From Iron Curtain to Timber-Belt Territory and Materiality at the Finnish-Russ ian Border

The paper shows the Fi nnish-Russian border changing from a political periphery in to a focus for international ecopolitics, because of how landscapes either side have been treated under different geopolitically informed regimes of government. On the Finnish side landscape was transformed into industrially managed forests, whereas th e Russian border zone was left largely unmanaged. Historical soc i a l links across the border were reactivated after the end of the Cold War, and young Finnish forest activists in particular have created social links here. Their activities challenge accepted ideas of sovereign territory and beg revisions of the analyti cal tool s for addressing processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation such as those at play in ecopolitics.

The paper shows the Fi nnish-Russian border changing from a political periphery in to a focus for international ecopolitics, because of how landscapes either side have been treated under different geopolitically informed regimes of government. On the Finnish side landscape was transformed into industrially managed forests, whereas th e Russian border zone was left largely unmanaged. Historical soc i a l links across the border were reactivated after the end of the Cold War, and young Finnish forest activists in particular have created social links here. Their activities challenge accepted ideas of sovereign territory and beg revisions of the analyti cal tool s for addressing processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation such as those at play in ecopolitics.
PhD Eeua Berglund, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London SE14 6NW UK. E-mail: e. berglund@gold.ac. uk In the face of environmental destruction state come from elsewhere. But Karelia is also deeply borders can easily seem meaningless.1 If this is connected to the history of Finnish national an exaggeration, border environments never identity. It has nourished ideas and practices of theless throw the weakness of state sovereignty the good life that draw a variety of resources into relief This paper sketches a picture of one from forests, something that has become impor region, along Russia's -formerly the Soviet tant economically as well as culturally in Fin Union's -900 km border with Finland, where land. Thus this paper argues that what pro state sovereignty is challenged by internation vokes the interest ofFinnish environmentalists al networks of governmental and non-govern and fosters social links across the border is the mental organisations and by ecological process materiality of the border's forests. Deterritori es. Russian Karelia2 has been 'open' to interna alised ecopolitical concerns articulate with Finn tional traffic for over a decade though for most ish historiography in which forests are both of the twentieth century, crossing the border resource and symbol for the nation. Besides was extremely difficult and access to the region supporting recent critical work on territories from within the Soviet Union was also restrict and territorialisation (Appadurai 1996, Lugo ed. Mter all, it was part of the boundary be 1997, 6 'Tuathail andDalby 1998, Paasi 1996, tween what US President Ronald Reagan fa Brock 1999), a broader point follows, namely mously called the Evil Empire and market-led that as an empirical as well as critical pursuit, democracy. Today it is an object of intense con anthropology needs to attend to re-territoriali cern for Finnish and international environmen sation as much as to de-territorialisation. talists. It is the focus of interest because of its For power remains spatialised (e.g. Brock exceptionally unfragmented boreaP forests, the 1999, Gupta and Ferguson 1997). The intensify result of the fact that the region was so long ing competition over access to environmental valued as a frontier, the edge of a territory.
goods and avoidance of environmental evils Here ecopolitics challenges sovereign terri (Harvey 1996) is but one arena where continu 1 tory, since the valued forest lies inside Russia, ity and change in the spatial relations of power whilst many of those seeking its protection needs to be better understood. Flows of capital, move ment of i n fim11ation a n d d is placem ent of people do not necessa ri ly i n d ica t e t he wea k en ing hold of terri tory a:; a n orga n is i n g pri nciple of ::;uci a l a n d pol i tical l i fe. Cert a i n ly i nterna tion a l cnvi ron menta l i ::; m chal lenge:; hegemon ic notions of space ( Kueh l :; 1 996) , high l igh ting tho d i sj u nct u res bet ween the space o f ccopo l i tics ( t h e pol i tics of global risk) and tho space of state control. Yet u ndcr::; tand i ng the e ffects of such disjunctures req uires further theoretical work. This paper, focus;;ing on the border zone whore the h i sto ry of Cold Wa r logic, ecol ogica l processes, and late-twentieth-cen t u ry econom ic patterns moot, demonstrates w hy.
As the border open ed up, the fo rests beck oned loggi ng co m pan ics, especially Finnish ones, to exploit easily accessibl e, abu ndant reserves of timber. The companies were soon fol lowed by environmental p rotestors who fea red i rrepara ble damage to Karelia's ancient forests. Activ ists thus pitted th cmselvc;; against corporate power on behalf of nature and sustainable life styles. In so doing, they also chall enged ideas abou t sovereign territory and abo ut th e rights to harvest natural resources for a world m ar ket. Yet on the face of it, their protest looked like a familiar romanticisation of living 'close to nature'.
