This article investigates the 1974 Nordic Environmental ProtectionConvention. It shows that the ulterior motives for such a conventionwere Nordic ambitions to regulate and reduce transboundary pollution originating outside of the Nordic region. Emphasizing theinter-organizational dynamics between institutionalized Nordiccooperation and international organizations, it examines how theNordics drew on developments within international organizations and how they pursued their agenda of shaping international environmental law within the OECD. Ultimately, the article argues thatthe Nordic countries tried to create a model convention to beexported to and implemented at the international level with theaim of reducing transboundary pollution and establishing transnational responsibilities and accountabilities. By setting out this argument and shedding light on the first legally binding internationalconvention to address transboundary pollution with proceduralprinciples, the article breaks new ground on the history of Nordicenvironmental cooperation as well as on the development of international environmental law.
Nuclear-historical research at KTH is expanding! We are happy to announce that Melina Antonia Buns has joined us as a visiting post-doc researcher, based on a collaboration between NUCLEARWATERS, KTH’s Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment and The Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger. Melina was recently awarded a major research grant from the Norwegian Research Council, which will enable her to spend two years at KTH. The grant is linked to her project “Nuclear Nordics: Radioactive Waste Spatialities, Materialities and Societies in the Nordic Region, 1960s-1980s”. Read more about this exciting research endeavor at the website of the Norwegian Research Council.
Melina Antonia Buns at her new KTH office
Melina holds a BA in history, art history and Scandinavian studies from the University of Vienna, an MA in International and Global History and a PhD in history from the University of Oslo. In June 2021 she successfully defended her thesis “Green Internationalists: Nordic Environmental Cooperation, 1967-1988”. At KTH she will make use of her expertise in Nordic environmental history while moving into the nuclear-historical field.
Melina will present her research project “Nuclear Nordics” in the NUCLEARWATERS seminar series very soon. The seminar was originally scheduled for 26 January, but has been postponed. We will soon be back with a new date and time.
This text was originally published by Per Högselius on nuclearwaters.eu on 21 January 2022.
The Stockholm Archipelago Lectures are part of the public activities of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory and have been since 2012. It was initiated as an event that marks the presence of the EHL at the KTH Campus. This Monday we look forward to our 10th lecture by looking back in time, finishing off with the announcement of this year’s keynote speaker.
In September 2012 the historian and geographer David Lowenthal visited the Division to give a series of talks. They were entitled the Archipelago Lectures, referring in part to the Stockholm Archipelago, but also to David’s career long professional and personal interest in islands, in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, in the Isle of Man where he had a summer house, and elsewhere. (From: Sverker Sörlin in “Defining Humanities – Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH“Report 2017-2018)
The Archipelago lecture was the first major public event of the KTH Environmental Humanities Lab and has become an annual institution every fall. In the early years the lectures were held at the KTH Campus, but for the 2018 lecture with Amitav Gosh on “The Great Uprooting: Migration and Movement in the Age of Climate Change” we moved to central Stockholm and Kulturhuset Stadsteatern. The event was announced in one of Sweden’s largest morning papers, Dagens Nyheter, and attracted our biggest audience so far. A little over 100 people came to listen to Amitav Gosh.
In 2019 the Archipelago Lecture was organized in collaboration with the workers educational associations ABF and the independent opinion group Arenagruppen. “What should socialism mean in the 21st century? An ecofeminist view” with Nancy Fraiser attracted over 200 people, who came to ABF to listen. The lecture was filmed and also streamed online for the first time without us knowing that this would soon be our new normal. Former EHL researcher Roberta Biasillo writes in the Biennial report “Integrative Humanities from the years 2019 in and 2020” Nancy Fraser “engaged with the audience and with us well beyond the time of the talk – we all sat and stood together, we ate next to each other and shook our hands. One year later, on 25 November 2020, we found ourselves online and it was no coincidence that the talk was on ideas and practices of care, repair, and restitution as ways to ensure just living conditions on Earth.”
