The Green Belt Undone
My current research combines my interests in forest, migration and labor history, and brings me back to Finnish Lapland. The history of Finnish Lapland is a history of labor migration. First, in the late 19th century, people traveled from the South to Lapland in search of work in the timber industry. A hundred years later, in the 1960s and 1970s, many of their grandchildren’s generation took the same journey in reverse in search of work in southern Finland, Sweden, or across the oceans in the New World. The economy of Lapland has therefore been relying on forest industry for more than a century. Throughout its history, however, the industry has seen great fluctuation in its fortunes, and just recently, it has experienced marked decline with plans of closing down the pulp mill of Kemijärvi located in South-Eastern Lapland. At the time when jobs are disappearing in Lapland, both at the pulp mill and the forestry communities around it, the people in the area are aware that new mills are being opened elsewhere in the world. Increasingly, the industry is shifting from the North to the South, where both environmental, regulatory conditions and socio-economic conditions are thought to be more favorable. The best known example is the Orion Pulp Mill in Fray Bentos, Uruguay, whose construction was approved in 2003 and started in 2005 by a Finnish company Metsä Botnia.
The aim of my study is to write a third volume to a forest history trilogy of Lapland: In 1996 I published my PhD dissertation in ethnology “Requiem of an Era: Lumberjacks in Finnish Lapland”. In my dissertation I described how lumberjacks came to Lapland in their thousands, and how their life changed as forestry developed. In 2003, I published a monograph entitled “Gothenburg – the largest Village of the Salla Parish”, where I analyzed the fate of people of Finnish Lapland who had migrated to Sweden partly as a result of being unemployed as a consequence of mechanization of forestry. In the third volume, I will return to Lapland and analyze how globalization of forest industry is experienced at the local level, among people in Kemijärvi and the surrounding communities: how the Green Belt of the World is currently being undone.
Lapland is not an unique case, on the contrary: the processes have been and are very similar throughout the Boral forests zone. My research adds a Finnish case to a larger scientific project entitled “Pulp Friction”, directed by professor Ron Harpelle from Lakehead University. That project deals with old and new economies of Canada and Uruguay, and it also has researchers from both countries. It is a case where one region’s (Northern Uruguay) new economy is another’s (Northwestern Ontario) old economy: in Canada forest industry is in decline as it is in Finland, and in Uruguay it is in ascent. The company which started extensive forestry in Finnish Lapland and was the strongest forest company in Finnish Lapland throughout the 1900s, Kemi Oy, was merged into Metsä Botnia now operating in Uruguay in 1991. The forest resource headquarters of Kemi Oy were located in Kemijärvi until the year 1900.
With this project I am also a collaborator in the project “Northern Communities in a Changing World: Towards a Better Understanding of Global Competition”, directed by Ron Harpelle, Canada, and funded (2009-) by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada.
In 1999-2002, I was in charge of an oral history project called “Forestry Professionals in the Changing Society” run by the Finnish Forest History Society during which interviews were made with 1 053 forestry professionals in different parts of Finland. Currently I am co-supervising three PhD thesis based on that material and one PhD, a study of academy educated foresters by Leena Paaskoksi, was published in 2008, and myself I have used the material on my mainly Academy of Finland funded project on Finnish immigrants in Sweden, and on a scientific article on careers of female cooks at logging camps.
From Kemijärvi and its neighboring municipalities Savukoski, Salla, Pelkosenniemi and Sodankylä, 12 academic level foresters, 31 intermediate level forestry professionals, 53 basic degree or without degree forestry professionals, and 6 entrepreneurs were interviewed in the project. These 102 transcribed interviews constitute the base for my research material.
When the interviews were conducted at the turn of the century, there had been talk about closing down the Kemijärvi pulp mill, river driving had ceased in the Kemijoki river and forestry had mechanized even further, but the dramatic changes in global forest industry had not started yet. In my study I will look backwards and forwards. I will analyze the interviews conducted in 1999-2002 in regards as how the forestry professionals see the recent (by the year 2000 standards) changes in forestry, and what they think of their occupation’s and Lapland’s future. According to them, what kind of livelihood and environment does forest provide for them? Furthermore, I will myself do some additional interviews among persons who have been interviewed earlier, and elaborate how their plans and insights for future have changed in the ten years that have passed since they first were interviewed. I will also go through a local newspaper, Koillis-Lappi, from the years 2000-2009 and analyze the editorial articles dealing with forestry: how is globalization reflected in them.
Sustainable development requires ethical discussion. My research will, I hope, have an obvious impact on civil society groups in remote areas of Finnish Lapland. Methodologically this research belongs to the field of cultural analysis and critical ethnology. My aim is to publish extensively both in English in refereed international journals and in Finnish as a monograph. Despite the fact that today the latter is not rewarding as far as an academic career is concerned it needs to be done. The people in the area studied need the information and their experiences should not be used only for academic merits. In all ways my aim is to follow the best ethical principles and enhance sustainable cultural development.