A young Finn, let me call her Anna, told me she would love to move to Russian Karelia. 4 The world on the Finnish side of the border with its high-tech and consumer-oriented life contrast ed unfavourably in her eyes with the almost subsistence-based village life on the Russian side. Here energy is conscientiously saved, wa ter is carried in buckets from river or lake to the house, and waste disposal is not an issue since nothing is wasted. After a lifetime's participa tion in conservation, Anna had a strong desire to live out what she considered a sane lifestyle. "I'd like to move here [to Russian Karelia] ," she told me. "This is where people, forests and large lakes exist side by side in a proper balance. I mean, it's selfish of me, I know, but this really is how a good life can be lived." Rather than reiterate the argument that such attitudes are typical of metropolitan coloniser (environmen talist) towards peripheral colonised (Cronan ed. 1995), I want to show that similarities in activ ists' and local people's ways of valuing the forests sti l l t ra n scen d pol i tical bou nda ries. E n v i ron rncn t a l is t s l i ke An n a may be i n fl ue nced by a m ed i a-e n h a nced global d iscou rse which con;;truct s concerned 'global' ceo-citizen;; at the same ti me as i t constructs d iflercntly val ued other:; -w h eth er backward peasants or ecolog ical ly w i se �> <IV ages -bu t th ey arc al so situ ated h i storica l ly and geographically in ways that i n flect their e nvironmentalism.
A brief methodologi cal note is in order here. My rc;;earch was designed to exami ne confli cts over fi>re�>t use i n a cou n try, Finl and, w ith a powerful sclf imagc of homogeneity and con !:iCns us. H istorical records and an alyses of poli t ical sh ift s, along with attention to various me d i a , h ave provided i nput, as have th e conversa tions all Finns seem to l aunch into when i t comes to talki n g o f forests. Th e current text, however, is based on ethnographic work with Finnish activists", which took me to both sides of the border and led to conversations with people on the Russian side. This work began to suggest alternative questions about young en vironmentalists' orientations to the nature and peopl e of th i s region . This part of my rese arch is limited to fewer than a dozen activists. Many more Finnish activists campaigned on Russian Karelia throughout the 1 990s, publicising ille gal logging, and even more young Finns and Russians have carried out biodiversity surveys of the forests in order to produce the necess ary documentation for conservation measures to be implemented. News coverage and letters to editors, interviews in a range of environmental organisations, and conversations with non-en vironmentalists, further demonstrate that many people have supported the young men and wom en at the heart of the effort to prevent the introduction of Finnish-style industrial forest ry in Russian Karelia. Events in its forests began to reflect Finnish values, and it is the view from Finland, which this paper presents.

Nature, Science and Ecopolitics6 at Borders
At first sight Karelia's belt of ancient forests seems like an obvious target for international environmentalism. As a recent publication puts it, these forests "are one of the most important bore a I biodiversity centres ofEurope" (Ovaskai nen et a I. 1 999). Anoth er refers to th e area as the 'Green Belt' of Fennoscandia, noting that this " u n i q ue natural complex 1 . . . 1 has been pre served and offers an opportunity to sustain evolutional and distributional dynamics -the prerequ isites of biological diversity -on an exception al scale" (Kieinn 1 998). However, one could ask, as many have in the Amazon and elsewhere (Kuehls 1 996 , Conklin 1 997), what gives the wealthy and privileged the right to protect bi odivers ity elsewhere when they have destroyed their own at home? Why do already disempowered groups become identified with nature, a passive if highly valued object, when the rich insist on iden tifying with civilisation and progress even after they have destroyed their environments?
In creating copious knowledge about the ecological value of the region, sometimes to gether with Russian counterparts, Finnish ac tivists throughout the 1 990s acted as if their work was deterritorialised, part of the global imperative to promote economically viable and ecologically healthy resource use (Ovaskainen et al. 1 999). Nature does not stop at borders and therefore by definition the environmentalist agenda is conceptualised as transnational. It is seen as scientifically based, and accordingly activists referred to the knowledge that pro moted their enthusiasm as free of political or cultural biases. Finnish activists are connected to organisations like UNE SCO, they work with large NGOs7 like Greenpeace, and with the international umbrella organisation dedicated to protecting such forests in the Northern hem isphere, the Taiga Rescue Network, a group that brought international delegates to Karelia in 1 996 to promote the political process. German organisations have fuelled the idea of the area as a World Heritage site (Kleinn 1 998).
