The Power of the Periphery: How Norway Became an Environmental Pioneer for the World

February 14, 2020 at 2:55 pm Leave a comment

Anker, Frontpage, CUP 2020

The Power of the Periphery: How Norway Became an Environmental Pioneer for the World, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Abstract

What is the source of Norway’s culture of environmental harmony in our troubled world? Exploring the role of Norwegian scholar-activists of the late twentieth century, Peder Anker examines how they portrayed their country as a place of environmental stability in a world filled with tension. In contrast with societies dirtied by the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century, Norway’s power, they argued, lay in the pristine, ideal natural environment of the periphery. Globally, a beautiful Norway came to be contrasted with a polluted world and fashioned as an ecological microcosm for the creation of a better global macrocosm. In this innovative, interdisciplinary history, Anker explores the ways in which ecological concerns were imported via Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, then to be exported from Norway back to the world at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Reviews

Anders Dunker, “Den norske dobbeltmoralen,” Ny tid, august 2020, p. 4-5. [Page 1], [Page 2]. English edition.

Gregory Ferguson-Cradler, “The Power of the Periphery,” Environment and History, 2020. [PDF]

Hedda Susanne Molland, “Å kle seg i miljønasjonens drakt,” Salongen, May 4, 2021.

Summary in Norwegian

Peder Anker, “Periferiens makt: Historia om miljøvitenskapen,” Syn og segn, 3:126 (2020), 69-75.

Blog-post

“Greenwashing Norway”, Nordic Branding, forthcoming 2021.

“Cabin Lockout“, Cambridge blog, Sept. 30 2020.

Book talks

Venice Biennale 2021 , May 21, 2021. [Video ]

Environmental History Week, April 19. 2021.