Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the changing historical dynamics of the nexus between quarry mining and ecological tourism in Karelia, and the effects of this nexus on the indigenous Northern Veps living near Onezhskoe Lake, as both industries shifted from being managed by the state to being privatized and deregulated.

Paper long abstract:

For centuries Karelia has been exploited for its natural resources and venerated for its pristine nature at the same time. This paper uses ethnohistorical and ethnographic data to trace how the region of Karelia around the Onezhskoee Lake, home to the indigenous Northern Veps, was simultaneously a site of quarry mining of elite, rare dimension stones and a land of ecological and health resorts during the Russian and the Soviet eras, and how how those twin industries have become transformed in the post-Soviet context of the privatization of nature. During the Tsarist and the Soviet era, both resource extraction and "nature vacations" were state-driven enterprises, experienced by the local Veps as environmentally balanced, fairly managed industries associated with financial compensation and cultural capital. Today the shores of Onezhskoe Lake are the sites of aggressive logging operations, and multiple quarries, run by foreign companies whose identities are opaque to the Veps, who experience these new incarnations of these industries as environmentally unbalanced and economically unjust. At the same time, the "pristine" remnants of the lakeshore property, minutes away from the quarries, are bought up by private ecoresort developers and effectively removed from local use, compounding the Veps' experience of dispossession. Using ethnographic data from Vepsian villages, this paper endeavors to articulate the dynamics of the nexus between resource extraction and ecotourism where for centuries "good old days of mining" coexisted with prefigurative versions of modern ecotourism, and where now deregulated mining coexists with private-sector ecotourism.