I

Tuomas, born in 1950, described his memories of life along the Vuoksi river in eastern Finland in visceral, personal terms. The Vuoksi was the lifeblood of Finland’s largest pulp and paper mill, and it showed. ‘There was a distinct smell … when you, for example, drove a motorboat close to Kaukopää [factory] … the back motor might get stuck because the water could not cool the engine.’ Therefore, he recalls, it was best to avoid going too close to the factory, as ‘Something might bubble up from the bottom, and in the worst times … the smell was so awful.’Footnote ¹ Tuomas’s story, shared after an initial meeting at his farmstead in 2023, was punctuated with silences and discomfort as he recalled his memories of daily life in Imatra, an industrial river town, between the 1950s and 1980s. His narrative became a familiar one: more than ten of the seventeen people I interviewed in Imatra recalled similar experiences of life in their industrial river town. During these decades, life along industrial rivers in Finland was frequently characterized by growing private and state wealth, coupled with an escalating pollution problem that residents and the employees of large river-based manufacturing companies often ignored. The narratives which people constructed about working life in industrial pulp and paper towns in Finland between 1960 and 1984 embody the complex cultural and communal relationships of power and conquest over forests and rivers.

Oral history offers new ways of understanding and historicizing these relationships. By drawing primarily on oral history, I demonstrate its broader methodological value in environmental history, especially for Finnish environmental history and histories of pollution. Although the green-hued river water and rotten-egg-like smells from the pulp and paper mill were a part of residents’ quotidian life in adjoining towns in this period, the relationships between the forestry industry, river ecology, and local communities’ environmental knowledge has only recent been given scholarly attention in environmental history.Footnote ² This article turns to oral histories collected in Imatra, the location of Finland’s oldest hydropower plant and Europe’s largest pulp and paper mill, Enso-Gutzeit (presently Stora Enso Oy), to explore the private negotiation of emotions – especially discomfort, denial, and shame – surrounding industrial environmental pollution at a time of economic growth and prosperity. In particular, I analyse the memories of working people who constructed their environmental knowledge around the silent acceptance of industrial air and water pollution in return for livelihoods.

The development of the pulp and paper industries in Finland, Sweden, and Norway played an important role in late nineteenth-century industrialization. Finnish industrial and business histories trace how forests, energy, and labour were abundant and cheap, providing Finland with economic growth throughout the twentieth century, as well as the means to build a welfare state.Footnote ³ Finnish forest resources were already partially depleted by the 1850s: in eastern Finland, imported wood had to be used to build new houses by this time. Although the Senate passed legislation to prevent further damage to forests, rebellion against that legislation meant a loosening of restrictions during the 1870s.Footnote ⁴ As the world economy grew, Finnish exports of paper products increased from 13,000 tonnes to almost 170,000 tonnes by 1913.Footnote ⁵ Until the 1950s, forestry products generated 80 per cent of Finnish export revenue, declining to 50 per cent by 1970. Forested regions adjacent to rivers were transformed into pulp and paper industrial towns whenever it was economically and geographically feasible, using rivers with high flow rates to generate hydroelectricity for the mills, as well as for timber floating and sewage.Footnote ⁶

The rapid industrialization of Imatra, a small town in south-eastern Finland, is typical of how many Finnish river towns, with abundant forest resources of Norwegian spruce (Picae abies) and Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), became urbanized and industrialized over the second half of the twentieth century (Figure 1).Footnote ⁷ After the Second World War, the price of commodities such as pulp and paper significantly increased throughout Europe. Industrial growth in Imatra accelerated in tandem with European paper consumption, which grew by over 6 per cent each year from 1950 to the 1960s; this rapid expansion resulted in paper mills releasing ever larger quantities of chemical waste into rivers from the 1960s onwards.Footnote ⁸ In 1972, for example, the pulp and paper sector’s biochemical oxygen demand discharges accounted for 90 per cent of Finland’s total industrial discharges and 50 per cent of industrial phosphorus and nitrogen discharges.Footnote ⁹ In other words, the then established paper industry released more contaminants into the town’s river. This provoked a depletion of oxygen, which in turn caused the delicate river ecosystem to collapse.

Figure 1.

Detailed map of the study area, with major industrial infrastructure.

In recent years, social and environmental historians have argued for a greater integration of quotidian lives and stories into environmental histories.Footnote ¹⁰ The damage to the Finnish river ecosystem is well documented by scholars who have drawn on governmental sources to write histories of the forestry industry.Footnote ¹¹ Building on their work, this article applies an oral history methodology to environmental history to explore the emotional landscapes of working people’s experiences of day-to-day life in industrial towns. Imatra’s natural landscape includes a river and forests, allowing us to tap into the rich environmental histories of forests, rivers, water, and artificial dams, and the work around them.Footnote ¹² However, many of these histories draw on sources such as company and state archives – records kept by privileged, highly educated men.Footnote ¹³ These have traditionally emphasized the influence and interests of large industries such as forestry and energy.

