This article investigates the 1974 Nordic Environmental ProtectionConvention. It shows that the ulterior motives for such a conventionwere Nordic ambitions to regulate and reduce transboundary pollution originating outside of the Nordic region. Emphasizing theinter-organizational dynamics between institutionalized Nordiccooperation and international organizations, it examines how theNordics drew on developments within international organizations and how they pursued their agenda of shaping international environmental law within the OECD. Ultimately, the article argues thatthe Nordic countries tried to create a model convention to beexported to and implemented at the international level with theaim of reducing transboundary pollution and establishing transnational responsibilities and accountabilities. By setting out this argument and shedding light on the first legally binding internationalconvention to address transboundary pollution with proceduralprinciples, the article breaks new ground on the history of Nordicenvironmental cooperation as well as on the development of international environmental law.
I am spending a long weekend with my parents in the Lower Rhine region, not far from the Ruhr area. It is the end of August in Germany and, like much of Europe, the country is suffering from persistent heat and drought. It’s that “summer of the century” again. Record low water levels are being reported from the Rhine near Duisburg, the city where I was born. The media speak of a “historic low”. The Rhine and other rivers in Germany have exposed their Hunger Stones. These stones in the riverbed mark exceptional periods of drought over the last centuries. They remind of the people’s suffering during these times, and their reappearance should alert the following generations to the dependence of humans on their environment and make them aware of the abundance and the deprivations that nature holds in store.
The last historic low on the Lower Rhine near Duisburg was just four years ago, in 2018. How can and how do we want to deal with the fact that natural events that we have long considered extraordinary are occurring at ever shorter intervals? In 2002, the people bordering the river Elbe experienced the “flood of the century”. Only last year, in 2021, a “century flood” hit the Ahr Valley. When such “century events” occur at intervals of decades, the extraordinary becomes commonplace. The residents of the flooded villages in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate worry now that they have fallen into public oblivion after the first large wave of donations. Even a catastrophe, it seems, can be gotten used to.
The concept of the “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” refers to this habituation effect. A “shifting baseline” can be translated to a changing reference. Our ideas of the ordinary or normal change over time because our references change. The two-year Covid-19 pandemic has made us practice some new behaviors, such as wearing face masks and keeping our distance, which now seem normal to us. The ongoing war in Ukraine has brought with it the fear of a creeping acceptance or even numbing of the European population. The war situation becomes normal. Likewise, in times of global climate change, we experience environmental changes as normal that previous generations experienced as extraordinary, extreme or catastrophic.
The originator of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome, Canadian fisheries expert Daniel Pauly, had such long-term environmental changes in mind when, in the 1990s, he described his observation that each new generation of fishermen along the North American coast was hauling in smaller and smaller catches over the course of a century. Instead of questioning it, they accepted their situation. The overfishing of the oceans rose to new dimensions obvious, but the fishermen’s concern did not. Taken together, Pauly’s observations were symptomatic of one finding: those most affected by an environmental condition were most accommodating.
Pauly used the medical term “syndrome” to describe his diagnosis that people are able to normalize extreme situations relatively quickly. What we consider ordinary or normal is not naturally given but derived from the lived context. Normality needs a frame of reference. Every generation experiences the situation into which it is born as normal. Poverty and war can seem as normal as can peace and prosperity. A life expectancy of roughly 40 years was just as normal in Germany around 1880 as roughly 80 years are today.
The “baseline” designates the respective reference. We measure and evaluate our situation in spatial and temporal comparison. We compare our economic power not with the countries of the Global South but with our European neighbors. Our temporal baseline is our lifetime or generational time, which is commonly measured in 30-year periods. Our reference is usually our own childhood. The baseline of my generation is the 1960s, 70s and 80s. “Everything was better back then” means that the 1970s were best. And vice versa: despite all its problems, every generation wants to believe that it lives in the best of all possible worlds.
