Keywords

In April 1969, Swedish chemist and environmental advocate Hans Palmstierna travelled to Oslo with Seved Apelqvist, CEO of the cooperative insurance company Folksam, and Anders Ericsson, secretary of the company’s Youth Council, to help launch a Norwegian edition of the Folksam environmental campaign Front mot miljöförstöringen (FMM, “Front against environmental degradation”). On April 17, Palmstierna appeared on primetime television in Norway, discussing environmental degradation with Prime Minister Per Borten and other guests.Footnote 1 Four days later Palmstierna, Apelqvist and Ericsson participated in an “information conference” in Oslo. The event was organized by the Norwegian cooperative insurance company Samvirke, with support from Landsorganisasjonen (Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions) and other labour union organizations. The Norwegian name of the campaign was presented as Vern om naturmiljøet (VNM, “Protect the Environment”) and Palmstierna’s message to the audience was that humanity must not allow itself to be governed by short-term profits.Footnote 2

In this chapter, we explore the early transnational effort to bring attention to environmental issues in the Nordic countries and the various media involved in the campaigns. The campaigns in Sweden (1968–1970) and Norway (1969–1971) coincided with “the environmental turn” in Scandinavia and were among the first resolute attempts to organize nationwide environmental campaigns based on popular support, but have been largely overlooked in the historiography of modern environmentalism.Footnote 3 One of the reasons may be the fact that the campaigns did not originate in the green counterculture movement that has played a dominant role in the historiography of environmental action. As evident from the list of organizations involved in the planning and execution of these campaigns, they were organized and financially supported by corporations with strong ties to the labour movement and Nordic Social Democracy.Footnote 4 This connection between nascent environmentalism and the architects and executors of the post-war Nordic welfare states undoubtedly set the campaigns apart from many other contemporary attempts to organize green grassroots movements. Here, elements of counterculture and political radicalism were all but non-existent.Footnote 5 This in turn raises questions about the role of environmental issues in the history of the Nordic welfare states.

It is often said that environmental problems do not care about national borders, but previous research in the field of environmental history has emphasized that during the first half of the twentieth century, problems with pollutants and toxins in nature were perceived primarily as local problems with local solutions. One of the decisive changes during the so-called ecological turn around 1970 was the recognition of environmental problems as global threats. This shift in perspective also called for new transnational arrangements to address environmental degradation.Footnote 6 As the Oslo conference suggests, the Swedish-Norwegian attempts to establish environmental campaigns provide examples of such transnational communicative activities and information exchange in the post-war Nordic region.Footnote 7 In doing so, it built on existing practices of engaging children and youth in international issues across the borders of the Nordic countries. For several decades, transnational networks of cooperation in the region had been used to promote issues such as peace and humanitarianism.Footnote 8 Now, environment degradation called for action.

As well as the geographic scale, the organizational temporalities underlying the planning, scope and outcome of these campaigns were also important. The aspirations of these campaigns reached beyond short-lived media attention. From initial launch to finale, each campaign lasted two years and involved carefully crafted strategies for turning information into political impact. Moreover, by actively engaging with children and youth as symbolic ambassadors of future generations and stakeholders in environmental politics, the temporal orientation of the organizers was imagined in terms of generations rather than ephemeral impact.

These campaigns were also characterized by the multitude of media employed in collecting and distributing information as well as making information “active” in terms of inspiring political action. The importance of activating citizens in political or social affairs beyond mere attention-making has been discussed as principally important since antiquity and gained further relevance in twentieth-century democracies. Following Nick Couldry, Sonia Livingstone and Tim Markham, we will explore the relationship between media and civic engagement as a form of public connection that included attention and action on local, national and international scales of interaction.Footnote 9 It is worth noting that we use the term “media” for a wide range of communicative tools used for transmission, storage and processing of information. Aside from print and broadcast media, we include communicative settings such as physical meetings, understood as “cultural techniques” of communication.Footnote 10 The purpose is to explore the mediation and transnational entanglements of these early environmental campaigns, with special attention given to the various media involved and how these media “formatted” the content of the campaigns. What media and organizational strategies were used to create civic engagement with environmental issues, especially among children and youth? What role did attention and activation play in attempts to bring about political reform? How did the organizers address different geographic scales of environmental issues in local, national and transnational frameworks?

