In the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev loosened state controls on media and association in the Soviet Union, a wave of environmental protest swept the country. Environmental clubs were among the first groups to form when Gorbachev legalized non-official social organizations, and many of them soon grew into the first mass-based protest movements in Soviet history. “It was not [economic failure...that] first brought people into the streets,” as one scholar has noted; rather, “it was the state of the environment.”1 Across the board, however, these mass environmental movements shrivelled to insignificance after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Why this rapid flowering and equally rapid fading of environmental activism in the former Soviet Union? In several non-Russian Soviet regions, environmental movements from the outset were suffused with an anti-colonial rhetoric which linked environmental threats to Moscow’s “genocidal” policies toward non-Russian nations. Environmental groups quickly spawned mass movements for independence or autonomy from the center, and were soon overshadowed by their nationalist offshoots. Jane Dawson has called this phenomenon “eco-nationalism,” and she identifies it as a form of “movement surrogacy,” whereby environmental concerns, being politically safer than anti-colonial ones, were used as a mobilizational tool for deeper nationalist agendas. 2 Once national independence had been achieved, Dawson argues, environmental movements lost their mobilizational utility and, therefore, withered away. In the cases of anti-nuclear activism which she considers, the governments of newly independent countries such as Lithuania and Ukraine chose to resume construction or operation of previously vilified nuclear plants. In Dawson’s view, the absence of continued mass environmental activism in the Soviet successor states reflects low levels of environmental consciousness there.

The experience of Latvia in the late 1980s and early 1990s supports Dawson’s analysis. In Latvia, too, it was environmental protest (against a proposed hydroelectric power dam) that first mobilized Latvian citizens and rapidly escalated into nationalist secessionism. As in Dawson’s cases, the Latvian environmental movement was soon eclipsed in numbers and prominence by expressly nationalist organizations, and in the post-Soviet period, grassroots environmental groups have, to borrow Dawson’s phrase, “dwindled to no more than a handful of still-concerned citizens.”3 As Dawson has observed in Moscow and Kiev, so too in Riga “the most active environmental organization...is now a regional branch of [an] international organization”: in this case, not Greenpeace but the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF International). Thus, Latvia reflects a post-Soviet pattern in which “foreign-sponsored, professional social movement organizations [have emerged] to replace the impoverished and largely apathetic indigenous movements.”

As Dawson herself suggests4, the post-Soviet withering away of mass environmental activism is no great puzzle. Mass political activism of any kind has largely faded since the breakup, with euphoria giving way to political disillusionment and apathy, or perhaps simply with the “normalization” of democratic politics.5 Moreover, environmental concerns obviously will be viewed in a radically different light by people who must begin generating their own economic growth and providing for their own energy consumption needs. The question that interests me, then, is how the newly independent countries are grappling with a perennial dilemma of the industrialized world: the dilemma of growth versus nature.

My fieldwork in Latvia suggests that environmental consciousness is still very much present, but its manifestations have become less visible, less dramatic, and less simplistic, as environmentalists seek to influence government policy through means other than street demonstrations, and as environmental needs can no longer be separated from development needs. Moreover, environmental attitudes continue to be strongly linked with national identity -- not in the merely instrumental way which Dawson identifies, but in complex, multidimensional ways, refracted through the problem of economic development. I will argue that, in the post-Soviet era, conceptions of national identity and developmental destiny are central to Latvian environmental attitudes. In other words, Latvian notions about their proper relationship with the land are intimately linked with their beliefs about who Latvians are as a nation, and where the Latvian economy is heading.