Like government officials who promote tech nomanagerial interventions as the only answer to ecological destruction, environmentalists here contribute to the world -wide power of ecology as a moralised scientific discourse (Takacs 1 996). Many of the other actors involved in cross border traffic speak another apparently univer sal language, that of economics. The Oikos, or household, is at the root of both these discours es: eco-nomics and eco-logy. The Oilws draw:.; attention to the idea that the planet as a w h o l e i s home and its management is a shared res pon sibility across borders. It seems hopeful to thi nk that problems such as global environmen tal degradation and global economic volatility ac tually carry the promise that eventually state borders will be seen for the mere human con structions that they are . But the reality so far warrants rather less optimism.
The crisis of environmental politics is i n ex tricably bound up with a crisis over boundaries (Kuehls 1 996). Ecological processes pay no h eed to borders, yet states remain crucial to their government and so "ecopolitics cannot be re duced to either domestic or international poli cy" (Kuehls 1 996 : 1 1 7). But ecopolitics is also bound up with a crisis of policing (the appropri ate spaces oD knowledge, science and expertise. Reliable knowledge and trustworthy experti se are necess ary to the political process of environ mental protest just as they are to resource management. Ecopolitics is thus a forum for generating new criteria for legitimate concern over territories, linking groups distanced in space, and reconfiguring existing networks of knowledge. It generates new collectivities held together by trust in purveyors of knowledge, as environmentalists in the border zone constant ly bring different spatial scales and various scientific logics into conjunction with each oth er. The intensity of the traffic in these compet ing forms of science is an important change from an earlier condition where scientific ex pertise was spatialised in more fixed, often national ways , as I shall show below. In insisting on a scientific basis for their concern , those protesting logging appear to be endorsing the official discourses that cross this border rather than challenging them. Just like employees of the Finnish Environment Minis try, Moscow-based activists, German research ers, or local conservation officials, activists con nect across the border in the language of scien tific ecology. Collaborative research prolifer ates as do publications like the report On the Ecological and Economic impacts of wood har vesting and trade in north-east Russia (Myl lynen et al. 1 996). Finnish and Russian nature enthusiasts, many ofthem students, spent sum mcrs i n the m i d-1 990s m a ppi ng unci s u rvey i ng the region's bi od ivers i ty, und i n the i r v i ew, Kci encc and economic::; arc best able to transcen d cultural d i l'fe rcncc�:� u n lCi:ii:l they arc cyn i ca l ly man i pulated . Suc h a Eu roccntric perspective (Szcrs7.ynski ct al . 1 99 6) h as allowed adm i n i s trators and scientists from a ra nge or i n stitu ticms to identi fy common goa l s and carry out collecti ve proj ect::;, lor instance co-operation under the "Finnish-Rus::;ian Development Pro gramme on Sustai nable Forest Managemen t and Conservation or Biological Divers i ty in Northwest Russia", admi nistered on the Finn ish side through the Ministries o f the Environ ment, of Agriculture and Forestry and for For eign Affairs. The process is clearly m anageri al and technical in character, with the umbrella project aiming to encompass "economic, envi ronmental, social and market aspects" (NWRDP 1997: 3). Forests are treated as an external re source needing to be managed for the common good whether as industry resource or as biodi versity -through govern men t action.
The power of modern scientific discourse in much of the world rests precisely in the convic tion that it is above politics and that only the world, not society or religious dogma or even financial interest, is reflected in it. However, social studies of science have done much to demonstrate that contrary to such proclama tions of transcendence, these claims are not devoid of culture or power, and that science remains a cultural practice (e.g. Latour 1987, Haraway 1997. Still, when wedded to the com mon-sense notion that we all know what nature is, it is hardly surprising that ecopolitics should make science carry so much of its argument. Technical and scientific languages remain pre eminent when international agendas in the name of a healthy, global environment are artic ulated. And the technical language ofthe global economy, conceptualised as necessary or tran scendent rather than historically constructed, is easily wedded to the technical languages of both resource use and nature protection, often enough with similar ends in mind (Luke 1995).

