologism

in which the politics of human societies is scarcely prominent. For now it is difficult to say

how much of this happens as an instrumental response to the relative successes (and failures)

of campaigns. Many forests have been set aside as conservation areas as the result of initial

media campaigns on behalf of pristine old-growth forests but above all as the result of many

hours of work in forests, with texts and at drawing boards that have produced reliable records

of the state of specific areas. In 1996 the Council of State produced a government resolution to

set aside old-growth forests on primarily state-owned lands and further resolutions are

expected. The work continues as impacted parties, including environmental NGOs are invited

to comment. For example, the Nature League, a prominent actor in forest debates, has tried to

influence the decisions. Its most active members are mostly young men with university

educations, and they have drawn up over 100 pages of detailed lists of valuable sites so far

excluded from the proposals now under scrutiny for a conservation program of the European

Union.

The 'other' side of the debates is also highly differentiated. The industry sometimes seems

closer in its rhetorics to the activists, leaving the administration in opposition. But the

administration itself is clearly heterogeneous also. The forest professionals berated by activists

working under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forests are a very different

group from those working in conservation for the Ministry of the Environment. Relations

between activists and the latter are sometimes quite good. The kind of survey work that

activists proudly carry out forms part of the regular tasks of many of the agencies operating

under the Ministry of the Environment, and like other forms of environmental administration it

enjoys considerable respect among the public. Concerns to protect nature hardly appear

radical in Finland's socio-political milieu, where support for green ideas has increased in the

last fifteen years. Where activists are radical is in their insistence on preserving biodiversity at

a higher social and economic cost than others would tolerate.

In 1991 a process of charting ecologically valuable forests began first on state-owned

land, which is explicitly national property. Subsequently also privately owned lands were

examined, for the purposes of establishing further conservation areas to protect what are now

routinely referred to as 'valuable' forests. The administrative body responsible for state-owned

lands, the Forest and Park Service (then still the National Board of Forestry) organised

surveys for identifying the habitats of endangered species and valuable sites. For several

summers in the early 1990s, it employed young people, mainly students, to carry out the actual

surveys. Some of them were already, and some became, active environmentalists. Many are

now highly expert at surveying as well as at producing and using maps, satellite images and

other representations of the landscape. At the time of writing, activists and others are working

in Russian Karelia alongside experts who are paid for by the Finnish Ministry of the

Environment. Given their role in this respect, it is not surprising that activists declare

themselves the country's leading experts on old-growth forests.

Critics of industrial forestry bemoan the narrow perspective from which authoritative

statements continue to be made, a perspective which considers the forest primarily as paper-in-

the-making. Notwithstanding the stress on ecological sustainability in management guidelines

since the late 1970s, activists still insist that unfragmented old forests need to be set aside

completely from human intervention. Thus, in contrast to the regular inventories that calculate

the cubic metres of timber available in forests, the old-growth inventories have viewed forests

as whole ecosystems. Beyond this, those who have been involved in the work underscore the

quality of the surveys they have carried out - it is not easily reducible to quantification.

Biologically oriented activists stress that in order to survey an old, or a 'real' forest properly,

one needs to identify indicator species as well as to assess the complex web of life that is there

without plotting it as a static snap shot. This would be a distortion of what biodiversity is

about. The admittedly amorphous notion of biodiversity allows activists to stress the

importance of processes over time and the life-sustaining qualities of species and systems that

are of no industrial value. The moral value that activists put on their intricate knowledge of

forests is to them obvious.

What might be the connections between this moral feeling, the sense of virtue in actual

old-growth forests occasionally stressed by environmentalists, and national and international

politics? Even as they focus on the detail of a specific forest and appreciate its vivid uniqueness

and value, activists claim to be motivated by a 'global imperative'. This enhances the moral

impetus. The emergence of ecology and biodiversity as world-wide, global issues, needs to be

understood as a specific, albeit influential story. The ways in which the world as a whole is

implicated in a crisis need to be scrutinised and responded to. These depend on how

knowledge of the crisis is validated. Claiming that Nature, the World, or Life is in trouble

means that only some forms of expertise are needed, ones that can answer to a totalising threat,

whilst others can be ignored. Hence my concern to emphasise the politics inherent in practices

that appear as innocent as the biological sciences or environmentalism.

Within the broader debates over forests in Finland, the biological knowledge emphasised

in the work of environmental administration is contrasted to the applied knowledge of forestry

institutions. In some senses, biological knowledge is the broader kind, in concerning itself

with the sustainability of the entire web of life. But the forestry profession has better claims on

the increasingly prominent qualities of social and economic sustainability. Then again,

knowledge of conditions 'on the ground' enjoys certain legitimacy over abstract book-learning

and unmediated reflexivity. Insofar as conservation measures are welcomed or unwanted by

forest owners, there is no evidence for a trend either way, or for generalising about the relative

preferences for government experts locally.

The environmental experts who concern themselves with Finland's forests include

organisations and individuals in other European countries and beyond. Similarly the industrial

actors and administrations (more or less) are tied into networks of transnational capital. Many

of these people can provide detailed and relatively secure knowledge of that sector as a world-

wide, global concern, and their confident grasp of a whole array of related facts imbues their

pronouncements with legitimacy. Local and universal knowledges cross cut each other,

confounding analogies between the global and cosmopolitan on the one hand and the local and

parochial on the other, at the same time calling into question even the usefulness of such

attributes for understanding environmental conflict. They serve poorly as analytical terms, but

say something about the legitimation those who use the words might be seeking - universal

responses to global problems. To have a 'global' world view is but one way, among many, to

organise knowledge into a totalising schema (Strathern 1995).

A brief history of the creation of the totalising knowledges that have driven Finnish forest

policy will help understand how expertise is made to count today.

