Abstract
This paper takes the management of the Kemi River in the Finnish province of Lapland as an example for asking what environmental management is or can do, in practice and in theory. It argues that environmental management – if understood as controlling an environmental phenomenon following a ready-made plan – is not a suitable concept for understanding the interactions between the river and the people on its banks. Either, environmental management has to be defined widely as a dialogue between human and non-human actors, or it must be discarded as the illusion of a modernist, positivist ideology that projects static categories on the world. This paper juxtaposes the dams used for salmon fishing and those used in hydroelectricity production on the Kemi River. It illustrates the adaptability of the former to the river’s processes and then shows how very different the technology and rhetoric of the latter appears when it comes to relations with the river. In spite of the significantly larger impacts that hydroelectricity production has on the river as a whole, it will be argued that upon a closer look, the operation of the system of power stations has much in common with that of the salmon weirs.
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Krause, F. (2011). River Management. Technological Challenge or Conceptual Illusion? Salmon Weirs and Hydroelectric Dams on the Kemi River in Northern Finland. In: Schmidt, M., Onyango, V., Palekhov, D. (eds) Implementing Environmental and Resource Management. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77568-3_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77568-3_19
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