To get at these questions, I will analyze an ongoing policy battle around sustainable forestry. The analysis is based primarily on some forty in-depth interviews with Latvian government officials, nongovernmental activists, scientists, and logging executives, which I conducted as an independent consultant for WWF International during an eight-month trip to Latvia from September 1995 to April 1996.6 The discourse of “sustainable development,” which came to global prominence in the 1980s, purports to integrate environmental needs with development needs -- to mitigate, in other words, the starkness of the jobs versus nature tradeoff. This tradeoff is potentially very stark indeed in the Latvian forestry sector, since forests both generate the largest share of Latvian export products and provide the most critical habitats for Latvia’s richly abundant wildlife. According to WWF International, “[b]eing the European country most dependent on the forest sector, Latvia could probably serve as a ‘model country’ for sustainable forestry development.”7 I focus on forest habitat rather than, say, pollution abatement as a testing ground of sustainable development because in Latvia, a country without extensive heavy industry but with a heritage of wildlife unsurpassed in the European context, the gravest environmental hazard is arguably the potential destruction of biological diversity. Identified by the Global Environmental Facility as one of the four most urgent targets of international environmental aid8, prevention of biodiversity loss is a central focus of both international aid and domestic activism in Latvia. The battle over sustainable forestry, then, represents a crucially important site for investigating the post-independence balancing of environmental and development agendas in Latvia.

The sustainable forestry conflict is illuminating, moreover, because its battle lines reflect a deep division in post-Soviet Latvian political culture between two competing conceptions of national identity and developmental destiny. These competing orientations, which I have called liberal internationalism and agrarian nationalism, promote radically divergent land ethics. For liberals, as we will see, being Latvian is primarily about stewarding a natural heritage, while for agrarians, being Latvian is primarily about working the soil. Because of their notions of who Latvians are and where the Latvian economy is heading, liberals understand good stewardship in terms of openness to Western norms and global markets and the strengthening of private enterprise and civil society. For agrarians, in contrast, good stewardship requires a strongly interventionist state, a tightly regulated private sphere, and a vigorously skeptical attitude toward Western influences. National identity, in short, continues profoundly to influence environmental attitudes and land use policies in post-Soviet Latvia, but in much more complex ways than in the heady days of anti-colonialism.


Latvian eco-nationalism: a tale of two dams

The Gorbachev era was not the first time that environmentalism joined forces with nationalist dissent in Soviet-occupied Latvia. During the earlier political thaw under Khrushchev in the late 1950s, Latvian Communist leaders made an abortive foray into the terrain of “national communism,” hoping to gain popular legitimacy through “indigenization” of Communist Party personnel and increased local decisionmaking authority.9 Cultural elites took advantage of the thaw to protest Moscow’s plans to build a large dam for hydroelectric power generation on the Daugava (Western Dvina) River. For Latvians, the Daugava "has been an integral part of ancient mythology and cultural history and serves as the country's chief geographical point of reference. Thousands of folk songs personalize and endearingly address this great river."10 Ultimately, “national communism” was crushed, and the dam erected, but Latvians never forgave Moscow for the flooding of cherished cultural landmarks and large areas of beautiful riverine landscape.

In 1988, another proposed hydroelectric dam on the Daugava was again the spark that mobilized public opinion, leading mass “eco-nationalist” activism of the sort analyzed by Dawson.11 It is important to note that anti-dam rhetoric not only decried Moscow’s colonial dictates, but also emphasized the sacredness of the Daugava itself, as the Latvian people’s “fate-river.”12 As in the 1950s, in other words, in the 1980s the anti-dam movement manifested not only the spirit of anti-colonialism, but also the spirit of pastoralism: that is, the defense of nature both as intrinsically valuable and as spiritually and aesthetically valuable for humans.13 This time, mass protest succeeded in cancelling the project, and anti-dam activists went on to form the Latvian national independence movement.

Since independence, Latvian government officials have shelved the hydroelectric project until at least the year 2010, identifying no urgent need for it. But in 1996, local governments in the area of the cancelled dam voted in favor of reviving the project. “Construction of the hydroelectric plant is a question of survival for us,” declared the mayor of Daugavpils, the provincial capital of Latgale.14 Latgale is Latvia’s most depressed region, with unemployment rates of 20 to 25%. A construction project of this scale, its boosters maintained, could employ up to a thousand people for several years, attract credits and investment, and thus stimulate the “economic rebirth of Latgale.”15 But what about the folkloric sacred status of the Daugava, the “fate-river” that rallied thousands to demand freedom from oppression? For the leaders of the 1980s anti-dam movement, the vote to reactivate the project was “a calculated affront to everything that was sacred and untouchable in the late ‘80s, everything that gave meaning to Latvian independence itself.”16 Local Daugavpils biologists, meanwhile, warned that flooding of marshes and forests in the Daugava valley would destroy “one of Latvia’s most biologically diverse natural regions.”17 According to dam boosters, on the other hand, “[t]he evil wrought by [the anti-dam movement] cannot even be comprehended -- they destroyed many people’s jobs.”18 The revered heros of the independence movement, in other words, had become, for some Latvians, public enemies.