By addressing these issues, we will also contribute to the understanding of campaigns as a media format in 1960s’ Scandinavia. A year before the FMM campaign started, Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right on 3 September 1967. As Fredrik Norén has shown in his evaluation of the massive information campaign that preceded the implementation, it involved the use of numerous media by a range of government agencies and no fewer than 250 NGOs.Footnote 11 One of these NGOs was Folksam’s Youth Council.

The traffic campaign and the FMM campaign both sought to convey information that would generate change. Since the relationship between knowledge of environmental degradation and environmental action was crucial to the campaign-makers, and still defines contemporary environmental discourse, we will discuss how these campaigns used various media for the purposes of attention, organization and activation of the public.

Bringing Attention to Environmentalism

The FMM-VNM campaign originated in Sweden. In October 1967, Hans Palmstierna published the paperback book Plundring, svält, förgiftning (“Looting, Starvation, Poisoning”), which became one of the seminal contributions to Swedish public discourse on environmentalism.Footnote 12 Palmstierna was trained as a chemist, regularly appeared in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, and was a committed Social Democrat. In his book, Palmstierna used his scientific expertise to show how man’s relationship with nature had transformed from mutual dependence to ruthless exploitation. The planet’s natural resources were quickly depleting while toxins and waste filled air, land and sea.Footnote 13

Paperbacks were a new medium for public intellectual debate in 1960s’ Sweden.Footnote 14 The success of Palmstierna’s book illustrates how environmental issues captured public attention in Sweden at this time and illustrates that the medium itself proved a successful starting point for transmedial circulation. In the following months, Palmstierna discussed his book on Swedish television, and his alarming propositions were brought up in the major newspapers.Footnote 15 These media all contributed to the spread of information about environmental issues, capturing public attention in the fall of 1967.Footnote 16 While Palmstierna was clearly content with this media impact and public connection, he was also concerned with what mere attention could not do. The book had increased awareness about environmental issues, but it did not provide an arena for social organization or political action. The relationship between information (or knowledge) and action—or rather lack of action—took centre stage in the 1967 environmental debate, and Palmstierna became personally involved in this issue. His next ambition was to organize a new popular environmental movement.Footnote 17

Establishing a social movement would require a far greater effort than Palmstierna could muster on his own, but an opportunity presented itself through his contacts with the insurance company Folksam. After reading Palmstierna’s book, Anders Ericsson, secretary of the company’s Youth Council, became committed to raising awareness of environmental issues in Sweden. In December 1967, Folksam’s Youth Council began planning a nationwide campaign, which would involve Palmstierna personally, as he was given the task of preparing material that could be used to reach new audiences. The content of his book was now adapted for a younger audience by the use of other media and materials.

From Attention to Organization

The aim of the Swedish FMM campaign was to “create broad and informed public opinion” which in turn would “influence public officials, corporations and industry to take action and make decisions without delay, eliminating further environmental degradation”.Footnote 18 Attention, fuelled by Palmstierna’s book, can be understood as a prerequisite for what the campaign-makers regarded as the objective of the campaign: informed public opinion. But the campaign also demanded organization and circulation of knowledge in formats that could more easily ignite civic engagement. Therefore, the campaign was organized in two main phases. The first was carried out in 1968 and sought to involve children and youth by gathering information about local environmental problems. In the second phase, carried out in 1969, the newly found knowledge and commitment of young people would be used and harnessed in a series of public hearings. In other words, the two stages of the campaign aimed to transform the young generation from recipients of information to socially engaged environmental activists using a specific set of media-related strategies. These efforts to strengthen public connection using two-way communication tie in with contemporary debates on public information and civic participation. For example, a 1969 report by the Commission on Public Information, appointed by the Swedish government, stirred a debate on the capacity for citizens to interact with authorities, fuelling criticism of top-down, one-way-oriented public information.Footnote 19

In the first phase, the organizers identified in-person meetings as a suitable technique for organizing the campaign nationwide. During these months, information meetings were held across the country, attended by local representatives from youth organizations and representatives of schools and municipalities. Anders Ericsson led this tour and reported that interest exceeded all previous campaigns by the Youth Council.Footnote 20