In the first year of the pandemic we went online and welcomed Achille Mbembe as our Archipelago keynote speaker. From his home in South Africa he gave the lecture “Reflections on Planetary Habitability”. This became one of the EHL’s and the Division’s most visited single events so far, with over 500 people streaming it in real time.
This year we are happy to announce Kathryn Yusoff as our keynote speaker. Kathryn is a professor of inhuman geography at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of the acclaimed book “A billion black anthropocenes or none“. So, mark your calendars and check your connection – becauseon December 1 at 4.30 PM CET we are ready to go online again for the next Archipelago lecture.
Lectures from the past
September 9, 2012
“Reflections on the Environmental Humanities”
David Lowenthal, Professor Emeritus of Geography, University College London
September 11, 2013
“The Meltdown of a High Arctic Hunting Community”
Kirsten Hastrup, Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
October 9, 2014
“Environmental Racism as State-Sanctioned Violence”
Laura Pulido, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California
November 2, 2015
“The humanities and global change research: relationships necessary, absent and possible”
Noel Castree, Professor of Geography, University of Manchester, England, and the University of Wollongong, Australia
October 27, 2016
“AlterLife in the Aftermath of Industrial Chemicals”
Michelle Murphy, Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto
October 5, 2017
“Connecting Dots in Toms River and Beyond”
Dan Fagin, award-winning author, and Professor of science journalism, New York University
September 26, 2018
“The Great Uprooting: Migration and Movement in the Age of Climate Change”
Amitav Ghosh, award-winning writer of historical fiction and non-fiction
October 7, 2019
“What should socialism mean in the 21st century? An ecofeminist view”
Nancy Fraiser, Professor, The New School for Social Research, New York
November 25, 2020
“Reflections on Planetary Habitability”
Achille Mbembe, Professor in History and Politics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
On this Friday, 20 August 2021, at 4pm Stockholm Time PhD-Candidate Dmitry V. Arzyutov will defend his dissertation with the title “Reassembling the Environmental Archives of the Cold War”. Dima’s opponent is Assistant Professor Bathsheba Demuth from Brown University in Providence, USA (State of Rhode Island). We are looking forward together with his supervisors Peder Roberts (Stavanger), Per Högselius (KTH) and Julia Lajus (St. Petersburg) to this major event in our division’s PhD-education.
If you want to join check out the official announcement including the Zoom-link here.
Abstract
To what extent the environmental history of the Arctic can move beyond the divide between Indigenous peoples and newcomers or vernacular and academic ways of knowing? The present dissertation answers this question by developing the notion of an environmental archive. Such an archive does not have particular reference to a given place but rather it refers to the complex network that marks the relations between paper documents and human and non-human agencies as they are able to work together and stabilise the conceptualisation of a variety of environmental objects. The author thus argues that the environment does not only contain information about the past but just like any paper (or audio and video) archive is able to produce it through the relational nature of human-environment interactions. Through the analysis of five case studies from the Russian North, the reader is invited to go through various forms of environmental archives which in turn embrace histories of a number of disciplines such as palaeontology, biology, anthropology, and medicine. Every case or a “layer” is presented here as a contact zone where Indigenous and academic forms of knowledge are not opposed to each other but, on the contrary, are able to interact and consequently affect the global discussions about the Russian Arctic. This transnational context is pivotal for all the cases discussed in the dissertation. Moreover, by putting the Cold War with its tensions between two superpowers at the chronological center of the present work, the author aims to reveal the multidimensionality of in situ interactions with, for instance, the paleontological remains or the traces of all-terrain vehicles and their involvement into broader science transnational cooperations and competitions. As a result, the heterogeneous archives allow us to reconsider the environmental history of the Russian North and the wider Arctic and open a new avenue for future research transcending the geopolitical and epistemic borders of knowledge production.