Sustainable development and Latvian pastoralism

The perceived stark trade-off between nature and development -- a tradeoff tragically familiar in every industrial society -- has dramatically complicated the relationship between nationalism and environmental attitudes in post-independence Latvia: the environmental crusader is no longer automatically a nationalist hero. Are Latvians now forced to choose between jobs and nature, and will nature inevitably lose out? A closer look at land use debates suggests that not all Latvians, in fact, perceive the trade-off in zero-sum terms. Many, instead, embrace the discourse of sustainable development, which, by seeking to integrate criteria of environmental soundness and social justice with that of economic efficiency in development decisions, holds out the hope that nature need not necessarily be sacrificed for jobs.

Western governments and international aid donors, including EU-PHARE, the World Bank, and WWF International, are currently promoting an array of sustainable development projects in Latvia, targeted chiefly at the preservation of biodiversity. Compared to Western Europe, Latvia has extraordinarily high levels of biodiversity. According to a top environmental official, “half of the species identified in the [1979] Bonn Convention [on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals] are common in Latvia, while in many European nations they can now be found only on postage stamps.”19 This wealth of wildlife is, ironically, a legacy of Russian domination: the relative economic inefficiency of imperial Russian and Soviet socialist rule meant later and less intensive development of agriculture, logging, and industry in Latvia than in the West. Moreover, the Soviets’ need for large military bases on its Western border preserved large areas of relatively pristine wilderness, especially along the Baltic Sea coast.20 Forests, and especially the more than twenty percent of forests which are on wet soils, are the key to Latvian biodiversity, providing habitat for such rare and endangered species as eagle, otter, wolf, lynx, beaver, and the world’s densest population of black storks.21

Many Latvians believe that Western interest in Latvian biodiversity is in itself a valuable resource for economic growth. “Biodiversity is one of Latvia's undervalued riches,” the abov-quoted official declared in 1992, “a vast capital which could easily be squandered during the period of economic transition in the race for immediate affluence, but which is extremely difficult to renew even in a wealthy nation.” He maintained that “tourism can support Latvia's economy more than agriculture,” and that Western tourists will be attracted not by yet another medieval castle ruin, but by wildlife. The Horn of Kolka in northwestern Latvia, the official noted, “is during spring migration the best observation spot for birds of prey in all of Europe. Nowhere else in Europe are there such long stretches of undeveloped beaches. Many Europeans would pay real money to walk along a beach that doesn't have three German sunbathers per meter!”22

A retired biologist profiled last spring in Latvia’s leading newspaper has placed his bets on the accuracy of this vision: upon restitution of his ancestral farmstead in the post-Soviet land reform, he and his wife chose not to farm it but rather to capitalize on its marshes and “virtually primeval” forest by developing a nature park. “Everyone is constantly talking about how we must enter Europe,” observes this eco-entrepreneur. “Nature is what we can still trump them with. We want to prove that in the most ordinary rural province and the most ordinary farmstead, by managing the land on the principle of environmental quality, birdsong, the peace and quiet of nature, the murmur of waters and forests can become market commodities.”23 Sustainable development, from this perspective, offers a way out from the zero-sum trade-off of jobs versus nature. Nature itself can generate growth, because Westerners, who have destroyed their own wilderness, will pay good money to enjoy Latvian wilderness.

