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'It's War and Everyone Can Do As They Please!' An Environmental History of a Finnish City in Wartime
Rauno Lahtinen and Timo Vuorisalo
| SINCE THE VIETNAM WAR (1961–1973), the environmental effects of war increasingly have become objects of research and public concern. In the Gulf War (1991) and War in Iraq (2003– ) environmental damage has been one of the major concerns for environmentalists and the international media. Since 1999, the United Nations also has investigated the environmental impact of wars and conflicts.1 But wars had environmental implications long before the Vietnam War. The modern weaponry of the twentieth century caused enormous environmental destruction in both world wars, for example. Wars also have other, more indirect and less obvious effects on the environment which are not quite as easy to observe or study. The environmental consequences of war can be complex and unpredictable, and—as some have argued—sometimes even beneficial.2 |
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Despite the growing interest in the environmental impact of modern wars, scholars have paid little attention to the effect of World War I and II on the urban environment. From an environmental point of view, wars seem quite short and perhaps therefore insignificant. Even in Central Europe, urban historians have ignored war and the environment in the twentieth century, although there were dramatic repercussions in many cities of that area. Until recently, Finnish historians also have mostly ignored the home front, focusing instead almost exclusively on military history and politics. In Finland, urban environmental history as a whole has only very recently attracted academic attention: Urban water management has been studied the most.3 Some research has been done on urban agriculture, mostly in ethnology and geography.4 It is not an exaggeration to say that the environmental history of Finland during wartime has been neglected. The chaotic years after the two world wars especially have been neglected. One important reason is that the surviving documents are often fragmentary.5 |
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This essay is the first to concentrate on the environmental history of a Finnish city at war. We consider two sets of questions. First, how did the wars affect the urban environment? Were those impacts lasting? Second, how did the experience of war shape people's environmental attitudes? Did the public environmental debate change during the war periods? We focus on the city of Turku. We conclude that the Second World War and its aftermath fundamentally transformed the way people experienced and used their environment, and had a long-lasting effect by suppressing public environmental debate. Environmental values that had emerged strongly in the interwar period vanished almost completely during the Second World War and didn't return for years—even decades. |
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Though the destruction caused intentionally by enemy bombing was substantial in Turku and in many other Finnish cities, we are mainly interested in the indirect effects of war. After a brief overview of the history of Turku, this article explores three different aspects of the city's wartime environmental history.6 We analyze the effects of the sudden rise of urban agriculture, which had long-lasting implications for the urban environment and land-use during and after both world wars. Next, we examine other implications of the scarcity of raw materials, for example recycling, and the way scarcity changed people's everyday lives and environmental attitudes. Then we explore the effects of wartime industry, which was responsible for worsening river pollution and carelessly placed industrial landfills all around the city. Although we concentrate on the situation in one city, one can assume that conditions in most other Finnish cities would have been much the same. |
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