Newer works have turned to historicizing rivers, forests, air pollution, energy, the environmental movement, and waste within a Finnish context.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, few of these works take full advantage of the methodological potential of oral history – even within environmental history outside Finland. Joy Parr’s Sensing changes, which provides a twentieth-century sensory history of the environmental effects of Canadian infrastructural megaprojects using oral history, neither analyses nor extensively quotes her respondents’ narratives.Footnote ¹⁵ Simo Laakkonen and Timo Vuorisalo in Vaurastumisen vuodet (The years of growth) argue that, although the Finnish working-class bore the greatest burden from environmental pollution, they developed a passive attitude on the issue due to the lack of alternatives, unlike the middle class.Footnote ¹⁶ However, the current study shows that by using oral history evidence we can establish that the working class was not passive, but actively catalogued, silenced, and witnessed environmental contamination. Further, oral history provides a potent methodology with which to incorporate the voices and environmental knowledge of women and of people from less privileged backgrounds.Footnote ¹⁷ This article therefore extends this historiography by analysing the voices of industrial townspeople to investigate the construction of silence and self-representations as people narrate memories decades later. Additionally, it provides new insights into the little-researched environmental histories of the post-war industrial Finnish towns by placing respondents’ narratives in the broader context of twentieth-century industrial life.Footnote ¹⁸

The article historicizes the experiences of people who are seldom represented in the historiography on Finnish landscapes. It also fills archival silences with the voices of working people who did not leave more typical archival traces, such as keeping diaries or writing memoirs. I conducted forty-nine interviews across southern, eastern, central, and northern Finland for the Finnish Technological Sublime research project, which is the first study in Finland to capture ordinary people’s life narratives and memories regarding large-scale energy infrastructure. The seventeen respondents from Imatra represent a mixture of working and middle classes, genders, and family backgrounds. The interviewees, born between 1935 and 1975, witnessed and participated to different degrees in the extremes of industrial change that characterized much of post-war Europe: an economic growth spurt during the 1950s and 1960s and a slow decline, affecting working-class industrial towns, as manufacturing automation increased in the 1970s. This cohort of industrial workers, colloquially labelled duunarit in Finnish, generally became prosperous homeowners by retirement age.Footnote ¹⁹

Although class is not the main focus of this study, it plays a role in how individuals frame their working selves with regard to pollution.Footnote ²⁰ Finland rapidly transformed from an agrarian society into a service-based economy in the 1950s and 1960s; unlike in other western European countries, industry and the service economy developed simultaneously.Footnote ²¹ This uneven, fast development led to the birth of a new suburbanized working class who were the first generation of service-sector workers, but with agricultural roots. As in Britain, where Selina Todd interviewed those born between 1960 and 1970, many of the younger respondents did not readily identify class distinctions when asked about perceptions of class in Imatra.Footnote ²² Workers in the town – especially those born prior to the 1960s – drew class divisions based on relationships, factory community, workplace, and occupation. Increasing access to education and the ability to rise within the company meant that the importance of class structures eased over the course of the post-war period, but a visible division continued between workers and management.Footnote ²³ Indeed, identifying oneself as working class was more common among the oldest respondents, as also evidenced by Sutcliffe-Braithwaite.Footnote ²⁴ Over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, class identity began to align with education and job title. It may be inferred that class differences and class mattered to some degree to those in positions of power, but for working people class divisions eased after the 1960s.

Participants were mainly recruited using a snowballing methodology, as this proved an effective method for building up trust with a group of interviewees over a significant period.Footnote ²⁵ Throughout the interview process, it became increasingly clear that some people would not disclose all their experiences relating to air and water pollution as they did not trust me. The greatest concern expressed by potential participants, generally through informal communication, was the possibility of identification and community retaliation for speaking with an outsider. Even when every effort was made to anonymize participants by not directly stating their job titles, by using seudonyms, and by providing broad brackets for their year of birth, interviewees were still concerned as to whether other residents would be able to identify their narratives. After about three interviews, I began noticing that people would repeatedly use the phrase ‘money stinks’ (raha haisee) to brush aside my enquiries about pollution levels. This deflection over time became part of a pattern of self-censorship and silencing about water pollution and olfactory experiences surrounding river contamination.

I conducted an additional focus group interview discussion to facilitate collective exploration of emotions and memories surrounding pollution among participants who were friends.Footnote ²⁶ This group of ten participants, who were first individually contacted through the snowball method, had, in several cases, known one another for over forty years, sharing hobbies, sports clubs, or workplaces. The focus group met in the home of one of my main contacts, which was a familiar space for many, allowing them to approach more uncomfortable topics than might have been possible in one-on-one interviews – including the collective denial of environmental harm – and to explore collective memories, while also offering greater emotional support in this process of recollection and reconciliation with the past. Usually, a focus group interview takes about an hour, and is carried out as a first point of contact with a study cohort. However, instead of talking for the planned hour, the participants shared stories and memories for almost two and a half hours, creating together around 19,000 words of oral testimony. The richness of this form of oral history is especially apparent in environmental history, which typically concerns events whose effects are distinctively collective – concerning, as they do, shared spaces such as forests and rivers.