From forest state to enlightened environmentalism

Although administration of forests had been of interest to government in the era of tar

production in the 18th century, the first map of Finnish forest resources was not produced

until 1850 (Michelsen 1995: 20). As Finland became a part of an international network of trade

and industry, surveying, a way of both representing and intervening in the landscape,

developed together with the professionalisation of timber extraction. The effect of all this

mapping has been to establish a set of truths about Finland's forests in a quintessentially

modernist idiom, one which effaces its own creation out of cultural, that is moral and political

commitments.

The development of the forest industries has gone hand in hand with national political

agendas to the extent that Finnish forest science is now widely considered both a national

achievement and a body of knowledge of global significance (Michelsen 1995). From the early

days of forestry, appointments, financial support and research agendas in the forest sciences

have been administered by the state in tandem with wishes of powerful industrial interests.

The National Board of Forestry was consolidated in 1859 and forestry education established in

the late 19th century.

As Jouni Häkli puts it, "the rise of knowledge to a strategic tool for government gave

impetus to the proliferation of maps and statistical data" (forthcoming). Now the Finnish

landscape has been mapped, searched, protected, logged and generally claimed for one or

another use in a process that today continues unabated. Purposes are assigned to land through

drawing traces on maps. The value of nature and the value of civilisation are thus made

explicit. In thus way all land is tamed. Not just that marked off for productive use, but all that

which lies beyond enters the schema controlled from the centre. Even as the forestry

profession developed to serve the requirements of industry, the conservation of the national

heritage was put in the hands of central government. The power to mould the land was taken

out of reach of those who were considered undisciplined and unscientific peasants, and

marked off as either productive land or wilderness. A. A. Lehtinen, upon whose work on the

politics and culture of forests in Finland the current exercise expands, has shown how natural

scientists with both conservation and production in mind came to a working solution in the late

19th century, for administering forests. "The main motivation for the state forestry was to

control and protect national property; in other words, nature conservation was an inseparable

part of the forestry administration". I expand on the significance of maps and other survey

data in the next section.

The raw material of paper and pulp and sawn goods really is everywhere in Finland. The

architects of national forest policy have also been landscape architects. And they have laid

claims to the landscape through knowledge. Legal title to forest plots may be held privately by

small-scale farmers and their urbanised descendants, but the expertise and the knowledge

which counts in materially constructing landscapes is elsewhere, ultimately within the purview

of state sanctioned forest science. This has led even to coining the term 'forest(-er)

fundamentalism', for the doctrine that treated forests primarily as paper in the making and

eclipsed many competing notions of good forestry practice that emphasised other uses and

other values inherent in forests. In this view the knowledge that counts in deciding forest

policy is unquestioningly that of scientifically trained experts who put the forests to the most

rational possible use.

This rationality emerged over a period of time from the late 19th century to the early years

of independence (in 1917) when the educational developments and novelties of industrial

capitalism were making themselves felt in Finland, and above all, whose effects were to

distinguish Finns ever more from their imperial masters, the Russians. Debate was heated

already in the mid-19th century as to the relative advantages of concentrating efforts on

developing the forest industries or on agricultural production. Again in the early 20th century

the politics of resource use were intimately tied to concerns over relations with foreign powers,

even if they were couched in terms of what kind of nation Finland wanted to become. At issue

was whether the country would be a more or less self-sufficient peasant society or an

industrially oriented economy. Proponents of the forest industries managed to create a link

between notions of well being for the whole population, allegiance to local companies and care

for the forests as a national patrimony. Eventually so-called forest fundamentalism became

common sense. This doctrine was consciously propagated through the Finnish Forest

Research Institute, METLA, established in 1918, and it received the prestige of modern

scientific credentials to establish the 'forest consensus' upon which many in Finland still want

to base their sense of security.

The Institute is housed in the same complex as the faculty of agriculture and forestry of

Helsinki University, where many forest scientists work. Not only does it publish annual

reports of the state of the land's forests and industry - catalogues of cubic metres and other

statistical representations - METLA has surveyed the population for attitudes towards forestry,

willingness to sell timber, size of farms and land holdings, and it continues to collect and

collate data on everything related to forests. Its passion for surveying is not unique however,

for Finns have been counted and measured by state administrations and semi-academic experts

from the early days of independence and before.

People use statistical and cartographic data with ease in daily life. Unemployment

statistics, just like maps of conservation areas, are mundane affairs. Maps demonstrate that

vast areas in the north and east already have huge under-utilised forests. This is a problem for

the regions given that they also seem to have plenty of under-utilised labour power, a fact that

the industry has not been slow to highlight.

To return to the history of the forest sector, its economic importance intensified up until

the 1960s. Soon after World War II, hundreds of thousands of people joined so-called forest

marches, planting, thinning, and generally improving growth conditions. Investments in

silviculture and new appointments of forest professionals increased significantly into the early

1970s. Soon enough the efforts seemed to pay off. Government-sanctioned expertise has

ensured that more wood than ever has been growing in Finland's forests since the 1970s

(FSIS 1995: 40). If it is not harvested, all the hard work would go to waste, or to paraphrase

the chair of the forest act committee, this timber will be left standing to rot in the forest.

The unchallenged common sense of the forest sector in the decades after the second world

war had always had some critics. But it did not emerge unchallenged or equally rapidly in all

areas. To this day the plethora of forest policies exhibits many different, coexisting

understandings of progressive or at least common-sense forest policy. In the forests

themselves, established silvicultural and harvesting practices are implemented side-by-side

with experimental ones.

In the mid-1980s a series of newspaper articles on the health of forests in Lapland

(northern Finland) pitted two researchers in the Finnish Forest Institute publicly against each

other over the implications of industrial emissions and acidification. The prospect of forest

dieback in the vein of German experiences of Waldsterben became a prominent public concern

in a nation-wide debate which crystallised many emerging environmental fears. From one day

to the next completely contradictory views on the situation were published, exposing the

cracks that had always been a reality inside the research community. Less visible, but possibly

equally influential in forming coming agendas, was the work of biologists commissioned

through a variety of channels by the Ministry of the Environment, itself established in 1983,

on the extinction of species. Around the same time, in the late 1980s the Green Party

consolidated itself as an alternative to the traditional social democratic, centre-agrarian and

coalition (conservative) parties. Finland's current Minister for the Environment is a Green.

