Nature, development and national identity: The ...

Environmental Politics

ISSN: 0964-4016 (Print) 1743-8934 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fenp20

Nature, development and national identity: The battle over sustainable forestry in Latvia Katrina Z.S. Schwartz To cite this article: Katrina Z.S. Schwartz (1999) Nature, development and national identity: The battle over sustainable forestry in Latvia, Environmental Politics, 8:3, 99-118, DOI: 10.1080/09644019908414481 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644019908414481

Published online: 08 Nov 2007.

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Nature, Development and National Identity: The Battle Over Sustainable Forestry in Latvia KATRINA Z.S. SCHWARTZ

The battle over sustainable forestry in Latvia provides insights into tensions between growth and conservation in a post-Soviet context. A diverse coalition of sustainability-oriented advocates of reform, with extensive ties to western organisations, is campaigning to improve operating conditions for private loggers and forest owners and to increase attention to landscape and biodiversity in forestry management. It is opposed by conservative forestry officials who are suspicious of both private enterprise and Western involvement, and for whom maximisation of material production is the sovereign criterion of forest stewardship. This battle reflects a deep divide between 'liberal internationalism' and 'agrarian nationalism': competing orientations toward national identity and developmental destiny in postSoviet Latvian political culture. While the outcome of this battle remains undecided, the debate itself suggests that, as in the late Soviet period, the politics of conservation continues to be strongly linked with the politics of national identity. Land use and environmental policies in the Soviet Union reflected the Marxist belief that limitless economic growth was achievable through man's infinite technological capacity to transform nature for productive purposes [e.g., DeBardeleben, 1985; Feshbach and Friendly, 1992; Peterson, 1993; Joravsky, 1970; Komarov, 1980; Weiner, 1988; Ziegler, 1987]. In the post-Soviet period, the newly independent countries are emerging from this technocratic Utopia to recognise conservation and environmental quality as public goods, and therefore to recognise limits to the possibility and desirability of the human transformation of nature. But at the same time, with the demise of the Soviet Union and thus of central planning and subsidised resource allocation, these countries must now The author is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This article is based in large part on research conducted as an independent consultant for the Latvian Programme of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF International). Environmental Politics, Vol.8, No.3, Autumn 1999, pp.99-118 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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generate their own economic growth and provide for their own resource consumption needs. They are thereby confronted with a perennial dilemma of the industrialised world: the dilemma of 'jobs versus nature'. While many in the post-Soviet realm, as elsewhere in the world, perceive the balancing of economic development and environmental protection as a zero-sum tradeoff, others believe the choices need not be so stark. The discourse of 'sustainable development', which came to global prominence in the 1980s, purports to mitigate the zero-sum tradeoff by integrating environmental considerations into development decisions, and this discourse has been embraced by many environmental activists and policymakers in the post-Soviet sphere. I examine sustainable forestry in Latvia as a case study of the postSoviet balancing of growth and conservation. Two radically divergent notions of good stewardship are pitted against each other in a struggle to redefine forestry governance in Latvia. While conservative forestry officials call for maximising the productive potential of forest lands, the proponents of sustainability champion biological diversity as a paramount criterion in guiding forestry practices. For advocates of sustainability, defending biodiversity is not about sacrificing jobs for nature: rather, they argue that preserving nature can itself promote growth. They argue not against development but against a particular understanding of how to foster development. Underpinning the divergent stewardship of the advocates conceptions of sustainability and their bureaucratic adversaries, then, are divergent prognoses about Latvia's economic development trajectory. Conservative forestry officials envision growth primarily in terms of material (timber) production, while proponents of sustainable development expect growth to be driven more by 'post-industrial' sectors such as tourism. These economic prognoses reflect a deep division in post-Soviet Latvian political culture between two competing orientations toward national identity and developmental destiny, which I call liberal internationalism and agrarian nationalism. For liberal internationalists, being Latvian is primarily about stewarding an internationally significant natural heritage, and good stewardship of the forests requires openness to Western norms and global markets, and the strengthening of private enterprise and civil society. For agrarian nationalists, being Latvian is primarily about working the soil, and good stewardship requires a strongly interventionist state, a tightly regulated private sphere, and a vigorously sceptical attitude toward western influences. Notions of who Latvians are and where the Latvian economy is heading, in short, underpin competing notions about how to balance development and conservation.

