Baltic Environmental Humanities

Earlier this month I went to Riga, just across the Baltic Sea, to participate in the First Baltic Conference on the Environmental Humanities (BALTEHUMS). The conference was originally planned as a small-scale event, as the initiators – a couple of (predominantly young) scholars at home in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – did not think there would be that many people in the Baltics identifying themselves as “environmental humanists”. But in the end nearly a hundred participants showed up, from 17 different countries. At first sight, the notion of a “Baltic” conference would seem to delimit its scope, but in fact it rather served to attract an extremely wide community of scholars who in one or the other way identified themselves with the Baltic region and with the environmental humanities.

During the 1990s and early 2000s I was almost always on my way somewhere in the Baltic Sea region and I wrote several books on various Baltic themes. Since then I have not been around much in the Baltics. With our Cold War Coasts project, however, which received generous funding from Formas in 2017, I am again approaching the region in my research and my writing. Having chaired a session called “Post-nuclear lives and narratives”, I was surprised to find out that my large reserach project on nuclear energy, NUCLEARWATERS, might also benefit from interaction across the Baltic’s waters.

BALTEHUMS offered a unique opportunity to link up with local researchers. The two strongest research environments in the field in the three Baltic countries are probably Tallinn University (which now hosts the Estonian Center for Environmental History, KAJAK) and Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania. Of the non-Baltic countries represented, the Finnish community was by far the largest, followed by the Swedish. It was a pity that so few Russians participated, although this was partly compensated for by the very strong contributions of those who did come to Riga: Alexei Kraikovsky and Julia Lajus, in particular, inspired me greatly through their vivid presentation of “The Baltic Sea in the environmental, technological and cultural history of St. Petersburg”.

However, there are still two huge academic divides between East and West in the Baltic Sea region. The first is intellectual: interdisciplinary and experimental approaches, especially in historical research, appear to have continued difficulties to be properly recognized on the Baltic’s eastern shores. The second is financial: “eastern” Baltic scholars still carry out their work under very difficult economic conditions – nearly three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.