The controversy over the north's forests did not make consensus disappear. A new,

broadly ecological consensus emerged, one that envisaged a progressive and internationally

significant role for Finland. Shared and taken-for-granted notions of unbiased science as a

truthful mirror of nature provided its foundations. The Brundtland report of 1987 did much to

bring environmental politics as a global imperative into the public arena. Finns could be proud

that they were able to subordinate internal disagreements to the needs of what presented itself

as a global threat. All levels of governance and most sectors of society came to support a new

green consensus, urging political and technical interventions to prevent global environmental

catastrophe and enhancing the sentiment that Finns are somehow privileged in both accurately

understanding, and being in a position to influence, the trajectory of this crisis.

However, as promises to respond to environmental fears were increasingly seen as

rhetorical rather than genuine, the late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed several high-profile

forest conflicts. Also in 1990, after massive capital investments and a period of sustained

growth, the country plunged into severe recession. In the wake of economic disorder in the

former Soviet Union and the impacts of changes in the German economy subsequent to

reunification, Finland suddenly had to deal with unprecedented unemployment. To keep the

export industry moving, the currency, the markka, was allowed to float, effectively reducing

its purchasing power. In the economic crisis changes in environmental administration

continued, but now spurred more by efforts at cost saving and improved efficiency than as a

beacon of progressive eco-aware politics.

Through the early 1990s new conditions in domestic politics were combined with

continued international imperatives for environmental protection consolidated in the UNCED

process in Rio in 1992. Despite the general waning of concern for environmental politics

world-wide after Rio, Finland enthusiastically answered calls to renew forest policies and

several high-level conferences on the subject were later convened in Helsinki. Ministries and

the Forest Research Institute publicised the input of Finland as a world leader in forest

management as well as the forest industries.

Given that the forest industry really has created prosperity and that Finland has appeared to

be an economically and socially homogenous place until now, the hegemony of the forest

sector has seemed natural, in both the good and the bad. From the early days of this century

the unpleasant smell of pulp mills has been shrugged off with the quip that 'money smells'.

Until the new kinds of conflicts of the 1980s, the specifics of the relationship between forest-

products industries and socio-economic and political decision making were hardly apparent.

Donner-Amnell makes an excellent case for an effectively Foucaultian regime of discipline

where slogans such as 'Finland lives off the forest' would do as such for an argument for

continuing business-as-usual. Finns have not needed to be told to invest in forestry, for their

very identity throughout independence has been predicated on the importance of forests. Now

the importance of ecological, economic and social sustainability - Rio's legacy - as well as the

difficulty of practising them, are being turned into something that Finns take for granted.

Activists may be harsh critics of the administration and of forest products companies, but the

direction of desired change throughout natural resource politics is clear: environmentalism

equals progress.

On modern ways of knowing

Arguments for conservation are based on biological and ecological expertise, progressively

improving upon old knowledge, are as modern as forest science, even if interviewees claim

that environmental activism is anti-modern or even postmodern. If it is modernity that has led

to the contemporary sense of urgency, then it matters to environmentalists what parts of their

project reinforce helplessness, or, equally importantly, create exclusions and violence. On

the other hand, the denigrating statements of some politicians and forest professionals to the

effect that activists are predominantly misguided youths who will overcome their romantic

impulses with age, seem to stem from their impetus to control. Since it is modern ways of

knowing that still count in politics, it is significant that environmentalism can be characterised

as misguided romanticism. A social science approach illustrates how environmentalisms need

not be either 'rationalist' or 'romantic'. Indeed the possibility that they might be significant for

bringing contemporary societies out of epistemological habits that harden these kinds of

unhelpful dichotomies and fall victim to the "addictive narcotic of transcendental foundations"

as Haraway has put it (Haraway 1997:22), is worth pursuing.

What can be known and what can be done about the state of the world? The globe is a

concrete and irreducible reality after all. The modern impulse is to seek to know it in order

control it. The idiom that best captures this urge to know and control is that of scientific

research. One result of this is the recurrent call for ever more research that holds up political

decision making. No wonder since scientific research embodies many moral commitments that

sustain democratic societies, such as objectivity, openness, reliance on numerical

representation and a certain humility in the face of brute facts (Porter 1995). Two aspects of

broadly scientific ways of knowing the world are relevant to understanding how influential

conversation about forests today has taken the shapes it has. The first is the use of maps and

other schematic representations. The second feature is the apparent neutrality, or lack of

cultural or political commitments in the scientific pursuit of knowledge.

Maps and statistics operate as disembodied and contestable pieces of information whose

accuracy is always open to debate. In practice, despite activists' pride in knowing forests in a

way that could be described as highly personal and unmediated by technology or

intellectualism - and notwithstanding the high value they place privately on this - much of the

consequential action takes place well beyond the actual forests, in places where knowledge is

produced, represented and contested. Such a situation both relies on and reproduces the

separation of the real world and its representations, in ways that appear thoroughly

inevitable. However, creating order as images, relying on visual metaphors, emerged

historically together with quite specific techniques of government in which knowledge was

power, and where what could not be made visible could not count as knowledge. This process

itself created the separation of the real world from mere representation. A distinction could then

be made between true representations and erroneous ones.

Timothy Mitchell provides one of the clearer analyses of this hallmark of modernity. He

elegantly describes how the use of plans makes the world appear to the observer as a

relationship between picture and reality. At the same time corporal discipline can be established

and the total environment, which in Mitchell's example is colonial Egypt in the late 19th

century, can be transformed into "a place [...] of continuous supervision and control, of tickets

and registration papers, of policing and inspection" (1988:97). Everything has, or should

have, its place. The notion of frameworks - the urban plan, the map, the school curriculum,

any underlying structure - makes the world something to be managed through knowing the

relationships that obtain between things. The mechanics of fixing relationships through

representing them and, more importantly, keeping them under constant administrative

surveillance, created a distinctive appearance of order, one which positioned the observing

subject in a separate place from the observed object. It is the picture or image which is

immediate and available to the observer, but being only a representation it is merely secondary,

whilst the world itself is prior.