THE BATTLE OVER SUSTAINABLE FORESTRY IN LATVIA

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The Battle Over Sustainable Forestry Forestry constitutes an excellent case for examining sustainable development in Latvia, since the perceived 'jobs versus nature' trade-off is potentially at its starkest in the forestry sector. On the one hand, forest products comprise the largest share of Latvian exports: 35.7 per cent in 1997, by one estimate ('Sola izstradat meza politikas istenosanas mehanismu', Diena, 8 May 1998, p.6). On the other hand, forests, which cover 45 per cent of Latvia's territory, provide the most critical habitats for a tremendous abundance of wildlife. Latvian forests, and especially the more than 20 per cent of forests which are on wet soils, are the linchpin of biodiversity levels unsurpassed in Europe, supporting such rare and endangered species as eagle, otter, wolf, lynx, beaver, and the world's densest population of black storks [WWF International, 1996:10; MEPRD, 1995: 48]. According to the Worldwide Fund for Nature (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' [Sylven, 1998: 5]. For several years, an unlikely coalition of ecologists, small landowners, and logging firms has been waging an uphill battle with the government over the management of Latvian forests. Despite yearly increases in both forest acreage and timber exports, the coalition maintains that Latvian forestry practices are 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 reform 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 adequately fulfilling its stewardship role. And, in fact, Latvian law does strictly limit the size of clearcuts and mandate careful forest inventorying and management planning. What, then, is the problem? Why are timber executives, who in most countries are typicially associated with rapacious over-logging, accusing the government of impeding sustainability? To explain this paradoxical situation, I explore the opposing camps' orientations toward development, the state, private enterprise, and the West. My analysis is based primarily on some 40 in-depth interviews with Latvian government officials, non-governmental activists, scientists, private forest owners, 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 [Schwartz, 1996]. Sustainable forestry aims to preserve the forest's 'potential to fulfil, now and in the future, [its] ecological, economic and social functions' [MCPFE,

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1995: 26]. In Latvia, the sustainability coalition seeks to preserve landscape and biological diversity, promote profitable timber and wood processing industries, and foster an economically secure and environmentally responsible class of small private forest owners. Spearheaded by the Latvian office of WWF, the coalition has extensive transnational linkages: proreform scientists and activists are largely funded by western donors, proreform logging executives largely work for or sell primarily to Nordic-based transnational logging corporations, and pro-reform private forest owners consult regularly with their West European peers and travel abroad for training programmes. 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 groups 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 (see, for example, 'Sertifikacijas kriteriji jaizstrada sogad', Diena, 16 Feb. 1998, p.6). The Latvian reform coalition shares this conviction; thus, 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 micro-manages 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 when, where, and how much 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.1 (Sustainable loggers, for example, will leave old trees, dead trees, and rotting stumps in clearcuts in order to protect 'habitat specialists' such as, say, eagles, which nest only in tall trees.) The coalition wants the state to get out of the business of forest management and limit its mandate to overseeing. Among other reforms, the coalition advocates transferring responsibility for the full forestry cycle to logging firms by granting them long-term leases of state-owned forests. Viewing 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


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'downsizing' that would inevitably result from such changes. Competent rangers, 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. During the Soviet period, around two-thirds of forest lands were owned by the state and managed and logged by state forestry enterprises (collective farms owned most of the remainder). The post-independence land reform in 1991 denationalised forest lands which been privately owned in the 1930s and extended rights of use to individuals; in 1993 a second phase .of the reform launched the complicated process of either restoring land to previous owners and their heirs or extending ownership rights to new claimants. By the time the privatisation process is completed, as much as half of Latvian forest lands may be in private hands. However, the majority of new owners lack the technical knowledge, experience, or economic security to manage their forests responsibly, and their legal rights and duties remain in many respects poorly defined. The Latvian state's relationship to these new private owners is one of considerable mutual suspicion and hostility. Many forestry officials decry the new owners' inexperience and poverty-induced short-termism as the gravest threats to forest health and productivity, while some new owners fear that the state is ever poised to harass them or even confiscate their property. The Forest Owners' Association, the lobbying and mutual assistance organisation for private forest owners, is joined by other members of the sustainable forestry coalition in urging the government to tackle the challenge of private forest ownership not by intensifying sanctions and penalties for bad forest management, but rather by supporting education and extension for new owners. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the sustainability coalition seeks to reform the policy-making process itself, by institutionalising channels of participation in governmental decision-making for civil society, for both domestic and international environmental advocates, scientists, private landowners and logging firms. In sum, the sustainable forestry coalition privileges the preservation of habitat and landscape as the paramount criterion in forest management, and its reform proposals derive from a vision of Latvia's developmental destiny that privileges global markets, transnational norms, private enterprise, and civil society. A majority of forestry officials, as well as some loggers (typically those affiliated with recently privatised Soviet-era logging concerns) and academicians, oppose these proposed reforms. Their counter-critique is, in contrast, anti-Western, statist and production-centred. Let us consider each of these three dimensions. First, the anti-reform 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