After months of planning and initiation, the next phase of the campaign was fully launched in the autumn of 1968. It included a special filmstrip with the title Plundring—förgiftning [“Looting—Poisoning”], which primarily took aim at children and young teenagers. In the title, the three keywords in Palmstierna’s book title (looting, starvation, poisoning) were reduced to two. This reflected the fact that in this context, the focus was not on global population and nutrition issues (starvation), but instead on environmental issues with local scalability. To target youth in secondary education, workshops based on Palmstierna’s book were planned, and Palmstierna produced a specific study guide for this purpose.Footnote 21

The campaign-makers also sought to encourage civic participation and interactivity by means of competition. In order to “achieve the greatest possible activity and the best possible results”, the campaign arranged a national contest, where the best entries would receive prizes totalling SEK 20,000 (equating to USD 20,000–30,000 in 2022, adjusted for inflation).Footnote 22 The object of the contest was to produce a municipal “environmental inventory”. The instructions reveal that mediation was considered just as important as the information itself, since the contestants had to choose a suitable medium for their product: “The groups can make a poster, fact sheets, an essay or a filmstrip, a photo exhibition or whatever you have the resources for and an interest in”.Footnote 23 Ultimately, the task was to translate knowledge into political action, and for this purpose the organizers were mindful of how knowledge was formatted, encouraging a multi-medial approach.Footnote 24 The target group of the nationwide competition was said to be youth organizations and secondary schools, but the material provided by the campaign was deemed suitable for younger children as well.Footnote 25 The package provided by Folksam included worksheets and instructions for study groups. In addition, participants could borrow the aforementioned filmstrip from their local Folksam office.Footnote 26

The list of prize winners testifies to broad interest and geographical impact.Footnote 27 Among the winners was a group of first-year students at Majorna secondary school (gymnasium) in Gothenburg, who had gathered data and produced an audio tape for use in public education: “We asked the company leaders about working conditions and environmental degradation, but at first they did not agree that the conditions were unsatisfactory. We pressed them harder and it turned out that almost everyone was aware of the problems”, said one student.Footnote 28 Another competition winner was a filmstrip about environmental degradation in Borlänge and Stora Tuna. A primary school in Örnsköldsvik was praised for a “fact-packed and richly illustrated” environmental inventory.Footnote 29

The competition format testifies to the congenial structure of the campaign. The intention of the organizers was for the information compiled as part of the youth competition to also form the basis for the public hearings that were to be arranged during the following year. Thus, the organizers of the hearings would gain updated information that highlighted municipal problems, for which local politicians were accountable. Children and youth were thus activated in these campaigns, and their efforts were (at least in theory) to become practically useful in the link between information and action on environmental problems. In other words, children and youth were mobilized as knowledge actors, gathering and mediating information on local environmental problems and organizing them within a nationwide campaign.Footnote 30

From Organization to Action

On the evening of 19 February 1969, the first public hearing of the FMM campaign was held in Norrköping. With more than 800 people in the crowd, members of the youth organization of the trade unions’ regional committee were put in charge of the public interrogation, in front of an all-male panel with representatives from local businesses and public administration.Footnote 31 For three hours, they responded to questions about environmental degradation posed by the young interrogators and members of the audience.Footnote 32

The event marked the beginning of the second phase of the FMM campaign. During the first six months of 1969, twenty hearings of this kind were held across the country, with an average attendance of 500 people. In early January 1970, the campaign ended with a high-profile “environmental parliament” in Stockholm. By then, the impact had exceeded the expectations of the Folksam directors: 10,000 people had participated in hearings, and according to the company’s periodical Folksam, “hundreds of thousands of young people” had studied the educational material of the campaign in schools and civic society organizations, or attended local campaign meetings. The publication reported:

Young people from schools, youth organizations and study circles, well prepared through book and field studies, have asked politicians, business leaders, authorities and experts about the environmental situation, especially in their own municipality, and how they intend to cope with our future.Footnote 33

