What is the source of Norway's culture of environmental harmony in our troubled world? Exploring the role of Norwegian scholar-activists of the late twentieth century, Peder Anker examines how they portrayed their country as a place of environmental stability in a world filled with tension. In contrast with societies dirtied by the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century, Norway's power, they argued, lay in the pristine, ideal natural environment of the periphery. Globally, a beautiful Norway came to be contrasted with a polluted world and fashioned as an ecological microcosm for the creation of a better global macrocosm. In this innovative, interdisciplinary history, Anker explores the ways in which ecological concerns were imported via Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, then to be exported from Norway back to the world at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
Author(s): Peder Anker
Series: Studies In Environment And History
Edition: 1
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 304
Tags: Environmentalism: Social Aspects: Norway; Environmentalism: Political Aspects: Norway; Climatic Changes: Norway
Cover
Half-title
Series information
Title page
Copyright information
Epigraph
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
‘‘We Are As Gods’’
1 The Power of the Periphery
The Allure of Life Lost
Chasing Paradise
The Return to the Wild
Learning from the People of Swat
The Fisherman-Peasant
2 The Ecologists
The High Mountain Ecology Research Station
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
The First Lectures in Ecology by Biologists
International Biological Program
A Steady-State Nation
3 The Ecophilosophers
True Weltanschauung
The Last Messiah
The Nation’s Philosopher
Mastering the Mountains
The Mardøla Demonstrations
The Ecophilosophy Group
4 The Deep Ecologists
Environmental Orientalism and the Critique of the West
The Referendum on the European Community
Deep Ecology in Bucharest
Marxist Attack
5 Environmental Studies
Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle
The Case against Science
Education in Ecological Dogmatism
6 The Call for a New Ecoreligion
Deep Ecology and Religion
Ecological Debate within the Church
Ecoreligion on the Syllabus
The Greening of the Church
7 The Sustainable Society
The Limits to Growth Report
The Call for a Golden Age in Equilibrium
Leading the Sustainable Effort
The Sustainable Society in Bucharest
The Limits to Growth in Norway
The Resource Policy Group
8 The Acid Rain Debate
Power-Socialism and the Social Function of Science
The Power-Socialism of the Labor Party
The Case against Environmentalism
Labor Party Environmentalism
The Acid Rain Debate
9 Our Common Future
The Alta Demonstrations
The End of Deep Ecology in Norway
Deep Ecology Goes Global
Our Common Future
The World’s ‘‘Pioneer Country’’
A Sustainable Climate
The Alternative Nation
Bibliography
Manuscript Collections
Index