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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. 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' [Ansons, 1995]. 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' [Vazdikis, 1995]. This anti-Western orientation can be seen as a cultural sucessor to the anti-Soviet orientation of Latvian forestry officials before 1991. Veterans of the Soviet period habitually point out that theirs was always 'the most Latvian ministry': forestry officials routinely falsified their reporting to Moscow in order to reduce the volume of timber harvests, and theirs was the only government agency where official correspondence was always conducted in Latvian, not Russian.2 Second, for conservative forestry officials, the state 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. These officials display a profound mistrust of and hostility toward private ownership and private enterprise. Back in the interwar 'golden age' of the 1930s, 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' [Osis, 1995]. 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' [Grava, 1996]. 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; freedom must be earned' [Vazdikis, 1995]. Owners must be made to understand that the forest is 'not only their property, but the state's, the nation's wealuY [Dislers, 1995]. Or, as one official most baldly put it: "The forest is not private property' [Vazdikis, 1995]. 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


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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 [Gavrilovs, 1995]. Perhaps the most poignantly nostalgic defense of the state's primacy over private enterprise in forest stewardship was offered by the president of the Forest Employees' Association. Arguing against the reformers' proposition that, given adequate transportation and communications technology, Latvia's forests could be adequately overseen by a small fraction of the more than two thousand rangers currently employed, she insisted that the forest ranger must remain in close contact with local residents, because he must be 'the soul of the local community . . . . Only he really knows what's going on in the 1500 hectares' of his ranger district. 'Being a forest ranger is not a profession but a way of life', she declared, and the crucial issue is where he lives. 'If he lives in the forest, then he is a saimnieks', she argued, using an untranslatable and emotionally charged Latvian word which can be rendered as 'manager' or in this case perhaps 'steward' (see Russian khozyairi). If he lives somewhere in town, then he loses this valorised status and 'becomes like any other paltry civil servant'. Likewise, if he takes a job with a private firm, 'he is transformed from a saimnieks to a servant' [Zviedre, 1996]. If liberal reformers cite corruption and incompetence among rangers as a key obstacle to good forestry and lament that nowadays, even more than in the Soviet period, 'the civil servant is God', then in the nostalgic agrarian view, in contrast, the key problem is that the ranger is not exalted enough, that the state is not strongly empowered enough to catch and punish timber thieves and keep private forest owners and loggers in line. Third, for anti-reformers, the sovereign purpose of rural land is material production. Good forest stewardship, therefore, means first and foremost maximising timber 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' [Grava, 1996]. If a landowner fails to maximise 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-centred notion of stewardship comes into conflict with the sustainable forestry agenda is the issue of whether or not to resume drainage (reclamation) 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. Conservative forestry officials want to resume this practice, which has been largely abandoned since independence due to lack of funding. But renewed drainage is targeted by advocates of sustainable

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forestry as one of the gravest potential threats to biodiversity, because wet forests provide irreplaceable habitat for many species. For the reformers, Latvia's wet forests are an unparalleled national treasure. But for antireform officials, they are simply a bothersome hindrance to the maximisation of timber output. Ironically, then, while voicing resistance to foreign dictates, these veterans of the 'most Latvian of ministries' are seeking to revive a crucial element of the technocratic Soviet land use legacy.3 It is not hard to identify the material interests underpinning the sustainable forestry debate. Heavy-handed state involvement in forest management and logging justifies the existence of a bloated apparatus of civil servants: in addition to some two hundred central agency staff, the state employs over 2,000 forest rangers, in a country around the size of West Virginia or of Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Rangers earn the highest wages of all rural professionals — higher than rural teachers or doctors, higher even than university educators [[Poznakovs, 1996; Mangalis, 1996]. Additionally, under the current system, the State Forest Service has a direct incentive to maximise the number of trees cut on stateowned land, since the bulk of its revenues come from stumpage fees collected per logged tree [Schwartz, 1996: II].4 Moreover, by many accounts, micromanagement of private logging activities by state officials provides the latter with lucrative opportunities for bribe-taking. By the same token, those in the reform camp have their own set of interests at stake. For new forest owners, a policy advocating state support for small-business development, education, and extension is obviously more compelling than are calls for increased government control. And as we have seen, Latvian loggers, in addition to bearing the costs of the economic irrationality of state intervention in logging decisions, have market-driven reasons to embrace sustainable forestry. Is the sustainable forestry debate, then, merely a clear-cut case of material interests determining policy stances? The picture is not so simple, since a significant number of the officials interviewed, from rangers to district chiefs to the forestry minister and his deputy, in fact support some or all of the reformers' policy recommendations. As Peter Gourevitch has argued, in times of uncertainty about 'objective' conditions, ideas and ideology provide a cognitive map for policy choices [Gourevitch, 1989: 100], and a post-Soviet transition is nothing if not a time of enormous uncertainty about the future. The dissenting officials support the sustainability reforms because they share a vision of Latvia's economic development trajectory which embraces global markets, transnational norms, civil society, and the value of biodiversity. Based on this vision, they perceive their long-term interests differently than do the anti-reform