After gaining attention through books, newspapers, and radio and television appearances, Palmstierna and Folksam had employed other media such as meetings and printed campaign material to involve children and youths in gathering information and producing knowledge about local environmental problems. Now, the time was ripe to transform these efforts into political action. The primary media technique employed for this purpose in the Folksam campaign was the public hearing, which illustrates that the media formats of the campaign relied heavily on a democratic repertoire that accentuated parliamentary reform rather than extra-parliamentary activism. This does not imply, however, that the use of hearings was well established within the democratic tradition of the Swedish social movements. Instead, the use of the English word “hearing” illustrates that this was considered a fairly new medium in Sweden and the organizers explicitly stated that they were inspired by US congressional hearings.Footnote 34 The major difference was that Folksam put young people in charge of interrogations. This reflected one of the ever-recurring ideas of environmental commitment: that children and young people, as members of the “next generation”, represent the future of the planet. One of the campaign’s information texts explained: “It is the youth who will take over the already severely devastated legacy. It is therefore also natural that young people are involved and form a front against environmental degradation”.Footnote 35

In early January 1970, a year designated as the European Year of Nature Conservation, the FMM campaign entered its final phase. On 2–4 January 1970, about 200 participants invited by Folksam’s Youth Council gathered for an “environmental parliament” in Stockholm. The participants included politicians, state and municipal officials and representatives of environmental organizations, representatives of youth organizations, and the winners of the 1968 competition. According to Folksam’s periodical, speeches by scientists and politicians were followed by a six-hour (!) hearing with a “quite heated” debate.Footnote 36

The environmental parliament marked the finale of a campaign that had begun two years earlier. In all stages of this campaign, Folksam and its Youth Council had targeted young people. Using custom-made educational material, the campaign had sought to educate the younger generation by bringing the facts from Palmstierna’s book to an audience that hopefully would turn words into deeds. The campaign did not merely aspire to enlighten public opinion. Instead, it was organized in two stages that would inspire action: from registering municipal environmental hazards to raising demands for new legislation. Action, as envisioned by the organizers, did not centre on extra-parliamentary protests or civil disobedience. Rather, it aspired to be constrained, disciplined and firmly based on knowledge.Footnote 37 There was, among the leaders of the campaign, an optimistic view of how technology and political decision-making could solve the environmental problems that were generated by an industrial society.

Campaign Export

By the time the Swedish edition of the FMM campaign ended in January 1970, the campaign had already spread beyond the borders of Sweden, with organizations in Norway and Denmark showing interest in the campaign format. In the following section, we will discuss the transnational scope of the campaign by analysing the Norwegian adaptation of the FMM campaign. During the spring of 1969, when Hans Palmstierna and Anders Ericsson were busy arranging public hearings in Sweden, they also made detours to Oslo and Copenhagen with the intent of establishing Norwegian and Danish editions of the campaign. The fact that they were accompanied by Folksam CEO Seved Apelqvist illustrates the importance given to the campaign and its transnational potential within Folksam. By then, Norwegian and Danish editions of Palmstierna’s book had been published, making Palmstierna a public figure across Scandinavia.

As mentioned, the backers of the Norwegian VNM campaign included not only the insurance company Samvirke, but also LO, the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions. This arrangement offered financial and organizational strength as well as potential media impact through the various periodicals distributed by the unions.Footnote 38 However, when trade unions backed a campaign that took aim at industrial pollution, it also caused potential political controversy. In an interview published in the journal of the Norwegian Union of Iron and Metalworkers, campaign director Olav Carlsen was asked whether a campaign that placed Norwegian industry “in the line of fire” in fact posed an attack on the members’ employers. Unsurprisingly, Carlsen denied this, stating instead that the campaign did not target companies but “laziness, inertia and habitual thinking, especially among responsible authorities”.Footnote 39

In another interview, Olav Carlsen explained that the campaign was planned to involve young people, but also different sectors of society.Footnote 40 When compared to the Swedish FMM campaign, the Norwegian iteration did not target children and youths exclusively.Footnote 41 What is further worth noting is that the liberal newspaper Dagbladet had enthusiastically called for a Norwegian version of the Folksam campaign in mid-March 1969, that is before Palmstierna’s Oslo visit, asking its readership to suggest organizations that could take the lead in Norway.Footnote 42 This was not appreciated by Carlsen, who was already planning a Norwegian campaign with backing from labour movement and cooperative organizations. He told Arbeiderbladet: “Our campaign is far greater and will involve more organizations than the Swedish campaign”.Footnote 43