Abstract på svenska
I vilken grad kan en miljhöhistorisk analys av Arktis undvika klyftan mellan ursprungsfolk och nykomlingar, samt mellan folkliga och akademiska form för vetenskap? Avhandlingen svarar på denna fråga genom att utveckla begreppet ”miljöarkiv.” Ett sådant arkiv hänvisar inte till en särskild plats, men heller till et komplex nätverk som samlar ihop förhållande mellan dokument i papper och båda mänskliga och icke-mänskliga aktörskap. Tillsammans stabiliserar och konceptualiserer de ett antal miljöobjekten. Författaren argumenterar därför att miljö omfattar inte bara information om förtiden men liksom andra form för arkiv (antingen papper-baserat eller elektronisk) kan reproducera förtiden genom att belysa interaktioner mellan människor och natur. Genom fem case studier från det nordliga Ryssland bjudas läsaren på en tur av fem olika miljöarkiv som omfattar olika disciplinära traditioner, t. ex. paleontologi, biolog, antropologi, och medicin. Varje case eller ”lager” presenteras här som kontaktzon var ursprungliga och akademiska form för vetenskap inte nödvändigtvis står i opposition, men tvärtom påverkar varandra, och därmed får inflytelse över diskussioner om det ryska Arktis även på global nivå. Denna transnationella kontext är avgörande för alla cases i avhandlingen. Genom att sätta det kalla kriget i analysens centrum (kronologisk sett), med fokus på spänningarna mellan stormakterna, hoppas författaren att belysa de flerdimensionella interaktionerna mellan t. ex. paleontologiska fynd och spår från bandfordon och hur dessa interaktioner var kopplad till bredare frågor kring multinationella samarbete och konkurrens. En så heterogen uppfattning av arkivet öppnar för nye perspektiv på miljöhistorien av båda det ryska Arktis och Arktis set i sin helhet, samt öppna för nya forskningsfrågor som överskrider nuvarande geopolitiske och epistemologiska gränser innanför kunskapsproduktion.
Nuclear energy is a highly debated field and depending on the societal context usually either embraced or fully rejected. From an outsider position it sometimes seems as if there was no in between: you are either pro- or anti-nuclear. This does not solely apply to times of active nuclear energy generation, but it also affects the future and finding solutions for safe storage of nuclear waste. In today’s interview with Andrei Stsiapanau we will hear more about the nuclear debate in the former Soviet Union. Andrei is a guest in our Nuclearwaters project since January 2020 and he is a scholarship holder of the Swedish Institute Visby Scholarship Program for Senior Researchers. He researches how nuclear energy is being socially and politically debated in Russia, Belarus and Lithuania and he is especially interested in the politics of nuclear waste in Russia, Lithuania and Sweden.
Alicia Gutting: Andrei, could you please let us know what you have been working on in the past months?
Andrei Stsiapanau: During the last months I have been working on the nuclear waste management issues in Russia as well as in Lithuania and Sweden. When more and more nuclear facilities throughout the world enter the stage of decommissioning, it is becoming particularly urgent to find sustainable solutions to the issue of nuclear waste. The list of possible technical solutions for spent nuclear fuel and other types of waste include deep geological disposal after reprocessing (favoured in France, Japan, and UK); direct deep geological disposal (favoured in Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Germany, USA and Czech Republic); surface long-term storage (favoured in the Netherlands, Italy and Spain). Each of these solutions translates into different ways on how to communicate, classify and govern nuclear waste in a particular country.
My research is focusing on how nuclear waste issues are communicated in various techno-political contexts. While studying how nuclear waste issues are being negotiated with communities in Russia, I discovered that natural resources like clay are used within nuclear waste discourses to mitigate the risk of potential radioactive contamination. It was my starting point to investigate how natural resources are used in various discourses about nuclear waste to make it less dangerous and harmful for people and environments. In the cases of Lithuania and Sweden, I am investigating how, through awareness and information campaigns, risks associated with nuclear waste are mediated and mitigated to transform the hazardous nuclear objects into manageable waste.
AG: What role does clay play?
