Science, Art and Other Ways of Knowing: A Proposal from a Struggle Over a Helsinki Green Space

Abstract

This chapter confronts the binary thinking still prevalent in environmental justice discourses by drawing upon a controversy in the Finnish capital Helsinki. It concerns an exceptional green space, an island within city limits with a few residents but a mostly premodern infrastructure. The chapter describes activist efforts to stop the city from developing and builds on Isabelle Stengers’ plea to ‘regenerate’ and ‘civilise’ science, together with an understanding of environmental injustice; to argue environmental activism is already shifting epistemic politics. It discusses two artist-led events that were motivated by the threat to this exceptional, ecologically as well as culturally rich, green space. The events and the activism that developed alongside them challenged modern knowledge practises by engaging with the island’s landscape in ways that mixed science with art, and treated local problems as also global ones. The text builds on participation in the events to reflect on how science and activism have co-evolved and continue to do so in the context of environmental struggles. It argues that the kind of art-inflected activism apparent in this case is pushing towards new forms of environmentalism, ones that begin to undo the persistent tendency to oppose rational calculative ways of knowing against affective romantic knowing. They also complicate similarly entrenched but increasingly outdated mainstream conceptions, which too easily presume structural opposition and/or antagonism between middle-class activists and poor or otherwise vulnerable victims of environmental injustice.