Governi ng Forests
Activism thu s i ndi rectly supports the pol icing of resou rce::; unci cndor::;c::; pa rticu lar forms of expert kn ow ledge, but it a lso resists the Lock can con ception of" land as only val uable when it i::; prod uctive i n a wuy the state rccogn i::;cs. 8 Activ ists cha l l en ge older ideas about nature, te rritory and state power, by allowing them to be drawn in by the concreteness ofthe forests in ways that the state cannot dictate. As 1 have argued elsewhere in m ore detai l (Berglu nd 2000), as they became tangible economic assets, forests were made a particular focus of social rel ations in Finland and until the 1 980s the state's role in de fi ning ideal attitudes towards forests, as well as policing authorised kn owl edge about them , was impressive and it reached practi cally every sq uare kilometre of thc terri tory (Michelsen 1995, Berglund 2000 giving substance to the ubiquitous claim that "Finland lives ofl"the forest". This thoroughgoing govern ment of Finland's natural landscape, as much as the isolation of the Russian border zone, is what has produ ced the sharp discontinuity in the biophysical characteristics of the forests on both sides of the border. The landscape that now draws activists, locals and others into collabo ration is thus the direct result of policing the frontier and of constituting Finland and Russia in mutual opposition . As Finland became increasingly connected to an international network oftrade in the mid nineteenth century, domestic life became more professionalised and increasingly governed through state apparatuses of knowledge pro duction (Hakli 1998). The state surveyed and documented the nation's progress. Sustained interest in timber extraction as well as in the population was fostered, and Finns came to believe that their right to self-determination was as irreducibly natural as their dependency on a natural resource. They depended on the forest for timber, but also for many other goods such as berries and wild game, as well as for the many auxiliary industries that paper and pulp manufacture brought with it. Since the 1 8 60s, Finland invested purposefully in the forest prod ucts industries, and gradually what lay within its borders became homogenous as nature and nationhood wore conso l i dated iogeiher (Berg lund 2000).
Today ihe border dem arcates both ihe land scape of' Finn i �:�h national pride -iho homoge nous l a ndscapes ofin dusirial forestry -and the landscape ofenvironmeniali si desiro -the Green Beli of' Karclia. Satell i te imagery, but also the naked eye, can easily distingu i sh the border beca use ofthe contrast in vegetation. The Rus sian side ofthe border is the legacy of purpose ful neglect, w hi lsi on ihe other side, state forest ry has affected p ractically all of Finl and's sur face area. Although much of Finland is forest and mosi of ii is pleasant to wander in and to enjoy, its biological diversity has clearly suf fered , irom selective replanti ng in response to industry needs, and from management that emphasises ease of access." Thus, the quality of the forests on either side of the border is one form of the "recognisable and concrete manifes tations of government and politics" to which Wilson and Donnan ( 1 998) wish to draw an thropological attention.
I believe it is of utmost importance to demon strate or reiterate the rather obvious point, that economic and political regimes, particularly at large scales, have long-term and often irrevers ible consequences. Significantly, governmen tality (Foucault 1 991) is made manifest not only in 'correct' Finnish attitudes towards forests, influenced as they are by state-led forest sci ence together with hegemonic aesthetic sensi bilities, but also in the biophysical environment itsel£ With the benefit of hindsight these land scapes, which had appeared natural and un questioned, can now be seen to be the result of sustained and transformative intervention with in a sovereign space through sovereign regimes of management.
As I noted, scientific discourse gains legiti macy from appearing to be an unmediated re flection of the world. Scientific institutions seek to make it appear that the people, the institu tions and the values embedded in them are an almost inconsequential background to the fore grounded facts, supposedly speaking for them selves (Latour 1 987). Only facts and policy recommendations -the former unassailable, the latter prone to human fallibility -are ad mitted as part of the science-policy process. In Finland ihis process fed i n to the high ly va l ued consensus characteristic o f' national politics, a consen sus where sci ence, well -being and gov ernment have often appeared to be syn ony mous. The limit of tho consensus has a lway�:� also been spatialised, producing the sense thai it is bounded territory which guarantees o rder and enables life io flouri sh . In official posi-war rhetoric, life on the Finnish side is, as ihe proverbial phrase puts it, "like winning th e lottery" , whilst life on the other side is, wel l , rather different.
Until the mid-1 970s10, the official rhetori c of forest-based prosperity broadly corresponded to the experiences of Finns across the country.
The modern forest, intensively managed io pro duce a sustained yield oftimber, became a focus of national as well as profes sional pride (Michelsen 1 995) but also something that peo ple thought about in highly personal term s.
This was (and is) because most of the forests consumed by the paper and pulp industry were privately owned, not in the alienating hands of large corporations or even of the state (Berg lund 2000). Orvar Lofgren ( 1 993 ) argues that landscapes perceived as national become are nas of emotional resonance and, along with other material manifestations of national pecu liarity, provide arenas for contesting and chal lenging what it means to be a nation, or part of one. It is not surprising then that in independ ent Finland, that is since 1 917, challenging the forestry expertise has always also been seen as threatening to a national consensus.U Even complaints about foul-smelling paper and pulp plants were long shrugged off with the quip that money smells. Forest politics has, as a conse quence, been a typical arena for socialisation into the role of social critic. Institutional conti nuity in forest protest is manifest for instance in an organisation called the Nature League, prominent when forest-industries lobbies need to name their enemy. 12 Throughout the 1 9 90s critics of the forest sector were regularly por trayed as irresponsible, romantic and even trai tors of the nation by the mainstream media and representatives of the forestry sector. 13 Activists' efforts are probably rightly inter preted by older generations as a sign that young people's allegiances are no longer with the for est i n d ustri es wh ich used to p rotect 1:.1 the rl a n d and fa m i ly. Fo r ott rl i or g-e ne ra t ion::;, th o::;o ::;y m bolisod belon gi n g to a l a n d wh ore peopl e wore free, democratic a n d able to fu l fi l the rn::;ol ve::; with tho help of' a ma rket econ omy, to a land whi ch, above all, saved itse l f' from t h o fa te of' so many, deve lop i ng i nto a l ibera l democracy rath er than a sa tel l i te of M oscow. Conson a n t w i th these kind::; of views, Ru::;::;ian Ka rc l i a is ::;omc times portrayed in the media as a s ite of di::;or dcr and dan ger, whorea::; fo r young activi sts, th i s 'w rong' ::; i de o f'the border i::; a locus ofvirtuc.