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officials. The battle over sustainable forestry, thus, is pitched not simply between competing material interests, but between competing ideas about how best to balance production and conservation, state power and private rights, and national and transnational interests. Two Conceptions of National Identity and Development The competing visions of the reformers and their conservative opponents reflect a fundamental divide in Latvian political culture between two competing conceptions of Latvian national identity and developmental destiny. The sustainable forestry debate can best understood in the context of this divide. Sustainable Development and Liberal Internationalism In addition to promoting sustainable forestry, Western governments and international aid donors, including EU-PHARE, the World Bank, and WWF International, are currently supporting an array of sustainable development projects in Latvia. This aid is directed chiefly at the preservation of biodiversity, which has been identified by the Global Environmental Facility as one of the four most urgent targets of international environmental assistance [Fairman, 1996]. Compared to western Europe, Latvia has extraordinarily high levels of biodiversity. According to a top Latvian 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' [Open Letter. 3]. 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' desire for large military bases on its western border served to preserve large areas of relatively pristine wilderness, especially along the Baltic Sea coast [Dreifelds, 1995:113-14]. 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 above-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.

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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!' [Open Letter. 3]. A retired biologist profiled last spring in Latvia's leading newspaper has placed his bets on the accuracy of this development 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 capitalise 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' ('Prece - pirmatnigs mezs un plava', Diena, 3 May 1997, p. 10). From this perspective, development and nature need not be sacrificed for one another. Nature itself can generate growth because Westerners, who have destroyed their own wilderness, will pay good money to enjoy Latvian wildlife. The sustainable development agenda is very much a transnational one. It is promoted by transnational donors and corporations, and it links Latvia's future course with global environmental norms and with transnational markets,6 markets for unspoiled nature as a 'commodity' or, as we have seen, for environment-friendly forest products. Latvia's new National Environmental Policy Plan, for example, declares that Latvia's relative wealth of wildlife must be protected because it 'increases Latvia's international responsibility for preservation of biodiversity at the continental level' [MEPRD, 1995: 48]. The sustainability agenda thus partakes of the liberal internationalist7 current in Latvian political culture, which links Latvia's developmental destiny with the forces of privatisation, globalisation and European integration. Based on global and regional market trends, liberal internationalists predict that agricultural and industrial production will be less important for Latvia's future development than transit, commerce, and service industries, including tourism. They oppose state support of 'production for production's sake', and urge their countrymen to discard the physiocratic notion that 'material production is the economy's foundation and the rest is merely parasitical' ('Racionala ekonomika un silutei migla,' Diena, 1 April 1993, p.2). Liberal internationalism is, at least in principle, consistent with a sustainable land ethic: for liberals, rural land stewardship should not seek to maximise material production, but should promote environmentally responsible forms of production, eco-tourism, and compliance with international treaty obligations.


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While the liberal sustainable development agenda is explicitly transnational in character, it also draws on traditional pastoral notions of Latvian national identity. Latvians commonly talk about Latvian identity as being defined by links to the natural terrain of Latvia, and liberals are no exception. The National Environmental Policy Plan, for example, locates the origins of Latvian nature protection in the pre-Christian pantheistic 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' [MEPRD, 1995: 5]. 8 The liberal internationalist authors of the Policy Plan argue for defending Latvia's natural heritage, therefore, not only because of international treaty obligations, but also because the 'national consciousness and culture of the [Latvian] nation developed within a diverse natural environment and cultural landscape', because, in other words, of the crucial relationship between nature and Latvian identity.9 'We need not sacrifice our culturalhistorical 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?' ('Par teritorialplanosanas reformu', Diena, 23 April 1996, p.10). The quintessentially global discourse of sustainable development, linked as it is to transnational donors and transnational flows of people and money, is thus appropriated in defense of the pastoral Latvia identity. Agrarian Nationalism: Back to the 'Ulmanis Days' There is another current in Latvian political culture, however, which does not look as favorably upon the prospect of globalisation and Western tourism as engines of economic growth, and which draws upon Latvia's pastoral traditions in a different way to promote a very different notion of stewardship. 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 example, 'Laukos - nacijas pamats', Diena, 20 Nov. 1992, p.2; 'Jabruge eels musu razotajiem', Diena, 2 March 1993, p.2; 'Latvijai vajadzigi stipri zemnieki', Diena, 29 July 1993, p.2; 'Latvijas zeme posas uz tirgu', Diena, 20 Nov. 1993, p.9). For agrarian nationalists, the sovereign use of rural land should always be agricultural and silvicultural production. Denouncing 'Europeification' as the newest form of colonisation, 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 (for example, 'Brivs zemes tirgus un Latvijas izpardosana', Diena, 12 June