Foundationalism and the issue of the relationship between a thing and its sign have long

been the focus of philosophical investigations and they may seem like trivial preoccupations,

but the question has important consequences for living with an ecological crisis. The

foundationalism symbolised by science has provided the moderns with a Natural Order of

Things separated from what are considered merely social preoccupations. This produced a

remarkable confidence, but this now seems to be crumbling, leaving predicaments uneasily

dubbed 'post'- or 'dis'-something, as in post-industrial or disillusioned. The politics of

environmental protection, however, still largely works on the principles that have given

modern people a sense that they are privileged in having better access than others to the real

world of things - and of course some are more privileged than others. This hierarchy depends

on the division between the conceptual and the material involved in experiencing the world as a

picture (Mitchell 1988: 60). The separation of presentation and representation means that the

latter can be fixed so as to establish a hierarchy of truths. To return to Finnish representations

of forests, the objectivity of decades of official statistics is still politically more powerful than

the mere subjectivity of a wander in the woods.

What environmentalists have done is to make it their task to question what figures and

what facts might remain outside the statistical record that could nonetheless be of consequence.

In creating order, in tracing maps and calculating averages, what elements of reality have been

rendered invisible? Environmentalists pursue efforts to produce, literally, a fuller picture.

Species of no commercial interest that had been rendered invisible are now being re-

incorporated into images of what a forest should be. They proclaim that a biological

understanding of forests is a more complete picture and also better science than what the

utilitarianism of industrial forestry can produce.

In legitimating their claims, both environmentalists and research organisations like the

Forest Research Institute rely on shared principles of knowledge production which characterise

public understandings of what science ought to be. They enable two fundamental claims to be

made. First, that data processed in controlled and rigorous conditions by competent

practitioners are valid. Second, that these data are always open to improvement - criticism and

openness being crucial aspects of their work. This, paradoxically, serves to demonstrate that

science is not dogma but is still the best available form of knowledge about nature. It is

authoritative and yet democratic.

However, to think about a thing called Science evokes a plethora of associations and

signals a huge class of practices whose internal differentiation needs to be kept in mind. Given

that the "growth of science has to a large degree involved the replacement of nature by human

technologies" (Porter 1995: 16) the notion of technoscience better captures the pursuits of the

late twentieth century than simply science. Not only is most research justified by its

usefulness, but the production of scientific facts is in reality indistinguishable from the

construction of the often expensive and elaborate technologies that enable their

observation/creation. If science did once mirror nature, now technoscience claims to speak for

a world of its own creation, one of humans, nonhumans and hybrids of both and, of course,

of standards and calculations.

The last three decades have produced a sizeable body of work that has both empirically

and theoretically established an understanding that setting scientific norms, what it is to be a

normal specimen, be it a forest, a plant or a human being, involves moral and political

commitments. More general critiques of modernity (Foucault 1979, Mitchell 1988, Latour

1993) have shown how the academic enterprise as a privileged form of producing knowledge

has been at the heart of legitimating certain types of normalcy at the expense of others. These

'Others' frequently enough have been colonial subjects. In colonial encounters, practices that

are now unhesitatingly considered mistakes if not crimes, were regularly committed in the

name of scientific progress. In public debate it is above all its claim both to ahistoricity and

progression towards improvement through time, as well as its more obvious appeals to power

to effect material change, that is invoked on behalf of abstract science as a transparent mirror of

immutable nature. New knowledge improves upon old knowledge as a matter of course

(Hobart 1993).

Such hegemonic power still operates with vigour in places where so-called development

transforms the world into something more rational and better, by adapting it to the demands of

various forms of standardised technomanagerial control and capitalist markets. These operate

together with the epistemological categories and processes that naturalise institutionalised

inequalities, scarcity and desire for possession, making contestation appear futile, misguided

or even mad. Whilst it is relatively easy to fault other sciences and other times for such

complicity, there is still work to be done in understanding how these legacies continue to

constitute what counts as nature today (Willems-Braun 1997).

In the forest debates, the science of ecology functions as the key to nature but the

prominence of science in the environmental domain is not just a reflection of the ways science

and nature are entangled. The ideal principles of scientific knowledge parallel many salient

features of the culture of progress or modernity, particularly the high prestige of objectivity

(Porter 1995) and its confidence in its own order and certainty (Mitchell 1988). In this idiom

errors and mistakes are attributed to temporary human failings or to cultural distortion so that

contradictory or ambiguous statements about nature can be explained away as expressions of

bias. The notion of unbiased science supports modern society's demands for clear

demarcations between truths and falsehoods, facts and fictions. As Latour has argued (1993),

the boundaries erected to support the frameworks of legitimate knowledge are constantly

crossed despite delusions that the world has been brought to order. Constant work is needed to

sustain the sense that 'we' the moderns are different from 'them' the premoderns, and that

humans are separate from nonhumans. This work is more necessary in the task of making

sense of life, than it is for living it. But of course, since environmental politics is acted out as

competition between knowledges this intellectualising is ever present in public debate.

One of the most assiduously policed boundaries is that between the natural world and the

human world or that between Society and Nature, the very division paralleled in the way the

world as picture makes the human an observing and acting subject and the environment a

passive object. This separation allows the former to control the latter. It is reinforced each time

subjectivity is made to stand for fickleness or lack of rigour, and objectivity for constancy and

reliability. It has also sustained the anthropological project insofar as culture has been studied

as the conventional and therefore humanly constructed form of adaptation to pre-given

environmental constraints (Ingold 1992: 39). The important thing is that these modern

knowledge practices have been confident enough to operate as if they themselves were eternal

and enduring, free of culture as an expression of values or moral and political commitments,

the inevitable outcome of a teleological schema.