AS: According to numerous researches on the role of the natural barrier in the nuclear waste disposal system, clay as well as crystalline rock are considered as a retardation medium for radionuclides migration. The multi barrier protection within nuclear waste technology illustrates how natural barriers or the geology of the disposal site will retard or mediate for both fluid flow and radionuclides migration in case of the engineering layer decay. This kind of technical vision of the disposal process promotes the natural protection layer as a reliable tool for absorption and immobilization of radioactivity. Geological and chemical studies of clay rock in various sites in the United States, France, Belgium, Canada and Russia show that clay has a number of absorption properties valuable for immobilization of the radioactive elements in the geomedia in case of the technical barrier decay. Thus, clay has become employed as a part of the nuclear waste management process. It represents a tool for absorption, immobilization and confinement of radioactivity. Including clay in the whole process of the nuclear decommission and decontamination makes it possible to reconsider the role of natural resources and materials in nuclear waste technologies and multi-barrier protection discourses.
AG: Are there differences in the Swedish and the Lithuanian (political) approach?
AS: Nuclear waste management systems in Sweden and Lithuania are developing in the context of decommissioning and nuclear phase out but following different trajectories and guidelines. The final repository for short-lived radioactive waste located at Forsmark in the municipality of Östhammar started operating in 1988. Lithuania is only now entering the phase of the construction of the landfill repositories for low and medium radioactive waste, and the construction of the geological disposal is programmed for after 2045. The Swedish approach represents an advanced example of nuclear waste management, based on the long-term experience of scientific research, transparent decision-making and continued reliance on public opinion and participation. Some connections in sharing nuclear waste management technology and experience exist between these two Baltic Sea countries. The Swedish nuclear waste authority, SKB, has been involved in the assessment of the existing nuclear waste facilities at the Ignalina NPP site in Lithuania since the 1990s. Swedish nuclear research and governance institutions continue to contribute to the transfer of knowledge and expertise in nuclear waste management taking part in numerous joint international research projects (BEACON; EURAD).
AG: What role does environmentalism play in the debate?
AS: As the two countries are at different stages of implementation of nuclear waste programs, it illustrates different levels of public engagement in the site selection process and environmental impact assessment of the radioactive waste disposals. In Sweden environmental issues are at the core of the public debate and concerns about the nuclear waste management program and are involving various actors, from local communities to International NGOs and leading national media outlets. In Lithuania environmental issues are less questioned, site selection is not contested and public participation is limited to local communities of the nuclear site with scarce media coverage. I suppose this situation will change with the start of a public discussion about the site selection for geological disposal of high radioactive waste and SNF and its environmental impact assessment. This debate will expand nuclear waste issues to the national scale. Considering environmentalism not only as participatory but also as scholarly concern, at the moment there are relatively few studies in environmental humanities and history about the uses of the natural resources in nuclear waste confinement and its impact on social and natural landscapes.
AG: Do people in the two countries differ in their risk perception?
AS: Different levels of public engagement in the nuclear decision-making illustrates different public opinion dynamics as well as public perception of nuclear risks. In Sweden due to the nuclear phase-out decision in 1980 and to the high impact of environmental movements, critical voices are prevailing the publicity concerning nuclear waste. In Lithuania the nuclear energy use became public only in the 1990s after the reestablishment of the independence and were associated mostly with Chernobyl disaster risks and anti-communist, sovereignty claims. During the transition period, the use of nuclear energy was considered as necessary for the economic and social developments of the country; political personnel, nuclear engineers and Lithuanian citizens embraced the energy produced by the Ignalina NPP as a national resource. The referendums about nuclear energy uses in Lithuania in 2008 and 2012 after the start of the decommissioning of the Ignalina NPP showed a rather radical change from pro- to anti-nuclear attitudes challenging the plan to construct a new NPP in the country.
by Elisa Privitera (Lizzy), C. M. Lerici Foundation Fellow
My story with Sweden started around two years ago. It was a scorching and sunny summer. I had just gotten my Masters Degree that explored the creation of a community laboratory that sought to regenerate a historical and neglected district in Catania—my hometown in Sicily—when my supervisor said to me, “What do you think about Sweden?”
“Sweden, hmmm…” I hesitated, trying to take time in order to dig into my memory and knowledge, to collect ideas for a right answer.
Waiting patiently, my supervisor prompted me again, “So?”
I sighed, “Actually, not too much. Why do you ask?”
Two years later, at the end of January 2019, I landed in the evening at Stockholm’s Skavsta Airport in order to accomplish about 6 months of research as a visiting scholar at the Environmental Humanities Lab at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment here at KTH. Oh yeah, I was in Sweden!