Not everyone was content with the organization of the Norwegian campaign. On 1 April, the chairman and vice-chairman of Natur og Ungdom, the youth organization of the Norwegian Nature Conservation Association, called it “deeply regrettable” that the campaign would be dominated by the Social Democratic Party Arbeiderpartiet (although it should be noted that the party itself was not formally part of the campaign). Natur og Ungdom welcomed an environmental initiative but had apparently planned their own nationwide campaign for more than a month. They expressed interest in cooperation but stated: “The campaign should neither be un-political, nor party-political”.Footnote 44

The VNM campaign formally began in September. Like the Swedish FMM campaign, it was organized in two stages. First, it offered educational opportunities for study circles, organized by the educational association of the Norwegian labour movement, AOF, discussing Palmstierna’s book.Footnote 45 In the next stage of the campaign, these groups were to make practical use of newly acquired knowledge by actively identifying local environmental problems. These would, in turn, be addressed by nature conservation organizations. At the same time, those responsible for the campaign emphasized that the problems could not be seen as purely local. In the Norwegian context, the threat to the world’s oceans was highlighted, including fears that life in the oceans was endangered.Footnote 46 Further, one of the campaign’s district organizers stressed in an interview with Fri fagbevegelse that the global nature of pollution made trade unions especially apt to address environmental issues, since they had extensive international networks.Footnote 47

Within a month, Norwegian newspapers reported that several hundred meetings had been held around the country. “It is evident that broad opinion is already strongly concerned about these problems”, Norwegian campaign manager Olav Carlsen told the newspaper Moss Dagblad in late October. Schools and adult education groups had begun working with the problems locally. According to Carlsen, the organizers of the campaign even had difficulty finding enough qualified speakers to meet demand across the country. This, however, also revealed a shortcoming of in-person meetings as a medium for organizing the campaign, as the availability of knowledge actors limited potential outreach.Footnote 48 On the other hand, a multitude of media were employed in this phase of the campaign. The material provided to study groups included filmstrips and audio tapes, workbooks and material for interviews, and posters. Evidently, the campaign organizers sought to utilize different media to achieve active participation in ways that were similar to its Swedish forerunner.Footnote 49 Like its Swedish predecessor, the main purpose of the VNM campaign was stated to be the creation of well-informed public opinion, but also to direct this public opinion into action and put pressure on decision-makers in politics and industry.

In the autumn of 1969, Anders Ericsson from the Folksam Youth Council and Lennart Danielsson from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency joined Olav Carlsen at a number of start-up meetings across Norway. Ericsson and Danielsson were quoted as saying:

There are probably no other countries that have initiated actions of the type we have had in Sweden. However, many people in many countries are concerned about the issues. […] The special thing about the Swedish campaign is that we go out to the broad masses with scientific knowledge. In other countries, it is mainly scientists who work on the issues in isolation.Footnote 50

Knowledge was thus considered crucial for stirring public opinion and enabling political action. The purpose was to democratize knowledge, but obviously also to create leverage for policy-making.

In June 1970, those responsible for the campaign announced that 1800 working groups had been formed. At this time, the newspaper Arbeiderbladet also reported that a group of students at Lunde school (grades 7–9) had encountered problems when they wanted to document environmental impact at the company Union Bruk in Skien. The company management had apparently declined to answer the students’ questions. Otherwise, most companies had welcomed the campaign, the Social Democratic newspaper reported.Footnote 51

Like the Swedish FMM campaign, the Norwegian campaign ended with a conference, on 3 January 1971. Among the speakers were Edvard Hambro, president of the United Nations General Assembly. The 150 participants also included the winners of the campaign’s prize competition and representatives from participating organizations. According to information given to the newspaper Arbeiderbladet, 200,000 people had participated in the campaign “in one way or another”.Footnote 52 Olav Carlsen said that he was particularly pleased that the campaign material had become part of the national school curriculum in Norway.Footnote 53