While I provided themes to discuss, the participants were free to decide the direction of the discussion. They shared some of the same stories they had shared privately, but others provided new memories or probed their emotional experiences further than in the initial interviews.Footnote ²⁷ Through focusing on specific themes of river pollution, the group revealed what had, in one-on-one interviews, become silences. They discussed air and water pollution, workplace accidents, near-death experiences at the pulp and paper mill, stories of local environmental knowledge about tree and forest growth, locations of waste dumping they had participated in, emotions, and sustainable transitions.

Oral history cannot claim to draw on a ‘statistically representative sample of any population in the past’, but this can be its greatest strength.Footnote ²⁸ As James Hinton argues in a study of nine wartime Britons, ‘individual subjectivity is always more complex than generalizations about the life of the group’. Footnote ²⁹ The more in-depth detail one has about an individual, the less their experience may be generalized. Paul Thompson reminds us that, in oral history, interviewees report ‘facts and events … in a way which gives them social meaning’; informants’ interpretations of when something occurred or the reasons for it can inform historians of the ‘expectations and norms’ of that specific person or their wider social group.Footnote ³⁰ Like all historical sources, oral history has its limitations. Informants provide a rich historical account of their lives within the context of their lived environment, but this yields an alternative perspective to national, macro-level environmental histories. In environmental history, these rich pictures of local, lived experience are especially crucial in enabling historians to challenge and interrogate grand narratives and the epistemic privileging of scientific government reports.

This article illustrates how an oral history methodology, especially where it includes a focus group interview, may be used to fill gaps in archives surrounding quotidian experiences of air and water pollution in industrial regions. It begins with a brief historical account of the Vuoksi river, the setting for almost all the interviewees’ earliest memories of Imatra. It then turns to explore the concepts of silence, shame, and loyalty surrounding memories of pollution. Interviewees, especially those in the focus group, talked reflexively about silences surrounding pollution and its effects on their personal and working lives. Throughout their oral testimony, working people expressed the ways in which they negotiated with pollution and its impacts, illustrating their private and communal negotiation between economic benefits from industrial development and living with the environmental impact of air and water pollution.

II

The Vuoksi river runs 150 kilometres through the Karelian isthmus to Lake Ladoga in Russia and forms part of both Finland’s largest water system and the Saimaa canal system (see Figure 1). This river is mythologized in people’s memories of Imatra. Often, informants’ recollections about life along the river would begin with the collective memory of the river’s rapids as a famous European tourist attraction.Footnote ³¹ Interviewees eagerly recounted that the region’s striking geography made it increasingly popular in the aristocratic circles of nineteenth-century St Petersburg, where it was identified as an untamed wilderness, bewitching its visitors.Footnote ³² A few interviewees described the rapids using the language from the Finnish-Swedish poet Zacharias Topelius’s book Maamme (Our land), which aimed to build a Finnish nationalist conscience, while a few remembered that the Finnish national epic Kalevala (1835; expanded edition 1849) has a lyrical tale of the rapids’ wild beauty and their ‘mighty torrent, whose deafening roar can be heard for miles’.Footnote ³³ The height of the falls prompted comparisons with Niagara Falls and concomitant tragi-romantic tales of desperation and suicide.Footnote ³⁴ For many people, the river rapids and the surrounding landscape formed a defining aspect of the imagined community, but most notably sparked feelings of national pride in this landscape – even in its current form as a high-flow-rate river which generates hydroelectricity.Footnote ³⁵

Residents would not eagerly recount the story of industrialization and post-war growth, as many had lived through the large changes themselves, and they found it difficult to articulate this broader narrative within the contexts of their lives. Once the government-owned firm Enso-Gutzeit, at the time Finland’s largest employer, began operating in Imatra in 1906 because of its hydroelectricity potential, its proximity to large swaths of South Karelian forest, and its cost-efficient access to foreign markets, the landscape, along with its people, began to change.Footnote ³⁶ Until the beginning of the twentieth century, fisheries had played a crucial role in Imatra’s economy, alongside the tourist industry. The Imatra Hydropower Plant, located in the city centre, was one of the largest of the city’s industrialization projects, in part built to provide electricity for the pulp and paper mills and the new nation.Footnote ³⁷ The plant was first conceived in the early 1920s and resulted in the damming of the famous river rapids in 1929, with no fishways – which in the long term meant that fish could no longer migrate with their life cycle.Footnote ³⁸ The end of the Second World War led to the cession of half of this river territory to the Soviet Union, transforming Imatra further into a trans-boundary dam and river system.Footnote ³⁹ Most respondents blurred the power plant and pulp and paper mill infrastructure together, due to their proximity to the river, as this crucial infrastructure transformed the town throughout the twentieth century.