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1994, p.3). In common with proponents of sustainable development, agrarian nationalists place a high value on Latvia's rural land and forests, and emphasise their centrality to Latvian identity. But in contrast to the former, agrarians value nature not as wilderness, to be protected for ecological and aesthetic reasons, but rather as the site of man's heroic battle to make a living by transforming the physical world. Like agrarians anywhere in the world, they valorise the farming livelihood in part for its closeness to nature, but more for its capacity to transform and improve upon nature.10 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 '1930s, 60 per cent 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' [Gomez y Paloma, 1993: 61]. 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 regulation, state corporatism, state monopolies, and forced liquidations, particularly of businesses owned by non-ethnic Latvians [Balabkins, 1982: 154; Aizsilnieks, 1968: part V\. 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 the 'Ulmanis days' (ulmanlaiks) 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 basis of conflict in post-Soviet Latvian politics. Conflict over agricultural support toppled Latvia's first post-Soviet government in 1994, 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. The post-Soviet land reform has been a site of tremendous ongoing controversy, with liberals arguing for a free land market and agrarian nationalists holding out until late in 1996 against opening rural land sales to foreign nationals. Liberals have to a large degree dominated the political stage in post-Soviet Latvia, and agriculture's share of gross domestic product has shrunk from 20 per cent in 1990 to 10 per cent in 1994, while that of the service sector has grown from 13 per cent to 56 per cent [OECD, 1996: 41]. However, agrarianism remains a powerful force in a country with a nearly 50 per cent rural population. Guntis Ulmanis, Latvia's president


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since independence is the honorary leader of the Farmers' Union party and attained his position by virtue of being the grand-nephew of the revered Karlis Ulmanis. According to the 1997 Central and Eastern Eurobarometer opinion survey, popular skepticism about the European Union is on the rise in Latvia (as well as in neighboring Estonia and Lithuania), and Latvian respondents identified farmers as the most likely to suffer from EU accession (reported in 'Latviesi ir skeptiski pret Eiropas Savienibu', Diena, 9 May 1997, p.8). As a prominent analysis of the Baltic transitions observes, '[i]n any successful scenario of economic transformation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, agriculture will remain a crucial sector' [Van Arkadie and Karlsson, 1992: 293]. The continued salience of the agrarian-liberal divide was demonstrated earlier this year on the op-ed pages of Latvia's leading daily newspaper, in a lengthy and spirited debate among academics and cultural figures about the nature of Latvian identity. A prominent sociologist expressed 'irritation' at the 'theory of two types of Latvians. - the real ones living in the countryside and those other ones,' and argued that 'we cannot simultaneously fear the Russians, hate Europe, and plant up all of Latvia with potatoes' ('Musu mainigas un daudzveidigas identitates', Diena, 17 Jan. 1998, p.2). 'Society has to a large degree returned to the ideology of the 1930s,' a historian similarly complained. The 'dominant historical myth' of the Latvians as a peasant nation, he argued, 'has long since lost any connection to social reality' ('Musdienu Latvijas eiropeiska identitate,' Diena, 26 Jan. 1998, p.2). These and like-minded scholars emphasised that Latvian identity is and for centuries has been inextricably linked with Europe. In sharp contrast, a literary figure, invoking the demographic threat to Latvians' survival as an ethnos,12 called for state support of family farms and rural schools on the grounds that 'it is still possible and essential to preserve Latvian identity in the countryside, because the majority of Latvians live there' ('Vai Latvijai paredzets Irijas variants?' Diena, 17 Feb. 1998, p.13). One of the fundamental questions of the Latvian transition from Soviet rule, in short, has been and continues to be: are Latvians a nation of farmers, or of cosmopolitan traders, service providers, and citizens of the new borderless Europe? In the forestry case, anti-reform officials draw upon the discourse of agrarian nationalism in supporting increased material production, extensive state intervention in economic life, and a suspicious attitude toward foreign interests. Sustainability-oriented reformers, in contrast, appeal to the ineluctible forces of globalisation in arguing for decreased state intervention, facilitation of private and foreign-owned commercial forestry, and the preservation of habitat and landscape as crucial resources for economic development. In the post-Soviet Latvian

