Return to Tallinn

Came back a few days ago after a week in Tallinn, whose university hosted this year’s European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) conference. One cannot help being impressed by the vibrant and dynamic character of this community, and with a friction-free organization of the kind that our Estonian colleagues offered, the overall result was bound to become a huge success.

The conference featured notable keynote lectures by nuclear historian Kate Brown, whose recently released Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, has already given rise to vivid debates within and beyond academia, and the ever-provocative human ecologist Alf Hornborg from Lund, who also just released a new work, Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene.

But the main benefit of navigating the conference sessions was probably the chance to get a taste of what Europe’s younger researchers (PhD students and others) are up to. With an eye to our own Cold War Coasts project at KTH, I tended to be drawn, among other things, to presentations with a coastal-historical focus, like Latvian researcher Kristine Krumberga’s in-depth studies of the Cold War military sites south of Liepaja on the Baltic or Josef Djordjevski’s mapping of Yugoslavia’s attempts to clean up its coasts in order to promote tourism along the mythical Adriatic seashore. Great also to hear Kadriorg Art Museum’s curator Alexandra Murre talk about the Baltic Sea in the views of Russian and Baltic painters in the 18th and 19th centuries!

My own contribution, however, was linked to our joint European efforts to promote historical studies of natural resource extraction, broadly speaking. I had organized a roundtable that sought to discern connections between different historical sub-disciplines in resource studies, with a panel consisting of my European colleagues Julia Lajus (St Petersburg), Mats Ingulstad (Trondheim), Urban Wråkberg (Kirkenes), Stathis Arapostathis (Athens), Matthias Heymann (Århus) and Erland Mårald (Umeå). I don’t think the audience in the overfilled room was disappointed by the discussion, which in an interesting way also brought to the fore the issue of how historians actually can – and whether they should! – seek to influence present-day events and trends in the extractive world.

Having lived in Tallinn for some time back in 1998, this trip was also special for myself in many personal ways. I haven’t been much in Estonia since I finished my PhD thesis in 2004 and my Baltic Sea book (Östersjövägar) in 2006. Tallinn for me has since long been transformed into a mesmerizing – and melancholic – place of memories, which range from my summer-time work as a park labourer in beautiful Kadriorg in 1996 via my field work for the PhD to my participation as a consultant for the OECD in 2006, where we were charged with evaluating Estonia’s higher education system. What a return now, so many years later!

Only one mishap: on the voyage back by ferry, one of the passengers jumped overboard from M/S Baltic Queen and disappeared in the midst of Stockholm’s beuatiful archipelago. Rescue teams found no trace of the man, while the ferry’s arrival was delayed by several hours.