The role of the river as a part of a person’s subjectivity is most visible through childhood stories, which interweave narratives of childhood innocence, labour, and play. Both men and women discuss work that used or required the Vuoksi river through gendered performances, indicating how memories of water and air pollution are also gendered life narratives.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although both men and women have memories relating to fishing, male interviewees in particular recall the dismal state of fishing on the river and the need to acquire a permit as fish stocks were so low, or even to travel elsewhere to fish. Although throughout the first decades of the twentieth century fishermen complained vigorously to Enso-Gutzeit, to the regional magistrate, and later to Imatran Voima (Imatra Power Company, also partially government-owned) concerning the impact of water pollution from the Tainiokoski hydropower plant (the original factory located there was owned by Tornator Company) and the Kaukopää pulp and paper factories on fish stocks, their complaints and lawsuits were often ignored or brushed aside by both companies and by the regional magistrate.Footnote ⁴¹ Living in Neitsyniemi estate next to the river, the factory investor Edvard von Nottbeck did not find the new factory endearing. He was an avid fisherman and vigorously filed cases against local factories, as court records indicate.Footnote ⁴² Another court case was filed in 1900 by Lauri Salomoninpoika, Juha Laihia, Katri Wainikan, Lauri Marinpoika, and Antti and Matti Laiha concerning Tornator Company ruining the water for fishing. The two first defendants owned half of the lot, while the others owned the second half; after a two-year legal process, the Laiha family won the case and the company had to pay compensation.Footnote ⁴³ Respondents to my study also brought up the poor state of the river’s fish, as many of the men enjoyed recreational fishing, illustrating how historical court cases filed by upper-class fishermen could slow down industrial growth but could not wholly prevent the decline in water quality.

During the 1950s and 1960s, when many of the respondents were children or adolescents, the pulp and paper industry was as its height. The chemical wood industry would have pumped bleached kraft mill effluents into the water daily. These effluents contained numerous harmful compounds, such as wood sterols, resin acids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and alkyl derivatives; the substances eventually sank into the sediment at the bottom of the river, where they were consumed by benthic organisms and bottom-feeders.Footnote ⁴⁴ The downstream watercourse contained a heavy nutrient load and compounds that caused oxygen depletion and a decline in species diversity over the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ⁴⁵ But for young boys, the river offered opportunities for performances of boyhood through play, exploration, and risk-taking. Lari (born c. 1935), for example, moved to Imatra in the early post-war period with his family. Young Lari’s mother forbade him from playing by the river, but he and his friends found ways to circumvent the rules. He spent time either swimming in the summer months or jumping on moving icefloes in the winter, much to his mother’s vexation whenever he was caught. Lari made no mention of the polluted waters during his interview, his tone and gaze suggesting a deep nostalgia for his childhood.Footnote ⁴⁶ The river offered a place of refuge for boys from the adult world of household chores, even though its green colour and smell perhaps meant something else to adults.

The two respondents before Daavid (born c. 1945) had not directly mentioned the river pollution nor fishing, beyond a few curious sentences in passing. Daavid came from a family of paper mill workers. His grandfather had been a bricklayer for Enso-Gutzeit. Yet he was outspoken about class and work safety, recounting complex kinships of factory relationships and his near-death experiences. He was also an ardent fisherman, who grew up fishing from the Vuoksi river for additional income for his family, drawing attention to the state of the river and bodily harm from work which had befallen him over his lifetime. He recounted a wage negotiation with his manager at the pulp and paper mill:

He illustrates the power relationships within the factory, directly questioning his manager about privilege in relation to fishing rights. Fishing in the Enso-Gutzeit upper river catchment area was limited to permit holders in the 1960s and 1970s, as there were too few fish making their way down the river. Factories did not want to implicate their involvement in this ecological issue, and thus tried to limit permits based on a variety of personal reasons. Prior to the 1980s, fishing permits were an important distinction marker between workers and management, as the awareness of the lack of fish could be seen in how upper management barred working people from accessing the upper part of the river. For Ilmari (born 1950), who began a recreational fishing business in the region in the late 1980s after retiring from his public sector job, the waterways were an especially important aspect of his self-identity, as the river provided him with his livelihood. Ilmari’s memory of when the degradation of the river began is connected to his son’s birth in 1970 – illustrating how familial milestones may be used as memory markers to recall when environmental change has occurred. ‘The Vuoksi was a sewer. It just existed like this in the 1970s. There was nothing to fish.’Footnote ⁴⁸

Women’s early memories of the industrial river generally focused on memories of helping their mothers with laundry. Isla (born 1948) grew up next to the riverbank and remembers joining her mother by the riverside to wash laundry, trying to do so at a time when the Kaukopää factory was not releasing chemical waste.Footnote ⁴⁹ Once her family bought a washing machine, they no longer needed to check the effluent levels of the water. When mothers washed sheets in the river, a popular joke went, the laundry was getting a double bleaching from the paper mill residue.Footnote ⁵⁰

During Helena’s interview, I was shown family photographs (see Figure 2) depicting a riverside swimming area with a beach remoulded into a small catchment to shield it from drifting pollution. Helena’s private indignation towards water and air pollution could be traced to her father’s role as an upper manager for the hydropower plant, her non-technical job at Enso-Gutzeit, and her husband’s managerial role in Enso-Gutzeit. In her account, Helena denied that the extensive pollution of the river was a genuine issue, as her father kept fishing, as illustrated in the photographs she displayed.Footnote ⁵¹

Figure 2.

Helena’s father’s fishing adventures in the Vuoksi river c. 1950. As visible from the photos, Helena’s father was an engineer with a licence to fish on the river, unlike Daavid, who was not given a licence due to his lesser job title. From Helena’s family album, reproduced with her permission.