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forestry sector, competing answers to questions of national identity and developmental destiny promote radically different orientations toward the stewardship of rural land - toward questions, that is, about how to balance rural development and conservation.. Conclusions A major reorganisation of the Latvian forestry sector has been under way since June 1997, and thus far the sustainability camp appears to be gaining ground.13 A leading reform advocate and former executive of a large Swedish-based logging firm is now heading the reorganised State Forest Service. The ecological awareness of forest rangers is expected to improve with the launching of a new training programme in 'key habitat identification' [Zvagins, 1998]. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has allocated $320,000 for a bilateral task force to recommend institutional changes in forestry governance. The FAO project reflects not only the continuing influence of transnational actors in the Latvian forest policy realm, but also a commitment to including nongovernmental organisations in the policy process ('Gatavos priekslikumus mezu apsaimniekosanai un parvaldei', Diena, 10 Aug. 1998, p.ll). Nevertheless, key elements of the sustainability agenda have yet to be achieved. State officials continue to make felling decisions in state-owned forests, while a proposal for long-term leasing of state forests has been drafted but not yet passed into law. Forest certification standards have yet to be established in Latvia, as one government-sponsored task force failed to accomplish anything and was recently replaced by a second group, at the initiative of WWF-Latvia ('Sertifikacijas kriteriji jaizstrada sogad', Diena, 16 Feb. 1998, p.6). The agrarian nationalist Farmers' Union party has been lobbying to keep forestry policy-making under the jurisdiction of the agriculture ministry, whereas liberals are seeking to relocate it to the environment ministry ('LC prasa isveidot mezu ministra posteni', Diena, 1 Nov. 1997, p.4). While sustainability is stated as a primary goal in the longterm forest policy program approved by the Latvian government in April, no mechanisms have yet been put in place for implementing these policy guidelines ('Meza politikas programma paredz ilgtspejigu meza apsaimniekosanu', Diena, 20 Nov. 1997, p.5; 'Sola izstradat meza politikas istenosanas mehanismu', Diena, 8 May 1998, p.6). If it is too soon definitively to assess the outcome of the battle over sustainable forestry in Latvia, we can nevertheless draw insights from the dynamics of the struggle about the relationship between develoment, conservation, and conceptions of national identity. Specifically, the Latvian forestry case argues against claims of the ephemeral, instrumental nature of


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environmental concern in the former Soviet bloc. In the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost' unleashed a wave of environmental protest across the Soviet Union, in several non-Russian regions this protest was suffused with an anti-colonial rhetoric which linked environmental threats to Moscow's 'genocidal' policies toward non-Russian nations [e.g., Dawson, 1996; Goldman, 1992; Jancar, 1993; Pryde, 1992; Ziegler, 1992]. Newly-formed environmental groups quickly spawned mass movements for independence or autonomy from the center and then, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, rapidly withered away. Some scholars have concluded from this phenomenon of swift growth and demise that environmental activism was simply a mobilisational surrogate or safe proxy for deeper, but politically more dangerous, nationalist agendas [Dawson, 1996; Jancar, 1993].14 Once national independence had been achieved, in this view, environmental movements lost their mobilisational utility and, therefore, shrivelled to insignificance. Moreover, in many cases post-independence governments abandoned the environmental commitments of the revolutionary period, failing to fund pollution abatement, for example, or resuming construction or operation of previously vilified nuclear plants, dams, and other targets of public outcry. According to these scholars, such development decisions, along with the the absence of continued mass environmental activism in the post-Communist world, reflect low levels of environmental concern there. The experience of Latvia in the late 1980s and early 1990s supports this analysis up to a point. It was environmental protest (against a proposed dam for hydroelectric power generation) that first mobilised Latvian citizens and rapidly escalated into secessionist nationalism [Dreifelds, 1989; Muiznieks, 1987]. The Latvian environmental movement was soon eclipsed in numbers and prominence by expressly nationalist organisations, and in the postSoviet period, grassroots environmental groups have, to borrow Jane Dawson's phrase, 'dwindled to no more than a handful of still-concerned citizens' [Dawson, 1996: 32]. As Dawson has observed in Moscow and Kiev, so too in Riga 'the most active environmental organisation ... is now a regional branch of [an] international organisation', in this case, not Greenpeace but WWF International. However, in Latvia in the late 1990s, the battle over sustainable forestry is by no means an arcane dispute among scientists, bureaucrats, and treehuggers. 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!' ('Latvijas nafta irkokmateriali un mezs', Diena, 10 Jan. 1997, p.2). When ordinary Latvians talk about forests as 'green gold,' they certainly have forest industries in mind, but they are also referring to the ecological,