In addition to lived normality, statistical normality is an expression of our baselines shifting over time. The average, the mean, is calculated from data collected over specific periods of time. Here, too, the reference values are constantly being newly agreed upon. The “summer of the century” is a statistical entity. It states that, on average, one summer in every hundred will be extremely hot and dry. When we speak of the “warmest summer on record”, we mean records that make it possible to form mean values in a meaningful way. Those systematic weather records have been around for 150 years since the late 19th century. When we speak of the “two-degree target”, we mean limiting global warming, i.e., the global average temperature increase, to 2 degrees Celsius “since industrialization”. A period of about 250 years serves as our baseline. Likewise, the zero point of gauge is not the lowest point in the Rhine’s riverbed, but the geographical location at which the water level gauge is placed. Gauge zero is a convention.
Whether measured values or data reconstructed from ice cores and sediments, climate research has a wealth of reliable information to share that goes far beyond the time we have ourselves experienced. Yet again, what appears as statistically normal or deviant depends on the time period we refer to. If we were to extend the time span to include the entire history of the earth with its many warm and cold periods, our present climatic changes would be practically negligible. However, if we compare ourselves with the current stable warm period of the last 12,000 years, the Holocene, the climate change of the last 200 years becomes highly significant. What we perceive, and what we perceive as normal, depends on the baseline, the “climatological reference period”. Like the generational span, the climatological reference period encompasses 30 years. Average temperatures are formed over periods of 30 years. This reference period determines our “normal climate”. Until recently, our normal climate was derived from the period 1961 to 1990. In 2021, the reference period was updated to the new period 1991 to 2020.
It makes sense to update the statistical reference periods, just as it makes sense to use generational time as a moving temporal frame of reference. The new statistical reference period is more up-to-date and closer to the climate experienced by the living population. However, the mean temperature of the new reference period is more than 1 degree higher than the mean temperature of the previous reference period. Very warm years are statistically no longer noticeable, because all years in this new period were relatively too warm. Shifting baselines are important not only in social psychology but also in statistics. When the frame of reference for statistical observation changes, deviations can become invisible – they are statistically normalized.
On the one hand, acclimatization may be our best coping strategy to deal with climate change. It seems as if humans cannot experience situations as permanently extreme, nor can they remain on constant alert. Normalizing a situation by shifting the reference points is an individual and collective adaptation strategy. As a society, we delegate dealing with extremes to our institutions. We institutionalize preparedness for crises and disasters. “Climate adaptation” is one such collective strategy that envisages new social and technical solutions to normalize climate change.
On the other hand, we will have to cope with the fact that long-term and especially slow changes can neither be experienced nor easily recorded statistically. They fall out of our lived time, and as series of data they often remain abstract. They also fall outside of the short cycles of media and politics. Daily press and daily politics make the baseline the day, the month, the year, possibly the legislative period. Political and medial memories are short. Pauly perceived the habituation effect of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome as a problem because habituation makes it difficult to mobilize for political opinion-forming and political change. After all, the normal is not necessarily the desirable, at least not always and for everyone.
Stories and events are needed to raise awareness about slow changes such as climate change. Stories can renew memories beyond our own generation. Historical dimensions can become concrete to us like the Hunger Stones in the river Rhine, which allow unique insights into the lives of past centuries. And isn’t the bread and butter of our profession of historiography to narrate, analyze and comment on changes over long periods of time? Besides recollecting the past, future narratives and science fiction stories can project current questions and problems into the future to make them concrete for us. This was Rachel Carson’s plot device in her book Silent Spring. Finally, it will also be important to communicate long-term statistical trends. The World Meteorological Organization WMO recommended keeping the reference period 1961 to 1990 to assess long-term climate developments. For us not to acclimatize to new social, political and environmental climates too quickly, we need meaningful baselines.
Missing in-depth conversations about important movies? Do you want to know more about Sami culture and history or about resource extraction in the deep sea? Have you ever heard a joik?
On September 1st, Crosscuts – Stockholm’s first environmental humanities film festival – will return! Through documentaries, poetry and conversations between leading researchers, filmmakers, students and artists, we explore different themes. This year we delve into deep sea mining, environmental activism and the green movement and Sami culture and the climate crisis. Everything happens on site at KTH, in Stockholm.
The program offers, among other things, the artistic documentary series What is Deep Sea Mining? (directors: Inhabitants with Margarida Mendes), the Greenpeace film How to change the world (director: Jerry Rothwell) and the acclaimed documentary about Britta Marakatt-Labba Historjá – Stygn för Sapmí (director: Thomas Jackson).