Daily life by the river changed as a result of washing machines offering a technological fix that allowed families to avoid washing laundry in contaminated water, and of the use of fishing permits alleviating pressures on industry to clean their waste water. Generally, these women respondents worked in nontechnical support roles rather than in upper management technical or engineering roles, but they upheld the silence surrounding pollution topics – even more tightly than men, in some instances.Footnote ⁵² Through such actions, working women performed agency towards local pollution and protected their family’s prosperity.

Witnessing the release of chemical waste was a daily sensory occurrence for respondents, but it quickly became a mundane enough experience that most cannot even date precisely when the releases began, when they were at their peak, and when, precisely, they ended. Nobody directly recalled environmental policies or remembered landmark water legislation such as the new Finnish Water Act (264/1961) (Vesilaki) of 1962, which mandated that certain industrial sites had to build water sanitation equipment within five years.Footnote ⁵³ This law made no mention of the forestry industry, which was thus able to carry on in Imatra as before until industry-specific legislation was passed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the main emphasis being end-of-pipe abatement technology retrofits.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is reflected in how respondents recalled the sensory details of their environment throughout the 1970s. As one resident stated: ‘You just could not go swim in that water. It was difficult to get off skin, it just smelt so pungent. It was always that way once the factories came.’Footnote ⁵⁵ The daily release of effluents, which were large foam balls that often smelled of pine soap (mäntysuopa), turned the river green, respondents confided. The green colour was probably the result of small amounts of black liquor being released and the foam was possibly the by-product of chemical effluents from Kaukopää factory (see Figure 3). Black liquor is a by-product of the sulphate process which removes lignin and other extractions from wood during the making of pulp; the by-product is also used in recovery boilers in pulp mills as a fuel source.

Figure 3.

Kaukopää factory, 1955. The photograph depicts the timber floating area, through which logs would be floated into the plant for processing. This water was also pumped into the mill, but by the early 1970s it was fully contaminated with chemicals such as chlorine (used to bleach cellulose), leading Enso-Gutzeit to try to find a solution to pump clean river water into the plant and to send the dirty water downstream to the hydropower plant. See Erkki Vaalama, Enso-Gutzeit oy Kaukopään tehtaat, 1935–1985 (Imatra, 1985), p. 203. Photograph by Pentti Roiha.

Source: Etelä-Karjalan museo, KUVKVV1499:13. Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

The daily release of effluents throughout the 1950s until the 1970s, visible as foam balls, was unremarkable to the majority. The Mellonlahti recreation park, for example, financed by the Ministry of Water (Vesihallitus), was built in the late 1970s as a clean swimming spot for locals, just south of the hydropower plant. The city was able to fund this project with monetary ‘reparations for created deficiencies’, as phrased by the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper. This hints at the pollution levels without openly stating the dire ecological disaster taking place – a stark illustration of the larger national collective silence on water pollution and the slow pace of rural wastewater treatment.Footnote ⁵⁶ This mundanity of pollution is a communal experience, reflected in how Joonas (born c. 1960) remembers the river pollution. ‘[It] had been incredibly dirty that even in my childhood you could never even catch a fish and eat it and … it was just so impossibly dirty. There was this black tar that was on the beaches and crooked pieces of birchbark (tuohenkäppyrä) were covered in this filth’, he recalled, pausing. ‘And then, when there was a flow rate exception, these balls of foam rolled under the bridge. It foamed because there was a ginormous amount of lye – that was really shocking.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Joonas’s narration illustrates the fallacy of human memory in terms of long-term pollution but the ability to remember a significant incident – as in the case of the 1983 black liquor release accident.

In 1983, the city was forced to begin cleaning wastewater from the Halikka river, which connects to the Vuoksi river, after locals filed a criminal report with the police as ‘sewage’ covered city and private river beachfronts.Footnote ⁵⁸ The newspaper coverage of this incident does not explain the damage that caused the release of the wastewater but implies that it was a pipe from a specific community. The city archives reinforce this narrative through loud silences, indicating that the city wanted to ensure quality of life for its citizens as much as possible without drawing the ire of local factories.Footnote ⁵⁹ Based on oral history evidence during the focus group discussion, this burst pipe was originally from the Kaukopää factory and leaked large quantities of black liquor into the Vuoksi river and onto its banks.Footnote ⁶⁰ Benjamin snidely chuckled, ‘The employee representative (pääluottamusmies) of Kaukopää sat on the city council board at that time’, and Daavid supplemented, ‘[The head of] Enso-Gutzeit also sat on the board. From that you can find your own potato field.’Footnote ⁶¹ This large-scale accidental release illustrates how visible pollution gets pushed to the back of a person’s memory.