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aesthetic, and recreational values of forests, of which they abundantly partake. Popular concerns about over-logging during the post-Soviet period are extremely widespread. The confluence of policy debate and public outcry over sustainable forestry prompts two conclusions. First, contrary to claims of the ephemeral, surrogate nature of environmental consciousness in post-Soviet countries, the fact that sustainable forestry is not an obscure technical dispute but a public debate widely reported, for example, in the pages of Latvia's daily business newspaper (Dienas bizness), suggests that concern about how to strike the proper balance between nature and development remains very much present on the political agenda in post-independence Latvia. To be sure, such concern is no longer manifested through street demonstrations or mass membership in environmental groups, but 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 'normalisation' of democratic politics. Rather, its manifestations have become less visible, less dramatic, and less simplistic, as environmental needs can no longer be separated from development needs, and as people seek to influence government policy through means other than street demonstrations, in the forestry case through sophisticated lobbying by professional environmental organisations, scientists, business people and landowners. Second, the sustainable forestry case demonstrates that attitudes toward the dilemma of nature and development continue to be strongly linked with national identity - not along the simply instrumental lines of the glasnost' era, but in complex, multidimensional ways, refracted through the problem of economic development. Because agrarian nationalists envision development through the nostalgic template of the agrarian 'golden age', they embrace a statist, anti-western, and production-centred notion of forest stewardship. And because liberal internationalists envision development as movement toward a unified Europe and global markets - wherein the importance of agricultural production will continue to shrink, while that of eco-tourism and eco-friendly forest industries will increase - their notion of stewardship elevates the private sector over the state, and elevates biodiversity above production as the sovereign criterion of rural land use policy. In both cases, conceptions of who Latvians are and where they are going inform notions of Latvians' proper relationship to the land. For agrarians, Latvians should primarily be working the soil, and the role of the state is to defend that soil-based livelihood against the vagaries of global market trends, European tourists, and new-fangled foreign ideas. For liberals, Latvians should primarily be defending a heritage of wild nature: a heritage which is central both to Latvians' international responsibilities as


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citizens of the new Europe, and to a pastoral tradition which intimately links nature with the'Latvian character'. While I have called the liberal advocates of sustainability 'internationalists' and the agrarians 'nationalists', both orientations, in fact, draw upon this pastoral tradition. Despite the internationalism of the sustainability agenda, liberals, no less than agrarians, invoke the nationalist significance of land in defending that agenda. In short, just as concern about nature has not evaporated in post-Soviet Latvia, neither has the linkage between attitudes toward nature and nationalism. That linkage, however, is no longer the straightforward, instrumental one between an anti-colonial nationalism and an anti-development environmentalism. In the postcolonial period, Latvians are expanding beyond the discourse of who they are not, to more complex struggles around who they are. Likewise, Latvians have moved from resisting colonially-imposed development initiatives, to murkier battles over how to promote development without desecrating the nation's natural heritage. As in the anti-Soviet days, these two sites of contestation remain intimately linked. For Latvian agrarians, it is the traditional agricultural livelihood - the transformation of nature to increase material production - that defines the proper relationship between nature, development, and identity, while for Latvian liberals, production must be regulated by the the equally traditional Latvian role of nurturing natural diversity.y. NOTES 1. While current legislation designates considerable portions of Latvia's forests as protected, pro-reform scientists point out that these restrictions are not based on actual ecological assessments, but are often ecologically meaningless carryovers from the Soviet period. 2. I observed little present-day anti-Russian sentiment among the forestry officials, presumably because Russians are minimally involved in Latvian forestry, in sharp contrast to the looming presence of the Nordic firms. There were, however, occasional remarks about 'unsavory' Russian logging concerns in eastern Latvia. 3. On the 'transformationist' Soviet land use legacy as it pertains to reclamation in Latvia, see Strods[1992: 256]; Dreifelds [1995];Gerasimov[1971:146];and Gustafson [1981]. 4. In 1995, 6.9 million lats out of total revenues of 11.4 million lats were collected from stumpage fees. 5. On the role of ideas in shaping perceived interests, see also Alexander Wendt's seminal argument[Wendt, 1992]. 6. Radical critics of 'sustainable development' projects in the South have argued that even under the guise of 'sustainability,' these projects have been driven by trading interests of the developed countries. Rather than protecting nature and empowering local communities, these critics argue, 'sustainable development' in fact simply extends the scope of technocratic managerial strategies on a newly global scale, in order to ensure more efficient capitalist market expansion[e.g., Escobar, 1996; Redclift, 1987]. While it is important to keep these criticisms in mind when evaluating the impacts of sustainable development projects in Latvia, what concerns me here is how Latvians themselves are appropriating or contesting the 'sustainability' discourse.