Among the invited panelists are Thomas Jackson, director, Gunhild Rosqvist, professor, Staffan Lindberg, climate journalist at Aftonbladet and Ylva Gustafsson, activist, folk educator and stage artist, who will also perform a joik for us. A joik is a traditional form of song in Sámi music performed by the Sámi people of Sapmi in Northern Europe and it is also one of the oldest vocal traditions in Europe.
During the evening we have with us the ecopoets Evelyn Reilly and Juan Carlos Galeano who will perform their poetry via link, and then participate in a conversation with the audience.
The event is held in English. Participation is free of charge, but the number of seats is limited and therefore advance registration is required.
Welcome to a day full of documentary films, panel discussions and performance!
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Crosscuts
Crosscuts is an international festival for film, art and research in the environmental humanities. Each film is shown together with a panel discussion with specially invited guests. The festival is organized this year by the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL) in collaboration with Stockholm University. Crosscuts was organized for the first time in 2018.
Rather than perpetuating the conventional academic mode of compartmentalizing knowledge, separating theory and practice, and adopting a hierarchized and exclusive treatment of the visual and the verbal, your events were made to bring scholars and artists together and to speak to both in the vibrant questions they raised with their researches.
Trinh T. Minh-ha, filmmaker, writer and professor at the University of California Berkeley
Crosscuts comes across as a cutting-edge bridge between academia, the art world, and the public sphere. This is eminently in line with KTH’s best traditions; the school’s motto famously brings together science and art.
Jan Olsson, professor emeritus of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University
This Stockholm Environmental Humanities Festival for Film and Text that was held for the first time in the fall of 2018, was an extremely successful and important event for both academic community and the general public.
Madina Tlostanova, professor in postcolonial feminism, Linköpings University.
Our colleague Anna Storm (now professor of technology and social change at Linköping University) has been involved in an intellectual exchange with the state-owned power company Vattenfall about the future of Ågesta Nuclear Power Plant in the context of its decommissioning in the magazine NyTeknik.
In Anna’s first article from 28 July 2022, she displays her consternation by the fact that Sweden’s first nuclear power plant (1963-1974) was already being dismantled, disregarding demands for making this cultural heritage of modern Sweden accessible to a wider audience via the cooperation with musea and heritage scholars. Especially in the case of the iconic control room, Anna objected to the practice of the company.
Five days later, on 02 August, Melker Drottz, the acting head of decommissioning of Ågestaverket from Vattenfall, published a response to Anna in the same magazine. In his eyes, Vattenfall did simply, what they were legally obliged to do. Since the control room, among other facilities, would be an irradiated environment, he objected to Anna’s wishes for creating a cultural venue from this heritage site. Furthermore, he pointed to the various other ways, Vattenfall would contribute to the memory of the Ågesta plant.
One day later, on 03 August, Anna responded by stating that future generations also need the actual sites as witnesses of their cultural history. In her understanding, photographs and oral stories will not be enough.
Anna Storm
Here are full citations for this exchange:
Storm, Anna: “Ågestaverket – en unik kärnkraftsanläggning slängd i containrar”, in: NyTeknik, 2022-07-28, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/agestaverket-en-unik-karnkraftsanlaggning-slangd-i-containrar-7035908 [2022-08-09].
Drottz, Melker (operativ chef för nedmontering och rivning av Ågestaverket, Vattenfall): Replik “Vi är skyldiga att montera ned Ågestaverket”, in: NyTeknik, 2022-08-02, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/vi-ar-skyldiga-att-montera-ned-agestaverket-7035985 [2022-08-09].
Storm, Anna: Slutreplik “Det hade varit möjligt att behålla kontrollrummet från Ågestaverket”, in: NyTeknik, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/det-hade-varit-mojligt-att-behalla-kontrollrummet-fran-agestaverket-7036016 [2022-08-09].
What is Deep Sea Mining? is a five episode short film series dedicated to the topic of deep sea mining, a new frontier of resource extraction at the bottom of the ocean, set to begin in the next few years. It is also one of the head events of the third edition of Crosscuts – Stockholm Environmental Humanities Festival for Film and Text on September 1st this fall.