Th is probably rcll ecis econ omi c changes, as forestry is losing out to other sectors of the economy, such as an expan di ng-te lecom mu n ica tions industry. Novc rth o l oss, li1r tho lorcsocablc future the critique oftorestry will remain cen tral to alternative politics. It is also worth men tioning that forest activists are among the lew in contemporary Finland who mount a sus tained challenge to nco-liberal economics and foster critical debate on technology and science.

Situated Ecopolitics
Let me now return to a more ethnographic sense of activism. In the early 1 990s, after the border was opened, environmentalists accused Finnish companies of plundering Karelia's irre placeable old-growth forests for short-term prof it, and they literally followed the timber lorries crossing the border. 14 In addition to mapping biodiversity, a few activists have acted as pri vate investigators tracking down criminals and apprehending Finnish loggers cutting down areas already set aside for conservation. 1 " In the wake of political and economic upheaval, the border zone quickly became known as the Wild East, haven of unscrupulous and corrupt operators, once again drawing Finnish atten tion to the proximity to, even contiguity with, the Russian Other.
Unlike those who highlight the dangerous ness of the border zone, Finnish activists be haved as ifrather than going abroad to Russian Karelia, they were coming home and leaving the alien behind . Crossing the border is also thought of as travelling back in time, perhaps to an earlier Finland. For despite Russification policies, many inhabitants of Karelia speak a 28 l a n guage closely re lated to F'i n n ish and u n re lated to Russ in n , n n d wh ich n l lows loca ls n n cl F i nn i ::;h activ i ::; t�:; to �:; ha i·o th ei r experiences i n a n atmo�:;phere of s pec i a l i nt i m a cy. Ka rclia has long been ro mantici �:; ed by Fi n n i�:; h i nte l lectu a l s, and the re a re spec ial c u l tu ral con nections to tho regi on, not j u�:;t a mong activ i sts, but a m ong state rep resen tatives and other Fi n ns.
S ign i fican t �:; oc i a l bon ds between some activ ists and v il l agers (and, although 1 have little di rect ev i de n ce, p robably between m i n i stry level actors a l so) were created beca use the groups from both s ides of the internati onal fro ntier share i deas about the importance of fo rests for l ivi n g th e good life. 1 " Knowl edge abo u t (()rest::; i s con stan tly created in both dc contextuali sed technosci entific discourses and in sen suous engagement. And much of the l at ter is u ti l i tari an , not solely ro m antic. Indeed, a number of activists come from rural homes where lorcsts arc not pri mari ly sources of aes thetic pleasure, but offinancial support. Within Karelia's forests and through contacts with the inhabitants of the forest vi llages, historically specific forms of social ity th us arti cul ate with world-wide, deterritorialised discourses of the biological . Even in a globalised epoch, and even among citizens of wealthier, highly modernised countries, social life remains imbricated in material processes.
What I suggest is that the tangible reality of Karelia resonated with activists so strongly because they were already familiar with mak ing their home, albeit in a very different way, in the forest. They compared their own homeland, with its manicured forests, to what they en countered here and found it wanting. The long conversations about berry picking, saunas and building materials that these activists could carry out with locals were only possible because of a partially shared concrete understanding of the practical use of forest resources. The manip ulation of the material aspect of the forest was probably the aspect talked about most when activists and locals conversed. Pragmatics and aesthetics, not biodiversity, fuelled their discus sions, as did a sense of profound injustice and, often, shame for their compatriots' actions. 1 7 One o f the prominent young men involved often used strong language to refer to the lies, cyn icism and greed promoted by the I(> rest prod ucts i n d u::;tries. His l on g-term i nvol vement had led to u soph i sticated u nderstanding of the . pol i tics of filrest expl oitation and of forest pro tecti on . A skill ed negoti ator and cam paigner, he had closely obscr·vcd how the large conserva tion orga n isation s seck to co-opt smal l er play ers an d be co-opted themselves into di l u ted form s of intervention. Involved in these proc esses hi mseH; he came to be seen for a few years as the most knowledgeabl e expert on the con servati o n ist side. Yet l i ke so many others whom I met, he insisted that an extensive old-growth forest is more than a repository of biodiversity or an object of aestheti c contemplation; it is a locus for materi al , but above a l l , spiritual re generation.
