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Accepted Paper:
Forests, wood resources and industrial production in the late Soviet Union
Elena Kochetkova
(University of Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
My paper is based on my new book “The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology” (MIT Press, 2024). It examines the complex relationships between technology and nature under state socialism and tell how it developed industrially embedded ecology.
Paper long abstract:
My paper will be based on my new book “The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology” (MIT Press, 2024).
I will discuss the complex relationships between technology, nature and humans under state socialism. Looking at the materiality of Soviet industry through forests and wood, I argue, demonstrates how, paradoxically, industrial ecology emerged and developed as a by-product of the Soviet industrialization project, giving rise to new paradigms designed by engineers and industrial scientists. Emphasizing the technological and environmental impacts of the Cold War, my paper will invite readers to reconsider the socialist experience of industry-nature relations in critical dialogue with the history of capitalism. It advances a fresh, under-explored perspective in considering interactions between socialist industry and nature. I will go beyond the binary oppositions often touted between industrialism and environmentalism to argue that state socialism was capable of producing specific industrial ecology even though it always remained within industrialism.