While the sustainable development vision is promoted by transnational organizations and embraces transnational flows of people and money, it also resonates with the pastoral tradition in Latvian national culture. Latvian national identity is strongly imbued with what ecologists and geographers call the “sense of place.” Latvians like to point out that the agriculturalist ancestors of the Latvian nation first settled in the territory of present-day Latvia as early as 2000 B.C. The proto-Latvian tribes embraced a nature-based, pantheistic religion, inscribed over the centuries in literally millions of folksong verses, called dainas, which depict harmonious, non-hierarchical relationships between humans, nature, and deities. In the dainas, “[n]ature is depicted not as something to be feared, conquered or subdued, but rather as an endowment to be cherished, protected and befriended.”24 Cultural leaders of Latvia’s first movement of national awakening in the late 19th century collected and catalogued the dainas, which remain an everyday element of Latvians’ cultural knowledge. The pre-Christian nature-based religion, “reinvented” during Latvia’s first period of independence in the 1920s, is still practiced today by a prominent minority of Latvians in Latvia and in the diaspora, while the great majority of Latvians still observe many pre-Christian customs and holidays. The intimate links between humans and nature expressed in the dainas survive also, albeit in vastly weakened form, in the lifestyle patterns even of urban Latvians. Fishing and mushrooming are national obsessions, and rare is the Latvian city-dweller who does not spend most summer weekends in the country tending a kitchen garden.

Moreover, at a discursive level, Latvians typically talk about Latvian national identity as being strongly defined by links to the natural terrain of Latvia. The new National Environmental Policy Plan, for example, locates the origins of Latvian nature protection in the pre-Christian naturalistic religion, which imbued in Latvian peasants “a deep respect towards the land, the sun, water, and all living things,” and left behind “a heritage of sacred springs, groves, caves and stones.” This attitude, the document declares, “should be cultivated in our hearts today, where we should learn to [...] understand it, and pass it on to future generations with patience and care.”25 Similarly, a prominent Latvian ecologist has described Latvian folklore as a conduit for ancestral ecological information. In contrast to (Russian-speaking) “populations who have come in here from very rich and vast territories, where natural resources were very plentiful,” she argues, in Latvia, “we have only land, forest, and people -- three riches of nature [...]. We are here on this little strip of land,” she observes, and we must respect the territory’s natural rules, transmitted through folklore, “or else we are finished, for we simply have nowhere to go.”26

In this environmentally determinist view, respect for nature is an evolutionary survival skill of the Latvian people: the confined and resource-poor Latvian land itself has made a sustainable land ethic an integral element of national identity. Thus, the Latvian pastoral tradition does more than claim the primordial roots of Latvian environmental attitudes; it posits those attitudes as constitutive of Latvianness itself. "The national consciousness and culture of the [Latvian] nation developed within a diverse natural environment and cultural landscape," observes the National Environmental Policy Plan. “More than just tangible,” concurs an emigré writer, “[the landscape] has become an inextricable part of the Latvian character itself.”27


Liberalism versus agrarianism: national identity contested

Latvian advocates of sustainable development, biodiversity, and eco-tourism thus partake of the pastoral tradition in Latvian national culture. For these Latvians, it would seem, embracing the global discourse of sustainability does not necessarily require abandoning notions of national uniqueness. “We need not sacrifice our cultural-historical values in our mystical efforts to be ‘like everyone in Europe,’” insists an analyst of regional development. “Perhaps people will come here expressly to enjoy the peace and blessedness of our rural homesteads?”28 But at the same time, the global nature of this discourse must not be overlooked. The sustainable development vision is very much a transnational one, promoted by transnational donors and corporations, and linking Latvia’s future course with transnational markets (for unspoiled nature as a “commodity”) and with global environmental norms.29 The National Environmental Policy Plan argues, thus, that Latvia’s relative wealth of wildlife must be protected not only because of its intimate relationship to Latvian identity, but also because it “increases Latvia’s international responsibility for preservation of biodiversity at the [European] continental level.”30

This development agenda reflects a current in Latvian political culture which I have called liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalists link Latvia’s developmental destiny with the forces of globalization and European integration. They embrace Western norms, foreign investment, and the primacy of private enterprise. Based on global and regional market trends, they predict that agricultural and industrial production will be less important for Latvia's future development than transit, commerce, and service industries, including tourism. Therefore, they oppose state support of "production for production's sake," and urge their countrymen to discard the phyisiocratic notion that "material production is the economy's foundation and the rest is merely parasitical.”31 Liberal internationalism is, thus, consistent with a sustainable land ethic: rural land stewardship, for liberals, should not emphasize material production, but should, by preserving landscape and habitat, promote tourism and compliance with international treaty obligations.