What is Deep Sea Mining? will start up the festival this year. The five episodes are screened at a brownbag seminar and followed by a discussion lead by the Divison’s Tirza Myer. In the panel we have Robert Blasiak, researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (focuses on the sustainable management of ocean resources, and ocean stewardship) and Staffan Lindberg, author and journalist at Swedish paper Aftonbladet (focuses on foreign and climate news).
The What is Deep Sea Mining? project was developed in collaboration with Margarida Mendes, curator, educator and activist from Lisbon, Portugal. Margardia is a founding member of Oceano Livre, the environmental movement against deep sea mining. She is dedicated to understand how a shifting climate impacts society’s capacity for imagination. We will also show a recording of Margarida during this event.
We are happy to share the news that Professor Sverker Sörlin was nominated by Sveriges Radio P1 to be one of the hosts for the aclaimed radio show Sommar. The show has been running during the summer weeks since the sixties. Every year a number of profiles of various backgrounds (research, arts, acting, politics etc) are choosen to host the show for a one hour session. The hosts choose the topic themselves and the music that goes with it.
The names are announced at the end of May each years, and the days before are always full of Swedes speculating in the lunch room about who will be on the list the upcoming sumer. It is an honorable nomination, and we are all very proud and happy that Sverker is one of the hosts this year.
“-My summer speaks about the love towards life and about such things that help us to live, for example empathy, justice and education. Therefore it will be about the vision of the fossil-free wellfare state Sweden. This is the new Green Norrland’s test case.”
Sverker’s show will air on 7 July, but is accessable at the Swedish Radio webpage after. The show is always in Swedish.
Please check out the broadcast via Radio Sweden’s Website. The producer of the session is Niklas Zachrisson.
Abstract (from Radio Sweden):
Sverker Sörlin är prisbelönt författare och professor i miljöhistoria vid Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan.
Under lång tid har Sverker Sörlin också varit del av den svenska kulturdebatten som skribent i bland annat Dagens Nyheter. Han har skrivit en rad böcker, främst inom området idéhistoria, men också självbiografiskt om längdskidåkning, sjukdom och bildning.
I sin avhandling ”Framtidslandet” från 1988 beskrev han den första industriella revolutionen i Norrland i slutet av 1800-talet. En liknande utveckling sker idag – och framtidshoppet kring norra Sveriges nya stora industrier växer återigen.
You can read and even listen to the full text on the Aeon-Website. Here is a small extract from Erik’s piece:
The recently resurfaced planet, I argue, can be traced back to fantasies like Richardson’s. Contemporary planetary governance relies on a specific trajectory of planetary monitoring. Even though efforts to map and measure global space have a far longer history – not least as a primary vehicle of Western colonialism and imperialism – the efforts to monitor and govern planetary dynamics have also relied on a particular history of knowing, seeing and measuring the planet. Thinking of the planet as an interconnected system required quantified and centralised approaches as well as a wide set of scientific instruments and technologies. A specific kind of planet was able to emerge, not by itself, but through the interconnected histories of geopolitics, technology and grand visions of planetary monitoring.
Adam Wickberg, researcher in our division, has published a new article together with John Durham Peters (Yale Univesity) in the esteemed journal “Critical Inquiry”, published by the University of Chicago.
In “Media: The Case of Spain and New Spain” Peters and Wickberg develop the new concept of “environing media”. They are focussing on the rich cultural heritage of Mexico, looking back over the last 500 years of its media history.
Here is the abstract of this intriguing piece. If it catches your interest, check out the whole article here.
Abstract
This article develops the new concept of environing media against the case of Mexico’s complex history over the past five centuries. To do this, it stakes out a theoretical development consisting in a shift in understanding from media as content-delivery systems to data processors, combining it with a processual understanding of environment as an ongoing and historical process of environing.
In addition, the article discusses examples of indigenous media, an area that has so far received very little attention. The Aztec empire was as dependent on media forms as the Spanish colonizers who replaced it, and there are numerous cases of knowledges and practices surviving in hybrid forms, for example as part of maps. For much of its history, the field of media studies has been biased toward questions of (1) ideological or attitudinal influence caused by (2) modern or emergent technologies.