This applies to the social disciplines as well as to the natural sciences. As long as social

analysis focuses on clearly identifiable 'others', be they distant in space or predicament -

savage tribes, the poor, or any sub-culture - it can easily treat their ways of ordering the world

as beliefs or cosmologies contrasted with the dispassionate and objective intellectual

framework of the sciences. The culture of progress and productivity itself, where academic

research is at home, escapes closer scrutiny. Disagreements about facts either constitute a

temporary but resolvable dilemma or are treated as expressions of underlying incompatible

social agendas. Put another way, explanation stops where common sense begins. Appealing to

'common sense' is one successful way of (dis)missing or bolstering otherwise unexplainable

views, but its ability to do so depends on an uncontrollable mass of previously constituted

facts. Hence an anthropology that is not ready to grant special privileges to moderns, calls for

common sense itself to be subjected to deconstruction and historicising.

As with 'primitive beliefs' common sense is best conceptualised as an expression of

commitment to a community. Clifford Geertz called for common sense to be attended to as a

cultural system even in the face of its infuriating slipperiness, because at the same time as it

operates through affirming that "its tenets are immediate deliverances of experience, not

deliberated reflections upon it" (Geertz 1983: 75), it still provides very contradictory lessons.

But sharing common sense, not needing to explain things, is a good definition of community.

Common sense operates best when its history is eclipsed, when the world and not society

is its authority. The same can be said of technoscience which, furthermore has unmistakable

power to transform things. In practice, technoscience for Finnish publics slips easily into

common sense, sometimes known as 'peasant reason'. This evokes the imagined peasant life

that underpins Finns' identities; apparently egalitarian, individualist, hard working and free of

the frills of sophisticated culture. In a sense Finns think of themselves as paradigmatic

moderns, unaffected by the distorting lenses of culture, closer to the really real world of nature

than others. There is an interesting isomorphism between such explicit national cultural values

and the self vindication of science which is that they both deny, or at least seek to minimise,

the effects of culture. I wish to argue that this is part of the reason why biology and ecology

continue to be successful as political strategies for environmentalism in Finland.

Making use of nature and culture, categories and processes

To the extent that the forestry profession's behaviour is seen to be biased by explicit political

and economic interests in favour of the paper and pulp industry, its trustworthiness suffers.

By contrast, ecology like biology more broadly, seeks to operate as a politically neutral and

thus virtuous pursuit. It mirrors the full complexity of life and is committed to its subject

matter from a love of 'life' rather than selfish, instrumental or power-driven motives. Yet, as

feminist scholarship in particular has argued (Jordanova 1980, Haraway 1997) the life

sciences have never been a politically neutral enterprise. "Organic rank and stage of culture

from primitive to civilized were at the heart of evolutionary biology, medicine and

anthropology. The existence of progress, efficiency, and hierarchy were not in question

scientifically" (Haraway 1997: 233). The attacks on the straight, white male have not been

capricious; as overseers of legitimate knowledge they created and controlled a framework of

norms and categories that became not just a model of, but a model for, normalcy.

The sciences have not been politically innocent or acultural, but this is not to say that they

have been wrong. This needs to be highlighted because my exposition so far leaves me

suspended in a tension between the impulse to pursue a critique of activism as being equally

self-delusional as the post-enlightenment pursuits against which it claims to protest - the use of

scientific knowledge as an ostensibly apolitical tool - and an admiration of environmentalists as

imaginative critics of a shared predicament. This tension cannot and need not be resolved.

Doing so would require either the god trick of a view from nowhere or a dishonest

commitment from myself to the notion of environmentalism as a reified thing. Demanding that

it be resolved may lead to moral as well as intellectual commitments that would perhaps be

better avoided.

Critiques of modernity must pay serious attention to how power operates historically and

situationally. Much of the writing on colonial encounters and institutionalised inequalities

risks overplaying the equation of power with evil and de-emphasises the capacity of scientific

methods to provide services that people want. As with any work that treats modernity or post-

enlightenment life, the reader, if not the writer, brings an ideological position to her task,

resulting - for example - in a simplifying dichotomy between the bad West or North, and the

downtrodden Third World or South. To contest hegemonic power systems and to question

taken-for-granted epistemologies more forcefully in the long term, the possibility must be kept

open that the powerful sometimes get it right and that the wretched might have more than their

lack of power as an ally. Furthermore, as Theodore Porter puts it in a not dissimilar context,

"not everything that seems wrong is therefore true" (1995: 224)!

The structural position of Finnish environmentalists makes them a good example of the

kinds of groups who zig zag between power and lack of it, between parochialism and

cosmopolitanism. If most activists do not totally renounce modernity, they certainly consider

enlightenment thinking to be misguided in its hubris and they constantly refer to the self

delusions of contemporary powers that be. Sometimes in public rhetoric, but more often in

private and in response to interview questions, they talk about the impossibility of knowing

enough about the world to truly control it as well as of the political implications of the uses of

technoscience in the service of efforts to control. They discuss civilisation in ironic tones, and

note that the world can continue quite happily without it, in fact without people. Drawing on

what they know about geological, biological and politico-economic time-scales, they suggest

that one crucial mistake of modernity has been its emphasis on economic growth and its

profligate use of natural resources. I need not elaborate further on these sometimes very

personal motives for environmentalism, to make the point that much of activism constitutes a

particularly vibrant intellectual as well as material practice.

To do justice to the way environmental activism creates, deconstructs and deploys models

of the world and ultimately effects change, an approach is called for that would recognise the

importance of categories and classifications but resist solidifying them into supposedly pure or

essentialised entities.