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7. Here I am drawing on Przeworski's discussion of the post-Communist development strategy of 'modernisation via internationalisation'[Prezworski, 1993]. 8. 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 BC. The proto-Latvian tribes embraced a nature-based religion, inscribed over the centuries in millions of folksong verses, called dainas, which depict harmonious, non-hierarchical relationships between humans, nature, and deities. In the dainas, '[njature is depicted not as something to be feared, conquered or subdued, but rather as an endowment to be cherished, protected and befriended' [Dreifelds, 1984: 217; also Gimbutas, 1963: 179-204]. 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 religion, 'reinvented' during Latvia's first period of independence in the 1920s, is still practised 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. 9. Similarly, a liberal Latvian ecologist describes 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' (Skaidrite Albertina, quoted in Open Letter, No.14, p.11). In this environmentally determinist view, the confined and resource-poor Latvian land itself has made a sustainable land ethic an integral component of national identity. 'More than just tangible', concurs an emigré writer, 'the landscape ... has become an inextricable part of the Latvian character itself'[Jauntirane, 1984: 13]. 10. Consider the following from an American farmer and self-styled 'defender of the agrarian idea': 'Farming is not just the destruction of the wild; it can on occasion be the creation of something in its place more pleasing, for surely majestic trees and vines were a sight far better than the aboriginal land itself, for eons the pasture haunt of grass and rabbit.... The visual power of [the vineyard's] creation held us firm, made us alive, told us that men who could fashion such living things, bring them into the world, could do almost anything and could never be altogether evil'[Hanson, 1996: 92-3]. 11. Daina Stukuls has analysed this divide in terms of competing discourses of 'temporal normalisation, which elevated a ... return to the institutions of the independent interwar state, and spatial normalisation, which embraced a 'return to Europe' and the construction of a liberally oriented, modern (read Western) European state'[Stukuls, 1997:132]. 12. While only 55 per cent of Latvia's population are ethnic Latvians, the percentage is even lower in the major cities: 38 per cent in Riga and as low as 14 per cent in Daugavpils, near the eastern border[Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia, 1995]. 13. Most importantly, the policy-setting function of the State Forest Service (SFS) was transferred to a newly formed Forest Department within the Ministry of Agriculture. Previously, the SFS both drafted and implemented the laws and orders regulating forestry activities. The SFS is now confined to implementation, although it also continues to serve as the agent of state ownership of forest lands and to derive much of its revenue directly from that ownership role. According to a government-commissioned analysis by the consulting firm Swedforest International AB, the concentration within the SFS of three key forestry governance functions — the regulatory, ownership, and production functions — is perhaps the most fundamental flaw of the system[State Forest Service, 1995: 17-23; Schwartz, 1996]. 14. For similar analyses of East European cases, see Janear-Webster (ed.)[1993].

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Peterson, DJ. (1993), Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Przeworski, Adam (1992), 'The Neoliberal Fallacy', Journal of Democracy, Vol.3, No.3, pp.45-59. Pryde, Philip R. (1992), 'The Environmental Basis for Ethnic Unrest in the Baltic Republics', in Stewart[1992]. Redclift, Michael (1987), Sustainable Development: Exploring the Contradictions, London and New York: Methuen. Schwartz, Katrina (1996), The Politics of Sustainable Forestry in Latvia: Property, Enterprise and the State in Transition from Communism, Riga: WWF-International. State Forest Service (1995), Latvia Forestry Sector Master Plan: Summary Final Report, Riga: State Forest Service. Stewart, John Massey (ed.) (1992), The Soviet Environment: Problems, Policies and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strods, Heinrihs (1992), Latvijas Lauksaimniecibas vesture[History of Latvian Agriculture], Riga: Zvaigzne. Stukuls, Daina (1997), 'Imagining the Nation: Campaign Posters of the First Postcommunist Elections in Latvia', East European Politics and Societies, Vol,11, No.1, pp.131-54. Sylven, Magnus (1998), 'WWF in Latvia: Status and Future Opportunities,', unpublished document, 10 Feb. Van Arkadie, Brian and Mats Karlsson (1992), Economic Survey of the Baltic States, New York: New York University Press. WWF International (1996), Latvia's Natural Heritage at the Crossroads, Riga: WWF Latvia. Weiner, Douglas R. (1988), Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Wendt, Alexander ( 1992), 'Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics', International Organization, Vol.46, No.2, pp.391-441. Ziegler, Charles E. (1987), Environmental Policy in the USSR, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Ziegler, Charles E. (1992), 'Political Participation, Nationalism and Environmental Politics in the USSR', in Stewart[1992]. Interviews cited lmants Ansons, director of the recently privatised logging company Ogres MRS, Riga, 6 Dec. 1995. Gunars Dislers, head forester, Ogre, 7 Dec. 1995. Georgs Gavrilovs, director of the Latvian State Forest Service (SFS) Forests Department, Riga, 23 Nov. 1995. Uldis Grava, director of the SFS Logging Unit, Riga, 8 Feb. 1996. Imants Mangalis, professor of forestry, Latvian Agricultural University, Jelgava, 5 Feb. 1996. Janis Osis, director of the SFS Forest Inventory and Environmental Protection Unit, Riga, 23 Nov. 1995. Evalds Poznakovs, director of the recently privatised logging company Rezeknes MRS, Riga, 30 Jan. 1996. Janis Vazdikis, director of the State Forest Inventory Institute, Salaspils, 14 Dec. 1995. Otto Zvagins, director of the SFS Department of Development and Strategy, email communication, 24 Aug. 1998. Aija Zviedre, president of the Forest Employees' Association, Riga, 30 Jan. 1996.