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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how the use of forests as a natural resource was justified by their economic utility. Via contextualist analysis of the works of A. K. Cajander, it produces an environmental intel-lectual history from a post-humanist perspective on Finland's engagement with its forests.

Paper long abstract:

The forests of Finland have been the cultural and economic cornerstone of Finnish identity and society. However, treating forests primarily with economic utility has hidden critical, human-induced environmental problems such as extensive clear-cuttings, drainages, and monoculture plantations. This paper maintains that addressing these issues necessitates delving into their intellectual roots. To this end, the paper investigates the emergence and evolution of justifications for exploiting natural resources, shedding new light on how economic utility was used to rationalized these uses, overshad-owing other potential justifications. By employing contextual analysis, the paper crafts an environ-mental intellectual history, offering a post-humanist lens on Finland's engagement with its forests. It unravels the path dependencies cemented during the twentieth century, revealing how the dominance of economic utility was first challenged by emerging environmentalist arguments in the 1940s and gaining traction in the 1960s and 1970s. A critical investigation of the ideas in the works of forestry experts such as A. K. Cajander, N. A. Osara, the critical environmentalist movement within forestry sciences by E. Kalela and E. Lähde, and comparing them with Swedish and British works on the development of scientific forestry, will show how the forestry industry continuously developed and vigorously defended their justifications of exploitation of natural resources and how the environmentalist tried to counter them. The paper opens up new avenues of investigation into the developing, transnational, scientific and modernised forestry and the impact that human beings had on the forests as a multi-species entity.