If there is an epochal tenor to our times, some of it lies in the intensifying critiques of

either-or schemas of thought and action, schemas which establish hierarchical oppositions and

reduce understandings of phenomena such as environmental activism to expressions of fickle

ideologies. To return to Finland's forest debates, I argue that they give flesh to the theoretical

contributions of the writers whose works I have used such as Bruno Latour (1993), Marilyn

Strathern (1992), and Donna Haraway (1997) who effectively argue that nature and culture

have imploded into each other. To characterise critics of Finland's forest sector as either

hopeless romantics or narrow minded in their scientism, would be as anachronistic as claiming

that nature is the world 'out there' and culture is human-made symbols.

Within the framework that separates nature from culture, environmentalism is a case of

nature needing to be protected by culture (Strathern 1992). This is so, as long as technoscience

is recognised as a cultural pursuit. I have argued that it is. But its political effectiveness

depends on it operating as if it were not cultural but transparent and universal. The choices and

judgements that produce technoscience, including new knowledge in the life sciences, are

erased from the record so as to leave an image of life as it really is.

If ecology, a close relation of the science of life itself i.e. biology, is the science of

living systems and how they interconnect, then the globe is the master ecosystem and Nature is

another shorthand for it. If humans are the practitioners of ecology, then the pursuit is

imperfect because humans are liable to err, and in any case, only capable of dealing with so

much detail at once. Few participants seriously question the privileged status of science in

discussing nature, let alone the imperative to protect nature.

For activists biology is species, genes, the 'facts of life' and much more. The notion of

ecology that activists appear to hold dear combines the erasure of cultural judgements in

practising science with an emphasis on the affective aspect of knowing nature. Not only is old-

growth surveying a skill that can only be learned by being inside a forest, it is also a way to

knowing nature as mysterious and humbling. Activists' claim to unmediated knowledge

through direct experience of authentic forests, with all the rewards this brings - appreciating

intimately and emphatically the power and the beauty of ancient forests, realising the

impossibility of accurate description of the full complexity of nature, not needing to rely on

second hand information - proceeds quite happily alongside acceptable conceptualisations of

science as dispassionate. The significance of the narrative Finns tell themselves that they are

close to nature gives added support to activists' uses of ecology and biology, and to how they

seek genuine understanding of nature. I mean the way that an unmediated relationship

between people and nature is the ideal towards which they strive, failing only in so far as they

are mere humans.

I hinted above to one peculiarity of the situation that merits further attention. The power of

activists' claim to privileged knowledge seems to reside not just in enlightenment

understandings of good science as more encompassing knowledge, the fuller picture, but in

something specifically Finnish. Recall the analysis of the separation of representations from

the real world. Apart from producing a hierarchy of truths, another effect of this

conceptualisation of order is the resultant drive towards authenticity (a Finnish virtue if there

ever was one). The self portrait of Finns as peculiarly close to nature almost amounts to a

national culture of no culture. Finnish culture claims a genuine and visceral experience of the

world which the respectability and power of technoscience makes eminently export-worthy.

The entry of Finnishness into the story introduces one more thorny problem for the

politics of nature, namely the significance of place. Forest questions in Finland are particularly

national concerns, where action upon the land clearly constitutes appropriation of its yield. The

very existence of the Finnish state as a sovereign territory has been dependent, or been made

dependent on constructing the landscape as intensively managed forests. Already at the end of

the 19th century the emerging Finnish intelligentsia - composers (Sibelius), painters (Gallen-

Kallela), and historians (Uno Harva) - established icons of Finnishness such as Koli mountain

(now part of a national park) at the same time as nascent financial institutions established the

conditions for expanding the forest products industries. Forestry continues to be evoked in the

oddest of connections, for example in the name of an arts program on national radio which

could be translated as "Get on with it you lumberjacks!" The hegemony of the forest sector has

been remarkably resistant to challenges not merely because of its economic significance, but

because national identity has been co-constructed in such an intimate relationship with the

materiality of the landscape. National pride and powerful affective commitments are ubiquitous

in forest debates. Environmentalists put them to use through emphasising clean nature and

progressive politics as quintessentially Finnish virtues.

Despite foot-dragging and some real antagonism towards environmentalism, ecological

sustainability as a significant cultural concern for Finns has already been the driving motive

behind many changes. The present state of flux and conflict may not come to a speedy end,

and much pain, particularly related to unemployment and set backs in achieved legislation on

gender equality, no doubt lies ahead for Finland. I make the tentative suggestion, aware of my

own complicity, that the particular type of modernity that the Finnish nation has created in the

last two hundred years may make it easier for Finns than for some others to imagine alternative

ways of living in the future that are not as centred on increasing consumption and continued

economic growth that ignored the different temporalities of natural phenomena. The nation's

experience of dependency on forests as a renewable natural resource suggests possibilities for

appreciating a cosmological schema - to use an anthropologising phrase - in which the material

and the conceptual were never as starkly separated in people's lives as the copious amounts of

survey data and disembodied information generated by forest experts might suggest.

Old-growth surveys are a way of making it matter how the nonhuman fares in tomorrow's

Finland. I wish to suggest that activism is a form of living out a commitment to a community

and a place. The social relations that appear to matter here encompass relations between both

humans and nonhumans. In so far as social disciplines that engage in metatheoretical debates

are concerned, my effort echoes a question succinctly put by Bruno Latour, "[c]an anyone

imagine a study that would treat the ozone hole as simultaneously naturalized, sociologized and

deconstructed?" (1993: 6). It is an effort of recombination according to context, of society and

nature, mind and body, form and process as well as a recognition that choosing what is the

relevant context is itself a political act. In the work of Tim Ingold, there are the beginnings of a

helpful model for the exercise, specifically related to how people might experience their

phenomenal environments.