I met Maria (born 1945) for the first time at my main contact’s kitchen table, drinking bitter Finnish coffee and eating pulla-pastry, just after the final large wave of COVID-19. In our interview a month later, I decided to probe whether Daavid’s memories about environmental damage, shared at his first interview, were a collective experience. Maria and her husband moved to the region for work in the early 1960s, from central Finland, when the city was flourishing with work. Her responses were my first touches on the collective silence surrounding the industrial river:

Such conversations became a common occurrence as the interviews progressed in the region. The deteriorating river ecology, rancid smells from the pulp and paper mill, and poison dumping had become common knowledge over the decades. They were rarely discussed in public or among friends or family but were instead ‘silently witnessed’ by residents who worked in the surrounding factories. This sentiment is evinced in Martha’s memory (born c. 1950). She was born into a working-class family who worked at the copper factory; as an adult, she worked her entire career as a biologist for Enso-Gutzeit. When asked about pollution in Imatra, she recounted her memory in the following way:

Her response startled me, and I stated that I possibly misremembered there ever being pollution – even though I had heard the opposite story from almost all other interviewees. She smiled, and we moved on to other questions. Her response, however, shows that by sharing only a positive story (‘it was a lovely time’) and not evaluating or elaborating further, she practised silence.Footnote ⁶⁴ The highly valued forestry industry provided the means to produce a silence among members of local communities, as the balance between monetary benefits to daily life and the necessity to support industry had to be kept.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, probing this silence, by asking respondents why they collaborated with it, became imperative to understanding how working people navigated working life, lack of work safety, and factory infrastructure as a part of their lived experience.

Peter Burke reminds us that ‘keeping silent is itself an act of communication’, and this insight proved crucial to the analysis of the silences presented by respondents.Footnote ⁶⁶ This social condition has ‘structural features’ that allows a society to ‘limit access to relevant information, creating a system of strong disincentives to speak’.Footnote ⁶⁷ When sharing a story that negatively impacts the narrator’s subjectivity and self-worth, there is a higher tendency to repress or avoid the memory.Footnote ⁶⁸ In such situations, people may not want to evaluate or elaborate on their memories – a practice which some respondents expressed. By choosing to remain silent and practising a collective amnesia about the existence of environmental change that is ‘covert, unmarked and unacknowledged’, feelings of unease over the state of the river and forests become easier to forget than to remember.Footnote ⁶⁹

Although in the 1930s some scientists acknowledged that Imatra’s highly polluting forestry industry was harming its trees, there was little public discussion of the pollution produced by factories.Footnote ⁷⁰ This dichotomy is noticeable through the Finnish Public Health Act (1927) and the Neighbourhood Act (1923), both of which permitted any amount of pollution as long as it was not considered harmful to one’s neighbours. Neither act was changed significantly before the late 1970s because the economic value of the pulp and paper industry was seen as too great to make environmental concessions.Footnote ⁷¹ When asked about unique olfactory memories of Imatra in the 1960s and 1970s, many respondents glossed over the subject of the level of air pollution in their narratives by using the phrase ‘money stinks’ (raha haisee), or, as Joy Parr notes for Canadian industrial regions, ‘money smells’.Footnote ⁷² Finnish has two words for smell: haista and tuoksua. Haista refers to bad smells, while tuoksua implies a pleasant aroma. The use of haisee is therefore an admittance or acknowledgement of money’s putrid smell – while simultaneously silencing further discussion.

In the individual interviews, air pollution questions were met with a sense of embarrassment, as in Maria’s case, or a desire to justify their existence by reference to the monetary value, as in Kim’s explanation. Maria recalled: ‘This place felt picturesque, [pause] the only minus was, when I first came here, that is, there was a specific scent [laughter], yes, stink, that is no longer around.’Footnote ⁷³ During the interview, we both began to smile with her use of the word ‘scent’ (tuoksu), which then erupted into brief, barking laughter. She then corrected herself with the word ‘stink’ (haiju). This exchange illustrated the sensitivity of the topic, using laughter to convey shame and discomfort. Similarly, Kim (born 1960) recalls, ‘There were of course those chimneys belching a never-ending stream of all sorts of things and [pause] and [pause] there was a terrible stink. My school was directly next to the Kaukopää factory and of course many parents worked there – so that meant that money stank there.’Footnote ⁷⁴ Kim’s description of the landscape with its ‘never-ending stream’ of pollution suggests an attempt to articulate what the factories were producing and to weave a story of acceptance surrounding the smell. He implies that his friends’ families were dependent upon the ‘stink’, indicating that there was little incentive to politicize or problematize the factories’ disregard for the continued pollution.

The distinctive employment of the phrase ‘money stinks’ was intriguing, as its usage in historical newspapers was quite limited. Both state and private media presented corporations as providing employment and ensuring the well-being of communities, and fostered a ‘good neighbour’ image, which became difficult to challenge – even though local fisheries and communities saw dead and dying fish in their rivers daily, avoided swimming in contaminated water, or suffered personally from the health effects of air pollution.Footnote ⁷⁵ During the focus group interview, I enquired further about the usage and meaning of the term in its contextual usage in the region. Johanna (born c. 1975), who moved to the area in her early twenties, articulated,

She continued, ‘And then that kind of negative commentary stops there, when you respond back like that.’Footnote ⁷⁶ I asked others if this was a typical response, and the focus group nodded or verbally agreed. This phrase had become a communal meta-narrative surrounding the pulp and paper mill which working people could use to acknowledge and produce knowledge about their local environment.