But why did I come here? Tracing back the story, during the two years in between my masters degree and my arrival, I continued to work and do fieldwork concerning environmental and urban planning. I collaborated with some grassroots associations, which furthered my interests in the processes of reactivation of derelict spaces. And I started a PhD program where I’ve continued to explore the link between environmental issues and urban planning as a member of LabPEAT– an action-research lab of ecological and environmental design. Working on my PhD, “Evaluation and mitigation of urban and land risks”—begun in 2018 at the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture at the University of Catania—I began to investigate the issues of community empowerment with environmental risks and the planning and regeneration of derelict areas.
Locations of LabPEAT in Catania and EHL in Stockholm
My thesis explores risky landscapes, such as all those post-industrial or in transition landscapes that have been deeply modified and contaminated due to the heavy human footprint. If the landscape can be conceived as the place of people and people’ point of view (Pizziolo and Micarelli, 2003), how can the local knowledge collected by the people’ stories influence the planning field? Or more generally, what can be the role of subaltern communities in the production of knowledge about risk in order to co-design neglected and contaminated areas? Starting from these research questions, my aim is to experiment an alternative approach to risk landscapes by investigating the issue of environmental risk from a qualitative and environmental justice point of view and by putting particular emphasis on storytelling. Since I believe that the industrial and contaminated areas represent a melting-pot of the inequalities as well as a prime example for debate on how to plan current and future risk landscapes, I have chosen to focus on Gela, a fishing village in the South of Sicily that has been converted into one of the main Italian petrochemical poles. In Gela, I had already started to collect stories about daily life from some inhabitants. But I understood that I still needed to deepen the theme of the potential role of the narrative.
That is why I came to the Environmental Humanities Lab (EHL) on a C. M. Lerici Foundation fellowship. Understanding the roles of narratives in order to tell the right story (Barca S., 2014) or to portray a more complex story of landscapes (Gravagno F., 2008) is an expertise of the EHL. It combines research, training, and outreach to tackle crucial societal challenges, such as climate justice, migrations, environmental justice, and rights to the city. The EHL has driven several projects on environmental justice over the years, such as Toxic Bios.
This public environmental humanities project has assisted my research through its aims to co-produce, gather, and make visible stories of contamination and resistance, by using the methodology of storytelling, as also explained in a published article. The collection of oral stories can be a useful tool for many purposes:
for uncovering toxic narratives centered on structural environmental injustice;
for co-producing knowledge;
for increasing the empowerment and collective capabilities of local communities (community building);
and for triggering an action-research path in contaminated territories in order to co-design a different future.
So, by having in mind the purpose of deepening the potential role of the toxic biographies in the planning of contaminated areas, I landed in the darkness at the airport of Skavsta, covered by layers of white snow during that January night. The day after my arrival I moved to live into one of the student dormitories on KTH Campus—a newly erected building with an amazing view on the cityscape of Stockholm. The following months have been an intense flurry of learning, experiences, and challenges!
View from KTH dormitory
Upon my arrival, I began a literature review about environmental justice, political ecology, and environmental history, as suggested by my KTH supervisor: Prof. Marco Armiero. Stockholm was so cold, with iced lakes and fascinating snowscapes sprinkled with nightlights in front of windows to face the darkness. February passed in a jiffy, and in March I started to attend a course for the Ph.D. candidates in “Theory and Method in Historical Research” and a course for master students in “Environmental History.” Both the courses have been challenging. In the first course, “Theory and Method in Historical Research,” I had the possibility to study and debate on many current issues, from Bruno Latour’s books to the epistemological research of feminist theory, from materiality to STS studies. The array of themes has been quite varied and helped me to frame and address my own research questions from time to time in a new way, by enriching certain points of view about it. Meanwhile, thanks to the “Environmental History” course, I investigated the historical connections between migration flows and environmental pull and push factors. These experiences gave me some insights on how to frame my topic as well.