Ingold's work on human-environment relations (1992, 1995), has stressed the importance

of practical engagement with the environment for producing effectual knowledge. He stresses

the idea, familiar from a broadly speaking phenomenological philosophy (Ingold mentions

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) that life is not the "revelation of pre-existent form but the very

process wherein form is generated and held in place" and takes as his point of departure the

organism within its environment (1995: 58). The same processes of coping with the

environment through practical engagement with it apply as much to humans as to nonhumans,

for instance in the ways they build their homes, learn about and alter the objects that they use

in the process and in the fact that they remain locked in processes of mutual constitution with

each other. It is Ingold's introduction of nonhuman agents as co-constructors of the world into

a social science framework that resonates with the Finnish case. Such nonhuman agents are

regularly treated in anthropological texts on hunting and gathering societies but their effects

are patently apparent elsewhere also, even if they rarely become foci of explicit attention.

When environmentalists and others claim to fear events in nature, the social scientific

impulse is to assume they are reifying nature, attributing it with intentional agency, when what

they really are concerned with are social relations. Instead I want to keep in mind the potential

significance of Ingold's idea that in certain respects, humans and animals, and consequently

social and biological relations, are not that distinct. This recognises the importance of

nonhumans, mute as they may be, as constituents in the social relations that animate the actions

of many forest activists.

Activists and the Forest Research Institute have more in common than they might wish to

admit. Activists want to protect nature for its own sake, forest scientists have long spoken of

their work as "improving forests". Both rely on an acultural understanding of science to

legitimate their projects. The agendas of government and industry institutions are easy to fault

for bias, but what about well-meaning and thoroughly informed activists who claim to speak

on behalf of nature and the whole world? I contend that justifications of political agendas

based on science, and especially biology as the science of the full complexity of the web of

life, can never be innocent. Stripping research of sinister, or simply exclusionary economic

biases does not result in a 'pure' science, an undistorted picture or a reality out there which it is

possible to know and to manage in an optimum fashion. Social studies of science have made it

amply clear that science is profoundly a social construction, which is not to say that it is false

or imagined. It merely recognises the constitutive role of contingency, choice, political power

and cultural convention in an area that historically presented itself as a form of knowledge that

transcends politics and culture. It is this transcendence that continues to animate the uses to

which science as a mirror of nature is put in environmentalist discourses in Finland. Ignoring

the impossibility of a view from nowhere, it hubris is still palpable.

Whereas an exercise in social theory can explore with impunity the differences made to an

analysis by the different perspectives adopted by the researcher, and stress point of view as an

issue in itself (Strathern 1991), policy making and the practical task of political activism do not

enjoy this luxury. It would seem that voluntary organisations, particularly ones with poor

access to the media, can ill afford to make mistakes of any kind, since correcting them is so

costly to them. In contrast, the mistakes and inconsistencies of those currently in power appear

less susceptible to damage through changes of heart. This is born out by the ramifications of

the study on employment losses to conservation in the North that I mentioned earlier. The

research organisation's provisional statements had the effect, from some perspectives

(probably at least those of the unemployed) of constructing a fact out of what might previously

have been mere common sense to them. For environmentalists it has meant a struggle to undo

the 'fact', but also to undo the structure of the debate that pits ecology against economy.

The intellectual projects of modern women and men are a curious but hardly innocent

mixture of criticism of predecessors on the one hand, and commitment to familiar categories

and the social relationships they accompany on the other. The areas of agreement and

disagreement in the forest debates illustrate that a conceptualisation of Nature as ideally free of

the pollution of humanity remains strong. This allows, for the time being, the conversation to

continue as one of intellectual supremacy in the shadow, nevertheless, of unequal access to the

raw material of the knowledge deemed necessary to producing an understanding that carries

political weight. Activists' appreciation of the significance of their phenomenological

experiences of forests is not used as a political tool. Their personal character sits uneasily in a

conversation that is premised on finding the common view, creating the picture that can be

agreed upon. This is looked for in efforts to produce objectivity as the view from everywhere.

Given activists' political and economic weaknesses, their success in using strategies based on

ecological arguments suggests they will continue in the same vein.

Undoing the dichotomies that sustain the competition for the most accurate representations

is not going to be easy. However, activism does provide enough provocation for society to

make talking about problems with modernity an increasingly acceptable pursuit. All the while

activists use their own resources as they think they best can, and continue to proclaim the

significance of their expertise.

I argue, however, that drawing on ecology and biology obfuscates many issues of

significance to people both in Finland and far away where Finnish environmentalism has its

effects, in quite systematic ways. It even brings people - including some Finnish

environmentalists - to claim that they do not care for the fate of people on the planet, since

what matters is nature. As an anthropologist my immediate question is whose fate, whose

nature? As I see it, biology is crucial to the way self-styled radicals avoid asking these

questions. Biology emerges out of our understandings of self-regeneration in Nature, and it is

clear that Finns are having some difficulty in maintaining a separation between biology and

nature. Although nature is a concept that is used as if it were one thing, it covers several areas

with the capacity to recall each other in different contexts: nature as the underlying force that

animates the world shades into underlying features that shape people - human nature - which in

turn can elicit notions of the naturalness of the body and the naturalness of certain ways of

behaving - or indeed the naturalness of periodic forest conflicts. The concept of nature, so

malleable and evocative, glides easily through all these domains and more.

Yet I imagine that most of us find it preposterous and perverse at some level to deconstruct

nature as a foundational category the same way we might for example deconstruct and then

reconstruct history. That this resistance to complete deconstruction of the category of nature is

so strong suggests that there are moral and political commitments at work. It might be useful to

accept their ubiquity and to get on with the work of tracing some of the networks responsible

for constructing the world that we now increasingly experience as nature-culture. The fact that

this will be historical work on the co-constitution of the conceptual and the material signals that

the illusion of a nature separate from culture is fast fading. The really difficult task lies in

considering the consequences of all this in time in the other direction, in what is made of the

future.

Appendix: Literature in Finnish

Donner-Amnell, Jakob (1995) 'Puulla parempiin paiviin ja kestavaan kehitykseen? -

Metsasektori suomalaisessa talous- ja ymparistokeskustelussa laman vuosina',

Massa, Ilmo & Rahkonen, Ossi (eds): Riskiyhteiskunnan talous: Suomen

ekologinen modernisaatio, Helsinki: Gaudeamus.

