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Paper short abstract

This project looks at several ad campaigns that appeal to the by-now axiomatic nature-loving Swede to buy “green.” In the consumption of “green” products, the interests of global capitalism and individual self-expression are not only compatible but are mutually constitutive.

Paper long abstract

At the turn of the 20th century, as Culture Builders were constructing a Swedish national identity as a “nature-loving” folk (Frykman and Löfgren) with a unique biomystical relationship with Nature (Facos), the Swedish state also was embarking on an industrial development/settlement campaign in the boreal north – Sweden’s “Land of the Future,” which would fund Sweden’s Social Democratic experiment. Nature in its most pure, uncontaminated state was idealized by the North, in which outdoor re-creating was as aggressively developed as were extractive industries. This bifurcated North -- the North of the Imagination and the north of plunder -- continues to have utility in the new green capitalism, which reverberates with utopian fantasies in which the interests of global capitalism and individual self-expression are not only compatible but mutually constitutive, grounded in the instrumentalization of the natural landscape.

This project looks at several ad campaigns that appeal to the by now axiomatic nature-loving Swede, and which obscure the industrial processes involved in their production. It examines Svenska Skog’s promotion of biomass pellets as clean and their rebranding of plantations as “forests”; LKAB’s promotional material aimed at recruiting a new generation of settler/workers, which offers a new vision of the future in which re-creating in Nature is compatible with large scale extractive resources; and the marketing of arctic berries as health/super-food while erasing the global chains of worker exploitation, and other examples. The story, in all cases, is that the world is made “green” through consumption, a fairy-tale of modernity.