There is another current in Latvian political culture, however, which does not look as favorably upon the prospect of globalization and Western tourism as engines of economic growth, and which promotes a very different land ethic. Many Latvians contend, in classic physiocratic tradition, that all economic value, and indeed moral value, comes from working the soil. They view the agricultural livelihood and Latvia’s ancient agrarian traditions as the bedrock of Latvian identity: the preservers of spiritual, moral, and physicial health and of the “national mentality.” For agrarian nationalists, the sovereign use of rural land should always be agricultural production. Denouncing “Europeification” as the newest form of colonization, they resent the notion of the Latvian countryside being used to entertain European tourists, and of Latvians being squeezed off their farms into demeaning service jobs. Like sustainable development promoters, then, agrarian nationalists also celebrate the pastoral roots of Latvian identity. However, rather than valuing nature as wilderness, to be protected for ecological and aesthetic reasons, they value nature as the site of man’s heroic battle to produce sustenance by transforming the physical world. Like agrarians anywhere in the world, they valorize the farming livelihood for its closeness to nature, but at the same time their agenda is to transform and improve upon nature.32

Whereas liberal internationalists look forward to “Europe” when envisioning Latvia’s developmental destiny, agrarian nationalists essentially look backward to the “golden age” of interwar independent Latvia. In the 1920s and ‘30s, 60% of Latvia’s population was rural. Latvia’s first independent governments made agricultural development a top priority, and they succeeded in making Latvia "one of the most advanced agrarian countries in Northern Europe."33 After the erstwhile agronomist and quasi-fascist Karlis Ulmanis seized dictatorial powers in 1934, Latvia was also a heavily statist country. President Ulmanis tightly controlled private economic activity through state corporatism, regulation, state monopolies, and forced liquidations, particularly of businesses owned by non-ethnic Latvians.34 Despite Ulmanis’ political repressions, and despite the fact that per capita agricultural and industrial output actually declined steadily under his rule, a great many Latvians today revere Ulmanis and invoke this period as a “golden age” of prosperity and solid agrarian values and, moreover, as a template for future development strategies.

The agrarian-liberal divide has been a persistent and salient source of conflict in post-Soviet Latvian politics. Conflict over agricultural support toppled Latvia's first post-independence government in 1994, for example, when the dominant liberal party, under heavy pressure from the IMF and World Bank, moved to lower agricultural import tariffs, thus provoking the defection of the Farmers’ Union party from the ruling coalition. While liberals have to a large degree dominated the political stage in post-Soviet Latvia, agrarianism remains a powerful force in a country with a nearly 50% rural population. Latvia's president since independence is the honorary leader of the Farmers' Union and attained his position by virtue of being the nephew of Karlis Ulmanis. One of the fundamental questions of the Latvian transition from Soviet rule, thus, has been: are Latvians fundamentally a nation of farmers, or of cosmpolitan traders, service providers, and citizens of the new borderless Europe? Let us now turn to the case of sustainable forestry for a closer look at how competing answers to this question promote radically different orientations toward the stewardship of rural land.


