CBEES Environmental Humanities Seminar (Envhumseminar) with Kati Lindström, Associate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm

Speaker: Dr. Kati Lindström, Associate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Discussant: Dr. Ekaterina Tarasova, postdoctoral scholar, Södertörn University.

Abstract: Science, technology and the environment are convenient to study within the framework of a single nation-state. However, such methodological nationalism is deceptive, since we exclude the broader regional and global connections that these phenomena have. A power plant is not just a power plant; it is a part of a wider envirotechnical system that includes the nuts and bolts, the surrounding landscape, the forest clearings left behind by the trees felled for power poles, and the imagination of what is a liveable life envisioned by the people who built it. What does this observation mean for the study of environmentalism? Inspired by the great street demonstrations and environmental NGOs in the West in the second half of the 20th century, we tend to look for environmental protest on the streets, in front of the power stations. In a dictatorship, however, this approach would not work. Does the absence of street protests mean then that there was no environmentalism in the Soviet Union before the late 1980s? I argue that if we are to take the notion of an ‘envirotechnical system’ seriously, we must search for the manifestations of environmentalism by tracing the parts of complex envirotechnical systems based on their material interconnectedness. In the Soviet context, we need to look inside the various official institutions, especially those involved in different envirotechnical systems that compete for the same resources. Tracing the nuclear power plant allegedly planned on Lake Võrtsjärv in Soviet Estonia in the early 1970s, we find opposition to the construction of the plant primarily in the fisheries and land reclamation offices, as well as food and drinking water systems associated with the lake. Similar opposition can also be found in Western Europe and Japan, where nuclear power plants were initially opposed by farmers and fishermen who feared thermal pollution of water bodies, but whose institutional struggles were overshadowed by later street protests. I argue that mapping envirotechnical systems is a useful methodological tool to uncover hidden environmentalism, departing from the material and institutional linkages, rather than present-day political structures.

Kati Lindström is a scholar of environmental humanities with a background in semiotics, literature, anthropology, environmental history and geography and trained at the University of Kyoto (Japan) and University of Tartu (Estonia). She holds a docent degree in the history of science, technology and environment, with specialization environmental humanities and uses of history from KTH Royal Institute of Technology where she works as a researcher. Her work deals with questions of why some landscapes, living beings or cultural phenomena are considered a resource and other singled out for protection? How and why does protection work? How do some places become selected for industrial development? These questions are pursued in a variety of settings in Japan, Estonia and Antarctica from 1890s onwards. Lindström is the founding member and a long term board member of KAJAK, Estonian Centre for Environmental History, and the main organiser of the Baltic Environmental Humanities and Social Science (BALTEHUMS) conferences. She is the Regional Representative for the Baltic States of the European Society of Environmental History, member of the Polar Research Committee of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, ICOMOS Eesti and an expert member at International Polar Heritage Committee.