Can the Baltic Sea die? An environmental imaginary of a dying sea
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Date
2024-01-09
Authors
Peterson, Jesse D.
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Publisher
Bristol University Press
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Abstract
This chapter seeks to illustrate how claims made about the Baltic Sea’s ecological conditions contribute to an environmental imaginary of a dying Baltic Sea. Adopting an onto-epistemological approach to environmental imaginary, this chapter explores cultural and scientific representations of the Baltic Sea and how they congeal into normative assumptions related to what this sea is, ought to be, and how to keep it that way. The chapter explores how the Baltic Sea gets framed as a stable, ‘natural’ categorization and how challenges to this categorization get framed as ‘unnatural’ and undesirable. The chapter exposes how a dying Baltic Sea predominantly rests upon selective attention to particular attributes of its water. Thus, a dying Baltic Sea is one Baltic Sea among many, and a dying Baltic Sea could die from changes to any of these other attributes. The chapter ends by discussing whom a living or dying Baltic Sea benefits and arguing for a political and artistic intervention into people’s onto-epistemological relationships with marine environments as an alternative to the simplistic binary in which marine pollution results from only human interference in ‘natural’ processes.
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Keywords
Baltic Sea , Dying Baltic Sea , Environmental imaginary , Natural , Unnatural
Citation
Peterson, J. D. (2024) 'Can the Baltic Sea die? An environmental imaginary of a dying sea', in Peterson, J. D., Dekker, N. L. and Olson, P. R. (eds.) Death’s Social and Material Meaning Beyond the Human. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, pp. 54–68. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529230161.ch004
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© 2024, the Author. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy edited version of a chapter published in Peterson, J. D., Dekker, N. L. and Olson, P. R. (eds.) Death’s Social and Material Meaning Beyond the Human. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529230161.ch004.