In a taped interview one young woman , who was extremely cflectivc in un covering the ille gal activities of timber companies , insisted that "actually, the important kn owledge comes from bumping into these issues in practice. That's where you get th e intuition that's so important.
It's about understanding I not information] ". As she continued , she shifted away from talking about the forests themselves to telling me about confrontations with drunken loggers and other Finns , about helping an injured prostitute to hospital , and about her personal motives for continuing the campaign even when criticised for romantic and utopian attitudes. "Yes" , she continued without prompting, her involvement might reflect a utopian strain of thinking, but even more unrealistic was the dream of contin ued economic growth. What border could Finn ish companies cross once these forests had been consumed? And what , activists ask , drives Finn ish companies to leave such devastation in Karelia when at home at least they persistently (and cynically) argue that they take ecological fragility seriously. 18 Activists felt that they were supporting the views of the local population in decrying the industrial use oflocal forests.19 In Soviet times , as today, forests in Russia have been classified on scientific grounds and their use has been controlled by state-experts (Myllynen et al. 1996). However, state forestry reinforced cus tomary practices according to which forests immediately surrounding villages were used for domesti c purposes only. Today's clear cuts , many carried out by Finnish companies , are thus a tangible sign ofhow times have chan ged.
In Vuokkiniemi , the largest of the Karclian villages , a local teacher recounted how "we've lived from the forest all our lives ," and talking of the first clear cut she ever saw, she said it had been like "entering the hallway to Hell" (see Berglund 1997). Resin collecting used to em ploy most men until less than two decades ago. Women still stock jams made from forest ber ries in their cellar along with mushroom pre serves and medicinal plants. Interest is also growing in commercially viable forms of sus tainable forestry, although concrete measures to promote it are in early stages.2° Clearly, Karelia is a region where human life and ecolog ical systems mutually constitute and frequent ly nurture each other. Even before Stalinist obsession with forests as security, villagers' forestry practices were sustainable , geared to wards partial export from the region (as resin , formerly tar) , and to hunting, fishing and do mestic timber needs.
I suggest that although Finnish activists' rhetoric has often supported the international discourse about the region as a repository ofthe globe's biodiversity (see Kleinn 1998), much of what sustains their enthusiasm comes from their relationship with the people living there and from their sympathy with the people's atti tudes to the forests. I am not , however, claiming that all those from outside Finland have the conver:;e attitude w h ich sees natu re us a n ex tern al resou rce o n ly to be rei fied and ro manti cised yet sti l l 'managed'. Indeed, the i nterna tion a l ly r u n Ta iga Rescue Network has done much to emph asise the pol itico-economic a n d cultural components of con servation itself: But my point is th at Finn ish act i v i sts speci fi cally are i denti fying these filrests as somethi ng a l ready familiar, providing further impetus fo r seeking connection with people in ways that chall enge the idea that specific n atural reso urc es are, and should be, u nder the authority of' one sovereign power.

The Cultural Signi ficance of Karelia
The Karelian case suggests that cross-border environmentalism is complex and multi-direc tional and impossible to narrate into a singular argument. Part of the problem is that the con nection between ecology and culture can be, and has been, used to argue that Karelia is more a part of Finland than of Russia and woul d thus be better off under Finnish sovereignty. 1 But even more radically, ecopolitics potentially chal lenges the whole concept of sovereign territory (Kuehls 1 996).
In addition to the conjunction of transna tional, media-infiltrated environmentalism with the truly noteworthy material characteristics of this border, cross-border traffic is also in spired by Karelia's special place in the Finnish national consciousness. Many Finns who do not join activists feel strongly about these forests simply because Karelia is thought of as the cradle of Finnish national culture. Although in the twentieth century it was associated with the unknown and frightening Soviet power, starting in the eighteenth century, peripheral Karelia in fact produced Finland's 'exotics with in'. As Finnish nationalism became more confi dent, Karelia, which lay administratively on both sides of the border, came to symbolise a quintessentially national folklore, the locus of the cultural authenticity which nineteenth cen tury European nationalisms needed in order to constitute the self as collective subject. Thus, when early nineteenth century Finns, after being transferred in 180 9 from Swedish to Rus sian rule, asked the question "who are we?'', the answer came from fol klorists. '!'hey a rgued that Fi n land's c u l tu ra l roots l i e in the backwood:; of Karelia, poorly connected both to F i n l a n d and to I mpe rial Russ i a , but enjoy i n g a vibrant oral trad i ti o n , i magi ned to h ave been lost fro m the rest of' the cou ntry along w i th modern isation .