Throughout this conversation, and in the one-to-one interviews, there was an emphasis on eliciting shame in the one who breaks the silence to question the smell or, even more provocatively, discuss the dwindling state of forest resources.Footnote ⁷⁷ Sara Ahmed, in writing about shame, argues that scholars ought to assess what ‘shame does to the bodies whose surfaces burn with the intensity of its affect’.Footnote ⁷⁸ She describes shame as a negation, of the body tingling as though burning. It is a painful feeling, which often causes the person to turn away and inward. By using shame as a tactic to silence protests, engagement, or elaboration on pollution, the community can protect its members’ self-worth and subjectivity.Footnote ⁷⁹ This tactic is noticeable in how Maria, Kim, and Johanna, for example, were quick to silence further discussion and refused to elaborate on the theme. Perhaps, some of the respondents tried to quench their shame at the situation, but they also used my enquiry to elicit shame in me for accidentally breaking the silence. Maria used uncomfortable laughter to express the painful feeling of shame inside her, while other interviewees, like Joonas, narrated a positive relationship to nature rather than focusing on his feelings surrounding environmental exploitation. This contestation between past pollution and a clean(er) present is, as Eviatar Zerubavel identified, a local ‘conspiracy of silence, whereby a group of people tacitly agree to outwardly ignore’ air and water pollution ‘of which they are all personally aware’ but are often reluctant to share in oral testimony.Footnote ⁸⁰

The sensory perception and memory of this air pollution is tied to specific spaces in South Karelia, which illustrates the expression of agency to avoid more polluted travelling and living in more polluted locations. All the participants spent their childhood and adulthood living with factory odours: their memories illustrate that residents were constantly aware of the wind direction, and bought or rented dwellings far enough away from the paper mill, but would not actively fight against the pollution levels in order to entice the heavily polluting industries to stay. As Eemil (born c. 1945) describes, in conjunction with Johanna’s comments about stopping conversations about the smells, ‘When living next to Kaukopää factory, all the changing rooms smelt, and after a while you could not smell anything, even when you came home from work. We only lived for six months by the factory, it was enough.’Footnote ⁸¹ Rather than complain, because that would threaten employment, people used their agency and moved – unlike in urban centres which hosted more active environmental movements and protests but also had fewer large-scale industrial complexes.Footnote ⁸² In the following extract, this communal expression of environmental knowledge and agency can be seen in how the three women participants in the focus group acknowledged the air pollution:

The air pollution from the factories – with smells described as akin to rotting eggs or cooked cabbage – permeated most of the city’s housing areas located near the factories and was a permanent fixture in everyone’s lives. The malodorous compounds were mainly hydrogen sulphide, methyl mercaptans, and other sulphurous species that, even when released at legal levels, are highly poisonous aerosols and known carcinogens.Footnote ⁸⁴ Maria displays a reluctance to explore what this air pollution meant for the local environment or her health, but her account also betrays a sense of shame relating to the stench and its spatiality: ‘At the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, when Imatra residents would go on trips, and when they opened their suitcases, a familiar belch came from inside. So it permeated everything. That is how it was, but otherwise everything was good.’Footnote ⁸⁵ With this non sequitur, Maria removes herself from the subject, distancing her subjectivity from the narrative. The smell that permeated the personal belongings, and indeed the person, of many inhabitants of Imatra also stigmatized them, indicating how populations living near heavy industry could be treated differently when travelling. The silence surrounding cancers and respiratory disorders in friends and acquaintances also shows the extent to which locals were willing to protect their paper industry.

Respondents’ sensory memories about the pollution levels in the 1970s and 1980s were further probed during the focus group discussion. Benjamin, who was a technical maintenance worker at the hydropower plant, represented himself as having a close relationship to water. For him, showing visitors the river rapids in the 1970s elicited an emotional response, exemplifying the complex emotional style of articulating past feelings of pollution:

His confession that he had felt shame about the state of the river in the 1970s prompted several other participants during the focus group session to verbally ‘deny, hide, and escape from [the] shame-inducing situation’.Footnote ⁸⁷ This self-silencing action was most likely localized, as other large cities in Finland were protesting for cleaner air policies from the government by this time.Footnote ⁸⁸ Two female respondents and one male one were motivated to speak once Benjamin had broken the silence:

The women who supported Benjamin by recounting their personal and familial experiences of the pollution exhibited empathy with his feelings and a willingness to break the silence. Daavid, who had worked at the paper factory in question, suggests in his responses both a strained sense of shame-motivated corporate loyalty, an unspoken deference to his former employer, and participation in silence on this topic. Although often siding with Enso-Gutzeit in this discussion, Daavid shared critical stories of his near-death experiences of accidentally inhaling hydrogen sulphide, which initially creates a strong, stinging smell but within seconds is odourless and deadly.Footnote ⁹⁰ Once in contact with the gas, Daavid collapsed on the floor, unconscious, but was luckily found by a colleague doing rounds, who administered first aid immediately. These accounts of having near-death experiences or witnessing pollution while nevertheless maintaining long-term loyalty towards the company elucidate working people’s complex emotional ties to industry, wages, and the environment.