This article goes in another direction by thinking about media as (1) environing and (2) residual. Media are agencies of civilizational and environmental order. The rise of digital media in recent decades has reinforced the fundamental logistical role of media as agencies that arrange, catalog, organize, network, and index people, places, and things. Our understanding of media as fundamental constituents of organization joins the recent interest in infrastructures. Calendars, clocks, towers, names, addresses, maps, registers, arms, and money are all infrastructural media. Such media become second nature, morphing biorhythms and altering ecosystems.
Today’s planetary digital infrastructure builds upon the long legacy of resource management via databases. We argue for a longer genealogy of the nature shaping logistical role of media that is so evident today. In this article, we refine and exemplify these claims via a case study of some environing media in Mexico, a country with a deep and rich media history.
This joint seminar features two perspectives on how power relations have become embedded in computer technologies. Beginning with the early history of computers, Janet Abbate examines how computers were metaphorically described as “giant brains.”
Brain imagery encouraged the public to believe that computers had remarkable powers, while simultaneously obscuring the skilled labor of human programmers (often women) who did much of the actual work. This metaphor helped to devalue human labor and also fed the illusion that autonomous machines, rather than the people who controlled them, were responsible for the results produced by computers.
Abbate argues that in recent times the word “algorithm” has taken on the metaphorical role of the “giant brain” and performs similar ideological work, making human labor invisible while raising questions of accountability.
Fernanda R. Rosa explores power relations embedded in Internet infrastructure, revealing how Internet routers reflect and perpetuate global inequalities. She introduces an analytical technique called “code ethnography,” a method for examining code as a socio-technical actor, considering its social, political, and economic dynamics in the context of digital infrastructures.
Rosa focuses on the code for the Border Gateway Protocol and examines how this code is implemented at the internet exchange points (IXPs) that interconnect networks and allow the Internet to operate as a global infrastructure. Her comparison of the IXPs located in Frankfurt and São Paulo reveals inequalities between the global North and the global South and a concentration of power at the level of interconnection infrastructure hitherto unknown in the context of the political economy of the internet.
Both talks emphasize that an algorithm or an Internet router can only be understood in context: not only as part of a larger technological system, but also as an active element in social, economic and political power relations.
Time: Fri 2022-06-17 14.15 – 16.00 (Swedish Time)
Location: Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, Seminarroom Teknikringen 74 D, 5th floor
Language: English
Lecturer: Janet Abbate, Prof. & Fernanda R. Rosa, Ass. Prof., Science, Technology & Society at Virginia Tech
Dr. Janet Abbate is Professor and Dr. Fernanda R. Rosa is Assistant Professor, both at Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech.
It is no news that we are in a situation of climate crisis right now. Temperatures are going wild in many places of the earth. Already since March a severe heat wave struck Pakistan and India, affecting hundreds of millions of people. In the Pakistani city of Nawabshah a high temperature of 49.5 °C was measured. In the meantime, people have to pay more and more worldwide to get food onto their tables, while “over 2 billion people live in water-stressed countries”. The Great Barrier Reef, giving home to a unique biotope and one of the natural wonders of the earth has recently suffered a mass bleaching event and will most probably be gone soon. The situation is not coincidental as it is a clear result of accelerated humanmade climate change.
A recent update from the World Meteorological Organisation puts this into perspective. It says that there is a “50:50 chance of global temperature temporarily reaching [the] 1.5°C threshold in [the] next five years”. According to the Paris Climate Agreement from 2015, the 1.5°C threshold contained severe but somewhat manageable consequences of anthropogenic climate change. Many countries of the world had ratified this agreement, and ostensibly made it their goal to curb emissions in an effort to avoid a collapse. But instead and despite the Covid-19-recession, global CO2-emissions have been at an all-time high in 2021. The trajectory shows far beyond 1.5°C.
While a temporary increase in global temperature by 1.5 °C does not qualify as a permanent temperature increase, it nevertheless represents a looming cornerstone towards mass extinctions and the threatening of the foundations upon which human existence depends upon. It seems like the chance to act had been forfeited.
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