The i mage of' Karel i a as some kind of' proto Finni s h con d i tion also suggested thai an essen tial element of Fin n ishness was the bond be tween people and forest. A broadly Herderian notion ofthe uniq ueness of all peoples i n formed the way thai the early n i neteenth centu ry ro mantics imagined the rel ationship between people and nature. They came to celebrate the environmental circumstances of the emergi ng n ati on , draw ing on Herder's i deas about the significance of varying physical environments for the evolution of national character (Wilson After the Second World War a large area of Finland, over 10 per cent of the territory, known as the Karelian Isthmus, was ceded to the Soviet Union. This experience solidified a sense of shared Finnish identity across language and class boundaries (though arguably Sami and Gypsy minorities have a different view) such that the name Karelia rings louder than others in contemporary consciousness22, and that is in many senses an unstable, liminal space, one that inspires both desire and fear. Through most of its independence the Finn ish co l l ective i magination has easi ly accepted a self image of a homogen eou s, consensual peo ple, and w hen the border was shown to be permeable, th o�:�e i n�:�ide Fin l and overcame in tern al squabbles in order to keep the enemy out.
Importantly, the strengthening consensus was accom panied by an enhanced sel f-conscious ness of being at home in forested landscapes.
Some or the mech anisms of this homogenisa tion were top-down like the spread of forest professionals across th e te rritory, or the fashion for pa inti n g forestcd l undscapcs, b ut many were bottom-up, like col lective resistance by small holders to company ow nershi p of land. Because of the way they have been constituted through the nation-state apparatus as citizens with both rights and responsibilities towards that state, Finns value forests in both utilitarian and in aesthetic terms (Berglund 2000 ment. Yet it is p reci sely th i s feature which haH attracted the pos itive attention ofthc activi�:� t�:�.
The ecopolitical challenge to territorial thought is only provoked by the fact that these forests, i n this place, have been he re a certain time. They are irreducible both to state-protected market values and to arguments about the exclusive property of any eth nic group or state.
The critics' joint agendas thus draw atten tion to what Kuehls calls the "nonsovereign territorial nature of ecopolitics" ( 1 996: 1 1 8), that l oggi ng is in any case not confined to any bounded territory, but both fuels and is fuelled by world-wide consumer desire for its produ cts. What is going on in Karelia cannot therefore be analysed simply as a conflict over who is master in the region. Such an analysis would remain as impotent as the appeals to nature and to terri tory it sought to explain. This is because ecopol itics already crosses borders with little heed to national sovereignty. " Even modern states arc not capable of imposing exhaustive injunctions on how their populations should connect with the environment. In Finland, despite a century of state rhetoric in which the perfect forest is the productive forest, commercial utilitywhether for industry or tourism -hardly ex hausts the ways nature is actually practised let alone dreamed of And for those who currently make their home in Russian Karelia, state fantasies of control and progress have long been at odds with place-bound realities.

Conclusion
Borders thus remain salient spaces for compar ing and contrasting similarity and difference, in biophysical or infrastructural terms, and in terms of authoritative knowledge. As Russian (http:// www.luontoliitto.fl/forest/russia/index.html, defi ned in the te rms of state i n stitutions. And although the language of i nte rn ation a l :;cie nce remains important, 1 have argued that it hardly promi:;e:; to create truly global collectives with identical commit ments lead ing to a sense of global identity. Such an iden ti ty, l suspect, is not going to emerge out of grassroot:; environmen talis m . Ecopolitics is then neither national, confined within borders, nor truly global. But it remains played out both w ithin and against territorial logics. There is sti l l a h uge market for wood products, and everywhere that forests (or other renewable resources) and people share a terri tory, these forests and the people become entan gled. This appli es not just to H.ussian Karelia but to many areas, especially in the tropical world (particularly South East Asia) where northern forest-products compani es arc trans forming more and more places into profit ma chines (Carrere and Lohmann 1. 99 6). At an empirical level, neither the exploitation of tim ber nor environmentalism can be said to have become de-territorialised. Instead, they are be ing re-territorialised.
As more and more space is consumed by productive machinery and waste disposal, the fight over some territory promises to intensify.
