Paper short abstract:

A recognition of the social and cultural dimensions of environmental damage has already shifted vocabularies and problem definitions. The paper examines the trope of design, popular among urban environmentalists in Helsinki, as a flexible and vague but potentially productive tool to conceptualize this shift and perhaps to inform environmental anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

Many initiatives for addressing ecological degradation have an urban bias, are narrowly expert-based and unequal in their demands and impacts, yet remain legitimated through appeal to the common good. Anthropology has helped draw attention to the politics implicit in such agendas and argued for more constructivist conceptions of knowledge. Meanwhile contradictions between globally recognized threats and locally consequential actions continue to create practical and political problems. But important shifts in environmental thought are taking place. These include significant reappraisals of the social and cultural dimensions of environmental damage and of the idea of technology.

This paper focuses on environmentalist thought in Helsinki where it is a significant domain of cultural creativity. Specifically it looks at the promises and pitfalls of "design" as a popular international trope for parsing together domains that earlier environmentalist thinking kept separate.

The paper shows how environmentalism never properly acknowledged the fictions that separated "nature" as rurality from "culture" as city. Now green thought is entangled with the urban vibe of the post-industrial city and green values inform its governance. But, the paper notes, although alternative thinking proliferates, it can be difficult to distinguish market-oriented green-washing from more meaningful efforts to address threats. Nevertheless, across networks of doers and thinkers, under the flexible banner of design, it seems it is possible to imagine the end of economic growth and to see technology in the environment. It is equally possible to see design in purely commercial terms.

The paper's theoretical impulse is towards a "post-constructivist", simultaneously rural and urban, environmental anthropology.