Respondents use silences, sentences lacking subjects, laughter to communicate nonverbal embarrassment, and repetition to hesitantly share thoughts they find uncomfortable, or those they consider to be against the grain. In our first interview, Eemil, employed for most of his adult life at the paper mill, stated he did not remember smelling any air pollution emitted from the mill. He would not meet my eyes, keeping his head down, and demonstrated through his body position myriad emotions. He defiantly stood by this view, blaming the Soviets for any air pollutant smells in the area, as I asked him to clarify his meaning. The focus group discussion held the following day, in which the ‘conspiracy of silence’ was broken by several of his fellow community members and trusted friends, provided Eemil with the safety and privacy to speak at length about some of the pollution activities he had committed. With chagrin in his shaking voice and a piercing gaze directed at me, he recalled the following:

The group situation gave Eemil a safe space in which to explore his past fear that he would be fired for noncompliance if he refused to take part in these activities, and his present embarrassment surrounding his actions. The communal laughter at the end of his anecdote suggests a communicative silence born of embarrassment and shame, as most participants knew of or participated in similar poisoning efforts. Eemil also shifted between the singular ‘I’ and the communal ‘we’ in his account, as a means of displacing responsibility for his actions onto others. Similarly, his insistence that he was only following orders to dump waste into the lake indicates his acceptance and internalization of the corporate hierarchy – which was a highly masculine working environment. This sense of company loyalty could allow individuals to commit acts in their capacity as employees that they might have deemed wrong if they had done them in their own name. Although people can change their values, or adopt new ones, it appears that, for these interviewees, denial was the easiest way to forget their role in the pollution of their local environment.Footnote ⁹² As a result of monetary and emotional dependency, many struggled to discuss this pollution and its negative impacts – as it was easier to create structural constructs of silence.

Working people expressed their sense of agency through narratives of well-being derived from factories and heavy industry, repeating the teleological phrase ‘now it is completely fine’, and silently, but actively, remembering the worst-polluted locations. Throughout the twentieth century, Finnish people continued to have a complex relationship with forests, as the interviews indicated how deeply the capitalist interest in harnessing and exploiting nature for monetary gain had become embedded in private and public subjectivities over the period from the 1950s to the 1980s.Footnote ⁹³ Respondents would emphasize the more recent environmental policies from the late 1980s and the European Union, indicating how residents had taken control of their historical past to create a communal redemption narrative. The interviewees could performatively accept the damage and placed emphasis on their hopes for a visibly clean future for the river in their narratives, which may be indictive of how they attempted to offset their guilt, shame, or anxiety about their past actions.

III

Through oral history projects with working people, Finnish environmental historians may gain new insights into how those people navigated environmental degradation and created local environmental knowledge as a part of their quotidian lives in industrial areas. Environmental histories have yet to tell the lives of those working and living in polluting industrial environments; in particular, Finnish environmental histories rarely explore how working people navigated pollution within their communities. Utilizing oral history methodology as a source for environmental history therefore shifts attention towards industrial workers and communities who may not have otherwise left an imprint of their lives in traditional archives. Oral history, and the additional value provided by using focus groups, yields new insights into the intricate relationships among community members, employment, pollution, and forest resources. This article has offered a model for how environmental histories of Finland could better engage with advancing histories of pollution, contamination, and rivers in industrial towns.

As oral history is always as much about the past as about the present, contemporary conflicting relationships with the intense economic use of forests impact how memories and emotions about past actions or inaction can be expressed. It is easier to be silent about one’s past actions, and about the uncomfortable interaction between corporate values and one’s personal relationship with nature, than to attempt to work through feelings of discomfort, shame, and embarrassment in an intimate interview setting with a stranger. Therefore, the focus group methodology allows the researcher, the community outsider, a way to understand the existing silences and the emotions this silence evokes in respondents. Providing a situation where participants were friends or acquaintances eases tensions and builds rapport. Using a focus group approach in addition to individual oral history enriches environmental history, enriches local communities’ understanding of their environment, and provides a personable space to discuss complex memories with familiar faces. Memories of pollution sparked a much wider discussion about how my interviewees’ memories played a significant part in how they understood the present-day climate crisis.Footnote ⁹⁴ The space thus created allowed the group to collectively deal with shame surrounding the actions – or inaction – of individual members in relation to what they saw as the region’s major polluting industries.

Through close examination of Imatra, an industrial river community, from the 1950s to the 1980s, this article has illustrated why community members, who were often employed by polluting companies, performed acceptance of industrial pollution through phrases such as ‘money stinks’, while some respondents also expressed shame and embarrassment regarding their personal involvement many decades afterwards. Laakkonen and Vuorisalo portray the working class as passive regarding pollution, yet the oral history evidence indicates a more nuanced position.Footnote ⁹⁵ Working people represent themselves as witnesses of pollution but conspired to keep the status quo to ensure their livelihoods. These difficulties are indicative of the strength of emotions concerning the impact of pollution to this day; a reluctance to discuss such issues suggests a desire to forget. Industrial communities participate in ‘conspiracies of silence’ surrounding air and water pollution, using collective shame that, while in one sense acknowledging the damage to nature and the local ecology, stops dissident opinions from forming.