What needs to be pursued is not the question, to whom does a certain territory belong, but rath er: is the hype of deterritorialisation prema turely displacing questions about what new boundaries and barriers are emerging in the world today? And at what level of analysis does the drive to de-territorialise prove analytically productive? Since political practice and social theory have unfolded for 300 years in matrices of space and time that operate territorially, such questions are difficult to articulate let alone answer conclusively. But oddly enough, it seems to be at the edges of territories, at bor ders, that one might best turn to examine them.

Notes
1. Thanks to Hastings Donnan and Dieter Haller for organising the panel and for comments. 2. I use this formulation because the contiguous region inside Finland is also known as Karelia. 3. A type of forest with much spruce and pine, i n tc n; pc n;cd w i t h rivers, l n kcs n n d m i res. The fitcL t. hn t. t hese fi u·cst s n rc <:o n t i n uo u s n <: ross a l a rge expa n se is s i g-n i fi<:a n t. c<:ol ogi <:a l ly, as is t he i r· ag"c.
4. I h ave i n<:c l ea rned that she d id p u rd r a sc a home th e re.
5. N i ne month i n 1. 996 i n d u d i ng th ree t r i p:; to H.w; s i n o f a few days each, i n terviews i n F i n l a n d s i n<:c then , and two tri p t o Hu ss i a i n 1 999.
(i. To fiu·eg"ro u n d the fi-1cL t hat env i ro n m en t a l i s m is not a straighlf(,rward p ractice l et a lone a sel f ev i dently v i rtuous one, bo rrow i n g from the geog rapher Th om Kuehls ( 1 996) I sh al l re fe r t o t he R t ruggles over Ka re l i a' filrcstR as ccopo l i t. ics.

.
No n -governmen ta l o rga n isnt ions. 8. Kueh ls ( 1 996) elaborates on the <:on n cd i on be tween e<:opol i tics and Lockean wn<:epti ons of sovereignty over productive land. 9. Sec Lowood ( 1 990) on cienti fi<: f(uu;try a n d its i mp act. 1 0. Tncreasecl mechanisation ancl tran sform ations in the political economy of forest prod ucts has meant relative decli ne since the mid -1 970 . Mar chak ( 1 995) and Donner-Amnell (1991). 1 1 . Twentieth century domestic politics was a lways accompanied by forest debate (Lehtinen 1991, Berglund 2000. 1. 2 . Mo re eth nograph i <: deta il can be fi1 u n d in Berg lund (forthcoming). 13. This is borne out in professional publications and was abundantly clear in enco unte r:;, i nclud ing nine interviews with high-ranking repre sentatives from corporate and state proponents of industrial forestry. 14. Information is available from environmental or ganisations in electronic form, and Finnish re se arch continues to expand and Haapala 1999.) 15. Kleinn ( 1 998) provides detail. 16. Bonds between the activists from Finland and those from Russia, especially Moscow were also clearly close, but I had little opportunity to be come familiar enough with them to make a strong er argument. 17. Motives for interaction are, of course, heteroge neous on both sides, and understandings of ceo politics are also highly varied. Complicating the picture is also the fact that a partial moratorium on logging Karelian old-growth was instituted by the largest Finnish companies in 1997. 18. In Finland where plots are often small by inter national comparison, extensive clear cutting is illegal. In Karelia, however, many companies claim that they are following local custom, in other words regulations inherited from the Sovi et era, where they denude hectare upon hectare of forest paying little if any heed to replanting. See Marchak ( 1995). 19. Attitudes are varied. Also, revenues from local timber have, despite administrative and politi cal set -backs, bc< 'n u sed Lo pay lin· i nsLn ncc lin· t. he Vuo k k i n ic m i School (Sec m a p ) . 2 0 . Ba ed on per o n a l co m n 1 u n icat.ion o n b o t h sides of the borde1· a n d newspaper a r ticles. Kg. 'ltu noky l ii ei c l i i y ksi n suoj e l u sta', Kcu:ia la i n en , 271 1 0197 .

21.
Debate ::;Li l l ::;u rro u nds t h e i nj u tice of the l o::;s o f 'sou t hern' Kn rc l i a t o t.he Soviet. U n ion i n t he Secon d World Wa r. Fo r the context sec Pa asi ( 1 99€i) a n d below.
22. But ::;cc the a rgu ment i n Paa::;i ( 1 996) that it wa on ly the war thnt rea l ly ::;ccu rcd homogcncou iden t i t y and l .lll CJ I I <'St. io ned a l le�-:i a n ce t. o the F i n n i s h n a t. ion -stat. c.
23. l copo l i tic::; i eq u a l ly i nconson a n t w i th pan -E u ro pea n or global c l a i m s to sovereignty such as de mands that Ka re l i a or the Amazon bc ' avcd' from thei r i n habitants in the name of biod i versity.