Until then, I have collaborated with the EHL on two running projects. Also, I have collaborated and participated in the lab meetings that take place more or less once a week. On the 21st of March, I also had the opportunity to present the activities and research carried out by LabPEAT of Catania during one of these lab meetings. Over the months, I got fully involved in Division life, for instance, by attending the Higher Seminars in which other scholars come from everywhere about present on current research topics.
Lizzy at the Lab. From left to right: Roberta Biasillo, Lizzy Privitera, and Marco Armiero
Also, frankly speaking, I have fallen in love with fika, an on-purpose-organized break with the aim of socialising among colleagues. The fika is sweetened by tea, coffee and a lot of sweets, typical from Sweden. Some of the main sweets are the “Princess cake,” the “kanelbullar” or “kardemummabulle”, and so on. In particular, the cinnamon bun can be considered the queen of Swedish cuisine! Thereby, in my opinion, among the key-words regarding Sweden, I would suggest FIKA! Between fika, readings, assignments and interesting discussions with colleagues, April arrived. It brought lighter hours, warmer weather, Easter and Walpurgis night, or Valborg. If the days of Easter have been characterised by the blooming of the trees at Kungsträdgården that attracted locals and tourists during several days, Valborg is one of these things about which I did not know about but that is a quite important event for Swedish society. In fact, it is a custom coming from northern Europe, and it consists of lighting bonfires in public spaces in order to celebrate the arrival of spring collectively. All throughout Sweden, there are bonfires with family and groups of friends who enjoy the flames. I got to enjoy Valborg from the seaside of Stockholm!
In the middle of May, the two courses ended. I started to draft a summary of the concepts learned about toxic autobiographies and environmental justice. In the meanwhile, nicer days came. When the sun arrives, it is a bursting event, a kind of explosion of joy and chilling out, and all Swedish (and not only!) people begin to scatter among the public places of the city: picnic on the parks, walks on the city, beers in terraces and gardens, events in the squares. A festive spirit rises. I started to stroll around the city in order to explore it. I visited Skansen park which gives lots of information about the history of Sweden and typical Nordic animals, some museums, such as the Nobel Prize Museum, and the park behind the KTH campus which is full of deer and forest animals.
At the beginning of June, I went back to Italy for a conference where I presented work I developed based on what I learned in the “Theory and Method in Historical Research” course. The title of the work is “Contaminated Entanglements,” and it will be soon part of a publication. “Contaminated Entanglements” concerns the complex set of connections between environmental components. Things, matters, bodies, humans and not, all are part of this entanglement. Especially, according to Stacy Alaimo (2010) in the contamination of the human and non- (more than) human bodies can be read the transcorporeality of the toxicity.
Another first output of this period of research at the EHL has been the paper titled “The Toxic Biographies and the “Small Data” from an Italian petrochemical town (Gela, Sicily)” that I have presented at the City Futures IV Conference in Dublin. This paper is a first and embryonic fruit of the collaborative work between the two research laboratories, LabPEAT and the EHL. This collaboration has brought us to experiment and propose an ecological and relational community design that uses toxic biographies as tools for converting the personal stories of life into collective knowledge. In fact, through the collection of stories a shift occurs from an individual tragedy to a self-aware community which can embark upon the quest for justice. By doing so, toxic auto-biographies become also a way to re-politicize the embodied experience of injustice. Once a community—formed as the result of a struggle—becomes aware of the diffused injustices, an ecological community design path can be triggered.
As July arrived, the end of my experience drew near, and I returned home. A second intense year of Ph.D. is now in front of me. The future goals for this year will be to continue to carry out a full-immersion and fieldwork in Gela (Sicily). More and more auto-biographies will be collected, and I will try to trigger an action-research path by engaging inhabitants and grassroots movements in order to map the risk landscapes as they are perceived by citizens and also in order to co-design alternative futures for this contaminated area. For sure I will have to deal with doubts, readings, editing and so on, but I am also optimistic about the decisive turning points. I do believe that future meetings with some of the scholars I have met at this division during these past few months will be fruitful and inspiring for my ongoing research!
That’s why I am really looking forward to coming back to Sweden one day again, and at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in particular!