The Norwegian campaign also resonated abroad. Before the finalization of the campaign in 1971, Carlsen travelled to London with hopes of launching the campaign in the United Kingdom. However, after the Social Democratic Party won the Norwegian election that year, Carlsen would land a new job as state secretary in a new ministry of environmental protection.Footnote 54 Instead, the international connections of the trade unions became important for Norwegian attempts to inspire new environmental campaigns abroad. In 1971, the LO journal Fri fagbevegelse reported that trade unions in Austria, Singapore, Australia, Japan and the United States had begun addressing environmental issues in advance of the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Environment, and that the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) had taken an interest in the Norwegian VNM campaign:

Without exaggeration, it can be said that the Norwegian trade unions have come further than other countries in this fight. The international trade union organizations have shown growing interest in what the LO campaign ‘Vern om Naturmiljøet’ has accomplished …. ICFTU has shown particular interest in the Norwegian model, and its environmental committee has already looked more closely at it.Footnote 55

When the United Nations arranged its first international conference on the environment in Stockholm the following year, Sweden and Norway could, in somewhat different ways, claim to be at the forefront of environmental action—at least among insurance companies and trade unions. This was in line with a self-image of Scandinavia as progressive and distinctly modern, and the solutions to environmental problems were consistently discussed in terms of scientific progress, investments and education.

Concluding Discussion

In this chapter, we set out to discuss the environmental turn in Scandinavia from the perspective of media history. We have analysed the wide array of media techniques employed in these campaigns to gain attention and activate the public in terms of civic engagement. The formation and circulation of knowledge on environmental degradation were central elements in the execution of the campaign in a structure that ultimately sought to transform knowledge of these problems into political action. As shown in this chapter, the campaigns used different media for different purposes. Although there were certain overlaps, the organizational and activating efforts of the campaign relied heavily on in-person meetings, public hearings and parliamentary simulation, while the efforts to gain attention made use of mass media such as newspapers, books and radio.

The FMM campaign in Sweden shares certain characteristics with the information campaign that preceded the change to right-hand traffic in 1967. For example, both campaigns mobilized resources by involving a broad range of civil society organizations as well as schools.Footnote 56 While the traffic campaign made use of expertise from social and cognitive science to influence public opinion and maximize its impact, the environmental campaigns were not primarily directed at the attitudes or behaviours of citizens. Instead, attention and organization of public opinion were used as means to achieve political reform. In both cases, however, the temporal organization of these campaigns reveals the perseverance and careful planning of the campaigns, which lasted for a long period of time—approximately two years—and took into account how various media could transform information into awareness and action. By actively seeking to mobilize children and youth against environmental degradation, the temporal orientation of the campaigns took aim at the long-term perspective: to gain the support of “future generations” and prepare them for what would today perhaps be described as active “ecological citizenship”.Footnote 57

Whether or not these campaigns succeeded in their mission is open to debate, especially if we narrow our viewpoint to the organizations and companies involved. Palmstierna’s ambition to ignite a new popular movement modelled on earlier people’s movements in the Scandinavian tradition did not materialize, but the pathways to challenge industrial pollution on a municipal and national level arguably widened.

Finally, the environmental campaigns are testaments to the transnational exchanges and integration of the Nordic welfare states during these years. Both Hans Palmstierna and Olav Carlsen were members of the Social Democratic Party in Sweden and Norway respectively, and several others were public officials or leaders in the cooperative/labour movement. When the Swedish campaign was launched in 1968, the Social Democrats had been holding power for more than three decades and gained more than 50 per cent of the public vote in the parliamentary elections that year.Footnote 58 Norway, on the other hand, was governed by a centre-right coalition. Instead, cooperation regarding these campaigns took place in civil society with support mobilized by companies and NGOs.

Earlier research has shown how environmental issues, owing to the transnational nature of pollution, became a crucial area for Nordic cooperation.Footnote 59 Formal networks among the organizations of the labour movement in Scandinavia facilitated international cooperation, including youth conferences, educational efforts and meetings of the Nordic cooperative insurance companies.Footnote 60 Again, the scalability of environmental issues between local, municipal problems and transnational or global challenges enabled activists to “think both globally and locally”, but also required environmentalists to use or develop organizational structures that facilitated international cooperation. The transnational networks of Nordic cooperation, as well as the vision and self-image of a distinct Swedish, Norwegian or Nordic Model, could readily be employed to promote the notion of a region at the forefront of environmental awareness, not least when measures to reduce pollution were framed in narratives of industrial progress and modernity.