The battle over sustainable forestry

For the past three years, an unlikely coalition of ecologists, small landowners, and logging firms has been waging an uphill battle with the government over the sustainability of Latvian forestry. Despite yearly increases in both forest acreage and timber exports, the coalition maintains that Latvian forestry is not sustainable environmentally, economically, or socially, and that fundamental reform of forestry sector governance is imperative. A majority of Latvian forestry officials have steadfastly rebuffed this sustainability campaign, insisting that Latvian forestry practices are at least as environmentally sound and economically rational as those of purportedly enlightened Western countries, and that the Latvian state is fulfilling adequately its stewardship role. And, in fact, Latvian law strictly limits the size of clearcuts and requires careful forest inventorying and management planning. What, then, is the problem? Why are timber executives, of all people, accusing the government of impeding sustainability? To explain this (at least from an American perspective) paradoxical situation, we must explore the opposing camps’ orientations toward Europe, the state, private enterprise, development, and national identity.

The reform coalition, spearheaded by the Latvian office of WWF, represents liberal internationalism. The coalition has extensive transnational linkages: pro-reform scientists and activists are largely funded by Western donors, pro-reform timber executives largely work for or sell primarily to Nordic-based transnational logging corporations, and pro-reform landowners receive regular consultations from their West European peers and travel abroad for training programs. While some coalition members embrace the transnational norms of “sustainable” forestry because of shared moral and scientific convictions, others do so because of a market-based assessment of future economic opportunities. Thanks to growing demand in Western Europe for environment-friendly consumer goods, loggers around the world have recently teamed up with environmental NGOs to develop a global system of “green certification” for labelling sustainably manufactured forest products. Latvia’s Nordic partners and timber buyers are convinced that soon enough, they will be hard pressed to sell uncertified Latvian timber in Germany or Britain. The Latvian reform coalition shares this conviction; therefore, they advocate sustainable forestry not only in order to defend Latvian wildlife, but also to defend Latvian jobs.

At present, the Latvian state intervenes heavily in commercial logging activities. In state-owned forests (currently comprising more than half of total forest area), logging is carried out by short-term contractors, but forest management remains in the hands of state rangers. Moreover, the state micromanages commercial logging activities through detailed, centrally issued forest management plans and countless “management directives.” According to the reform coalition, state intervention is both economically inefficient, as it prevents loggers from making market-based decisions about how much and when to cut, and ecologically destructive, as it prevents loggers from planning cuts so as to respect landscape and ecosystem boundaries and maintain habitat for forest-dwelling species. 35 The coalition wants the state to get out of the business of forest management and limit its mandate to oversight. Among other reforms, the coalition advocates transferring responsibility for the full forestry cycle to logging firms by granting them long-term leases of state forest land. Because they view private enterprise and global markets as the sine qua non of national development, the reformers maintain that even state officials need not fear the governmental downsizing that would inevitably result from such changes: competent rangersm they insist, would have no problem finding jobs with private firms, as long as the “rules of the game” are conducive to a vibrant private sector.

By the time the post-Soviet denationalization of land is completed, half of Latvian forest lands are expected to be in private hands, but the majority of these new owners lack the technical knowledge, experience, or economic security to manage their forests responsibly. The coalition urges the government to tackle this problem by supporting education and outreach for the new owners. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the coalition seeks to reform the policymaking process itself, by institutionalizing channels of participation in governmental decisionmaking for civil society: that is, for both domestic and international environmental advocates, scientists, private landowners and logging firms. The sustainable forestry coalition, in short, embraces the liberal internationalist view of Latvian developmental destiny: a view based on global markets, transnational norms, private enterprise, and civil society.

A majority of forestry officials oppose the reform proposals, and their counter-critique embraces the discourse of agrarian nationalism. That is, whereas the liberal coalition appeals to transnational norms, private enterprise, and biodiversity, the resistant officials’ discourse is anti-Western, statist, and production-centered. Let us consider each of these three dimensions.