Holopainen, Viljo; Timonen, Erkki (1995) Metsä Vastaa: Suomi - Metsätalouden vai

suojeluvallan maa?, Helsinki: Otava.

Jaakko Pöyry Consulting Oy (1996) 'Pohjois-Suomen ja Pohjois-Karjalan vanhojen metsien

suojelun kustannukset'.

Kuisma, Markku (1993) Metsäteollisuuden Maa: Suomi, metsät ja kansainälinen järjestelmä

1620-1920, Helsinki: SHS.

Lehtinen, Ari. and Rannikko, Pertti eds. (1994) Pasilasta Vuotokselle:

Ympäristökammpailujen uusi aalto, Tampere: Gaudeamus.

Lehtinen, Ari Aukusti (1994) 'Satumetsiä ja metsäsatuja', Metsä ja metsänviljaa,

Kalevalaseuran vuosikirja 73, Helsinki: SKS.

Massa, Ilmo (1994) Pohjoinen luonnonvalloitus: Suunnistus ymparistohistoriaan Lapissa ja

Suomessa, Helsinki: Libri Academici/Gaudeamus Kirja.

Mikkeli, Heikki (1992) 'Metsäturkki ja sen jurot parturit: Näkemyksiä metsäluonnon ja

kansansluonteen suhteesta 1800-1900 luvulla', Historiallinen Aikakauskirja, 90

vuosikerta: 200-215.

Sairinen, Rauno et al. (1996) Suomalaiset ja Ympäristöpolitiikka, (English summary available:

Finns and environmental policy), Tilastokeskus tutkimus 217, Helsinki.

Toropainen, Mikko. (1994) 'Voiko metsäsektori nostaa kansantalouden lamasta?',

Toropainen, M. and Mäkkeli, P. (eds) Metsäsektori myllerryksessä,

METLA:n tiedonantoja 500.

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* This research was carried out with the generous support of the Emil Aaltonen Foundation and

the Ella and Georg Ehrnroth Foundation, Finland. Thanks to Emery Roe and the Center for

Sustainable Resource Development (CSRD) for providing the right work environment. I have

received valuable feed back on presentations of this material at CSRD, at the meeting of the

American Anthropological Association, and at the Department of Geography graduate workshop

in Joensuu, Finland. David Anderson, James McCarthy and Jeff Romm have provided valuable

written comments.

Apart from the extensive reports by the Finnish Forest Research Institute, the last decade has

seen a significant growth in research that has been critical of the hegemony of the forest sector.

Some of the recent literature in Finnish can be found in the Appendix. Only references to works

in English will be given in the text and footnotes. For a historical account of clashes between

conservation and industry, see for example Lehtinen (1991), for a summary of an example of a

community study see Kortelainen (1993), and for changes in the political economy of the forest

industries see Raumolin (1990).

At the time of writing (June 1997) proponents of further conservation measures are amazed at

recent statements by the Minister of Finance, who bemoaned the loss of the last remaining

productive forests to bugs and cockroaches, naming parasites that predominantly live inside

human dwellings. His statement was welcomed by some as a strong and sensible contribution to

open political debate in response to prevarication in the face of media attention on behalf of

environmental measures.

Humphreys (1996).

Hyttinen and Kola (1995).

This way of identifying the 'problem' is informed by the legacy of Foucault but also of more

straightforwardly anthropological concerns. See for example Geertz (1983) and more recently

Descola and Pálsson (1996) and Povinelli (1995).

Sairinen (1996).

These include official records compiled by government agencies, newspaper and journal

articles, NGOs' publicity materials as well as further written sources, such as office memos, not

meant as such for public use.

The final report also gives the same impression but potential gains from conservation are more

prominent. Jaakko Pöyry (1996).

These phrases have become increasingly ubiquitous as government, industry and communities

dependent upon it have seized on its usefulness for their agendas. Environmental NGOs have

quickly learned to include them in their rhetorics. For lack of space I shall not expand further in

this interesting, but so far mostly rhetorical turn in the debates.

Sairinen (1996).

Lehtinen (1991:79).

Lehtinen (1991).

Häkli (1997 forthcoming).

My source is the work of Väliverronen on the role of the media in these debates. So far this

work is unpublished in English.

For example the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forest in Europe in 1993, and the

Intergovernmental Seminar on Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management in

1996 were both held in Helsinki. Finland is also home of the recently established European

Forestry Institute.

In Finnish, Donner-Amnell (1991).

The role of Finnish forestry expertise all over the world is very important and the effects of

Finland's domestic concerns will be of consequence to forestry practices elsewhere.

From interviews as well as newspaper reports.

Heidegger's essay, 'The Age of the World Picture' has been influential on this point in social

theory, (1977).

Mitchell (1988).

A little defensiveness might be in order here. Critiques of modernity that highlight the power

of frameworks to effect explanations are not to be read as nihilism or an abdication of political

responsibility. On the contrary, they point to the irreducibility of intellectual pursuits to either

merely material or merely conceptual consequences, by making the connections between social

hierarchies and material transformations an object of explicit concern.

See Latour (1987, 1993) and Haraway (1997) for analyses of technoscience and the hybrids of

humans and nonhumans, and Porter (1995) for an account of how the world is transformed into

something calculable.

This includes most works that analyse science as a primarily social phenomenon, for example

Bloor (1976), Woolgar (1988), Porter (1995).

These have to be highly abstract labels for the moment. Forestry education and practice is in

fact rapidly changing. Also, numerous paradigms of ecological thought inform conservation

practices. These observations do not affect my argument, which is to note how the ideal types of

these practices operate in public debates.

See Haraway (1997) for a discussion of genetics and biology as master tropes.

This phrase is from Sharon Traweek, and put to further use by Haraway (1997: 22-).

See Ingold (1996) for a critical discussion.