Harmaat aallot. Ympäristönsuojelun tulo Suomeen by Simo Laakkonen Sari Laurila Marjatta Rahikainen (review)

Abstract

584 SEER, 79, 3, 2001 were coopted into governmental positions, leaving a vacuum in the non-state domain of activism. A more Machiavellian story is told by Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen,who argues that West Germans grossly exaggerated the GDR's environmental travailsin order to providejustificationfor shuttingdown existing industryin the East and replacingit with colonial economic investments.Whateverdirty industrythere was, according to the author,was the resultof the initialstages of industrializationin easternGermanyand dependence on lignite,producing effectsnot dissimilarto conditions in the Ruhr or in Manchesterof an earlier period. Positive achievements, such as small and slow cars, household waste recycling, large areas of quiet forestsand lakes, and lack of disposableplastic packaging,have been ignoredby Westerncritics. Certainly,the extreme anti-Communistviews are unbalanced,yet many of the positive featuresBoehmer-Christiansenlistswere more the product of an inefficient, capital-starved economy unable to innovate than of conscious environmental sensitivity. Ultimately, one of the unifyingelements of thiscollection is itsmessagethat the Cold Warcontext caused problemsand theirsolutionsto be posed as a set of unproductivebinarychoices: communism or capitalism,'dirty'communist industry(in the former GDR) or 'clean' de-industrialization,and so on. The editorscall fora Third Way. 'The futureofpoliticalecology lies in constituting a systemic challenge to both free marketorthodoxy and the now discredited centralplanning of ex-actual socialism'(p. 25). In a rich concluding section Tickle and Welsh ponder why the environmental movements of EasternEurope,which had played such unprecedented political roles and which had held aloft the banner of a humane and socially responsive modernity, faded so quickly. Larger exogenous trends, such as globalization and Westernlending policies, they offer,helped to suffocateany incipient social democracy, while at the same time amplifying existing local traditions of patriarchy, civic passivity, and nationalism. The cooption of movement leaders finished the process. The editors are to be congratulated for assemblingthistimely and critical-mindedcollection. Department ofHistory DOUGLAS R. WEINER University ofArizona Laakkonen, Simo; Laurila, Sari, and Rahikainen, Marjatta (eds). Harmaat aallot. rmpdristdnsuojelun tuloSuomeen.Historiallinen Arkisto, I I3. Suomen Historiallinen Seura, Helsinki, 1999. 236 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Price unknown. THE history of environmental problems has only recently been taken up in Finland. One of the projects that has been launched, with funding from the Finnish Academy and the communities involved, is a collaborative, multidisciplinary research exercise investigating the water policies of eight of Finland's largest urban centres. This volume contains parts of the results from six of them. It claims to be a pioneering study in the field of environmental history. The papers collected here are the work of ten separate contributors, REVIEWS 585 but most of the contents are essentially focused on the same questions. The basic subjectmatter is water and sewage, which became problems in Finland forthe firsttime in the nineteenth centurywith the beginningsof urbanization and industrialization. Previous to that period, Finns had been a tiny population inhabitinga largecountry,and living in small,scatteredfarmsand villages. Their water came fromwells, or the nearestlake or stream,and their environment was spacious enough for the disposal of waste to present no problems. They had lived that way for centuries. The research in this study shows how, when such people congregated in towns, they showed little consciousness that water supply or sewage disposal could be a problem and carriedon in the traditionalway. Drinking water came from wells, the waste went into open drains, accumulated solids were removed by horse and cart and in both cases ended up in the nearest convenient open water. The result was cumulative pollution of wells and surface water sources, and chronic outbreaksof water-borne infections such as cholera and typhoid. The effect was compounded since the same waters used for disposal and sewage were also used for bathing and laundering. Further early industrial enterprises assumed as a matter of course a right to feed their effluents into the same water sources. A law of I879 required urban communities to employ their own medical officersand set up Health Boards,and environmentalawareness developed in Finlandthroughtheirwork. By the i88os, recent medical discoveries about bacteria, and how their presence in waterwas linkedto pollution of the water suppliesand the spread of disease were known in Finland as were the techniques available for providing a reliable supply of clean water and, from the i89os they were...