First, the agrarian-oriented officials disparagingly refer to the sustainable forestry practices advocated by Latvian ecologists as the “Swedish methods." At best, they deride these practices as a slavish imitation of the latest West European “fashion," and at worst, they denounce them as a ploy by Latvia’s competitors to induce Latvia to lower its own timber production in the name of ecology. Latvian foresters already practice sustainable forestry, these officials maintain, but “our” sustainability is different from “theirs,” because Latvian natural conditions are different. “A Swede can’t evaluate our forest better than we ourselves can,” they insist. 36 Moreover, since logging has historically been much less intensive than in the West, Latvian forests are already in a much more natural state. “Socialism,” as one official wryly put it, “was very good to fauna.”37 From the fact of late development they conclude that “we have really always operated ecologically correctly, we just need to know how to advertise ourselves.”38

Second, the state, for agrarian nationalists, is the sole legitimate arbiter of environmental correctness and good husbandry: not nongovernmental scientists, environmental advocates, or private loggers, and certainly not foreigners. Markets cannot be trusted to defend the forest ecology and other public goods, they insist: only the state can. 39 These officials display a profound mistrust of and hostility toward private ownership and private enterprise. Back in the interwar "golden age" of President Ulmanis, they nostalgically muse, things were better. Not only was the state strong, but individuals were worthy property owners. Back then, “property was sacred, a family thing: people thought about the benefits to their children and children’s children. Nowadays, we lack traditions, moral values.” 40 In these post-Soviet times, they lament, “socialism has damaged the individual. He is not ready to take on the responsibilities that accompany property rights.”41 The solution to the problem of poverty, inexperience, and lost values among new private forest owners, in their view, is not so much education and support, as the sustainability coalition urges, but rather tighter state control. “The private owner must be to some extent enfettered,” declared a high-ranking official: “freedom must be earned.”42 Owners must be made to understand that the forest is “not only their property, but the state’s, the nation’s wealth.”43 Or, as this official even more baldly put it: “The forest is not private property.”44 Private logging firms, from this perspective, are no more trustworthy than forest owners. Except for one or two subsidiaries of large Nordic concerns, Latvian loggers are derided as “suitcase firms”: fly-by-night operations interested only in short-term gain, and therefore not to be trusted with long-term leases. Some officials go even further to argue that private loggers by definition cannot have an economic interest in the long-term wellbeing of the forest.

Third, for agrarian nationalists, the sovereign purpose of rural land is agricultural and timber production. Good forest stewardship, then, requires first and foremost maximizing production. “It is in the state’s interests for each cultivated hectare to produce,” declared one official. “Let the landowner produce whatever he wants, but the property must produce.”45 If a landowner fails to maximize the productive potential of his land, the official maintained, the state should fine him or even confiscate the land. A crucial instance of how this production-centered notion of stewardship comes into conflict with the sustainable forestry agenda is the issue of whether or not to resume of reclamation (draining) of wet forests. Latvia is a very wet country, and during the Soviet period, huge sums of money were spent draining marshes and wet forests in order to increase agricultural and timber production. Reclamation has been abandoned since independence due to lack of funds, but it is targeted by advocates of sustainable forestry as one of the gravest potential threats to biodiversity, because wet forests provide crucial habitat for many species. In the liberal vision of Latvia as a land of eco-tourism and international environmental responsibilities, then, Latvia's wet forests are an unparalleled national treasure. But for agrarian nationalists, wet forests are simply a bothersome hindrance to the maximization of timber output.


Conclusions

To sum up, what does the battle over sustainable forestry tell us about the relationship between national identity and attitudes toward the land in post-Soviet Latvia? First, it is important to note that this conflict is by no means an arcane dispute among scientists, bureaucrats, and tree-huggers. Forests, one hears continually from Latvians in all walks of life, are Latvia’s “national treasure.” Forest products comprise Latvia’s largest export group; “Latvia’s oil,” trumpets a newspaper headline, “is timber and forests!”46 When ordinary Latvians talk about forests as "green gold," they certainly have forest industries in mind, but they are also referring to the ecological, aesthetic, and recreational values of forests, of which they abundantly partake. Popular concerns about excessive logging during the post-Soviet period are extremely widespread. Contrary to Dawson’s assertion, then, popular environmental consciousness about forestry appears to be fairly high, even though it is not manifested through street demonstrations or mass membership in environmental groups. And despite the withering away of mass-based protest, environmental activism on behalf of forest habitat is very much alive in the form of sophisticated lobbying by professional environmental organizations, scientists, timber executives and forest owners.