“Masters in Our Native Place”: The politics of Latvian national parks on the road from Communism...

Political Geography 25 (2006) 42e71

www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

‘‘Masters in Our Native Place’’: The politicsof Latvian national parks on the road

from Communism to ‘‘Europe’’*

Katrina Z.S. Schwartz*

Department of Political Science, University of Florida, 234 Anderson Hall,

P. O. Box 117325, Gainesville, FL 32611-7325, USA

Received 5 January 2005; received in revised form 4 July 2005; accepted 11 July 2005

Abstract

On May 1, 2004, eight formerly Communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe con-summated their long-desired ‘‘return to Europe’’ by joining the European Union (EU). Whilepopular perceptions of the east European environment center on nightmarish images of pol-

lution hotspots, Communism also bequeathed a wealth of relatively untouched nature thatsupports far more biological diversity than can be found in Western Europe. The enlargementrepresents a biodiversity bonanza for the EU, but millions of humans inhabit the

* The author is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of

Florida. This article is based on a year of ethnographic field research in Latvia in 1998e1999, supported by

a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad, an IREX Pre-Doctoral Fellow-

ship, and a University of Wisconsin Vilas Graduate Fellowship. Write-up support was provided by a Mac-

Arthur Global Studies Fellowship, an ACLS East European Studies Dissertation Fellowship and

a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute. Versions of this case study appear

in Schwartz (2001, in press-a). The author wishes to thank Kathryn Hendley, Mark Beissinger and Robert

Kaiser of the University of Wisconsin for their support and guidance on the larger project from which this

case study is drawn. Invaluable feedback on this article was provided by my postdoctoral colleagues at the

Harriman Institute (Hilary Appel, Victoria Frede, Rebecca Neary, Ethan Pollock and Olga Shevchenko),

participants in the November 2004 Mellon-Sawyer seminar at Cornell University’s Institute for European

Studies and the Polson Institute for Global Development, and two anonymous reviewers.

* Tel.: C1 352 392 0262x278; fax: C1 352 392 8127.

E-mail address: [email protected]

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doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2005.07.001

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43K.Z.S. Schwartz / Political Geography 25 (2006) 42e71

post-Communist countryside, too, tending cultural landscapes rich with local and nationalmeanings. EU accession has thus raised profound questions about post-Communist nature

management. Should priority be given to biodiversity conservation at the continental scale,or to maintaining peopled landscapes and traditional land-use patterns? This article examinesthe confrontation between global and local understandings of nature through a case study of

two Western-supported initiatives in national park management in Latvia in the late 1990s.Some Latvians, seeing hope for national development only through an internationalist em-brace of globalization and regional integration, appropriated the Western narratives of biodi-

versity and rural economic diversification. But others resisted these narratives as threateningto agrarian notions of the value of rural landscapes: notions rooted in a potent agrarian dis-course of national identity. What internationalists saw as a savvy embrace of the globalization

of nature, agrarians denounced as a sort of self-imposed neo-colonialism.� 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Latvia; Political ecology; National parks; National identity; Nature; Biodiversity; Landscape;

Post-Communism; Agrarianism

On May 1, 2004, eight formerly Communist countries in Central and EasternEurope, including the former Soviet republic Latvia and its Baltic neighbors Estoniaand Lithuania, consummated their long-desired ‘‘return to Europe’’ by joining theEuropean Union (EU).1 The new members brought with them the scars of environ-mental damage wrought by decades of state-socialist industrialization: the lingeringeffects of the Chernobyl disaster, forests laid waste by acid rain, the old strip minesand coal fired power plants in the ‘‘black triangle’’ on the East GermaneCzechePolish border. While popular perceptions of the east European environment centeron nightmarish images of pollution hotspots, there is far less recognition of the factthat Communism yielded profound, if often unintended, environmental benefits aswell: namely, a wealth of relatively untouched nature that supports far more biologicaldiversity than can be found in Western Europe.2 Thanks in large part to the relativeinefficiency of state-socialist economic development, in May 2004 the coal mines ofBohemia were ‘‘returned to Europe’’, but so too were Poland’s ‘‘primeval’’ BialowiezaForest, the flood plains of the Danube and the high dunes of Lithuania’s CuronianSpit. Among the new citizens of Europe are the thousands of brown bear, wolvesand lynx roaming the Carpathian Mountains, and the world’s densest populationof black storks nesting secretively in Latvia’s ‘‘northern rainforests’’.

Eastern Europe’s countryside represents a biodiversity bonanza for the EU, wherenature for the most part has been thoroughly subdued for centuries by intensive

1 The new members are the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and

Slovenia, as well as Cyprus and Malta. Accession negotiations were initiated in 1999 with Bulgaria and

Romania, as well, but these countries have not yet satisfied the EU’s conditions for membership.2 ‘‘The vast tracts of relatively unpolluted lands [remain] an invisible backdrop to these striking images’’

of environmental disaster areas, note Ian Welsh and Andrew Tickle (1998: 17). See also Pavlinek and

Pickles (2000: 41e42).

44 K.Z.S. Schwartz / Political Geography 25 (2006) 42e71

agricultural cultivation, industrial development and dense human settlement. Butmillions of humans inhabit this countryside, too, tending cultural landscapes that re-flect generations-old land-use practices, and these landscapes and practices are oftencentral elements of national and local identities. In the years leading up to the his-toric enlargement, environment officials, non-governmental activists and rural dwell-ers in the candidate countries, as well as EU officials, aid donors and consultantshave grappled with the challenges of managing nature in the post-Communist coun-tryside. Should priority be given to biodiversity conservation at the continental scale,or to maintaining peopled landscapes and traditional land-use patterns? Or can bothgoals somehow be achieved through the magic of ‘‘sustainable rural development’’?

Local responses to these questions have been mixed. Many east Europeans, seeinghope for national development only through an internationalist embrace of global-ization and regional integration, have appropriated the new Western narratives ofbiodiversity and rural economic diversification along with other cross-border flowsof aid, commerce and ideas. But others have resisted these narratives as threats tohistorically rooted agrarian notions of the value of rural landscapes, of the properrelationship between humans and nature and of national identity. In Eastern Europeas anywhere, constructions of nature and landscape are central to constructions ofnation. The cultural question at the heart of nationalism e ‘‘Who are we?’’ e is atthe same time always a geographical question e ‘‘Where are we?’’ or ‘‘What isour place?’’ National entrepreneurs seek to define not only the nation’s ‘‘character’’but also its ‘‘homeland’’. By infusing physical terrain with national meanings, theytransform landscape into ethnoscape, to borrow Anthony D. Smith’s (1986, 1999)evocative term: into a reservoir of national history and ethnographic uniqueness.3

Thus in England, the patchwork landscape of villages and hedgerows came to em-body the national virtues of order, stability, insularity and good stewardship (Low-enthal, 1994), and in Israel, Zionists planted forests to enact a redefinition of Jewishidentity away from rootless cosmopolitanism to an earthy connection with the land(Bardenstein, 1999; Selwyn, 1995).4 In the case of east European nationalisms, the‘‘nation of peasants’’ has been a dominant trope since the national revivals of the19th-century, which were fueled in large part by the Romantic fascination withfolk culture and peasant authenticity. To this day, many east Europeans value naturenot as pristine wilderness but as cultivated agrarian ethnoscape: as a productivelandscape shaped and transformed through hard agrarian labor, and a reflectionof the unique national character also forged through that labor.

This article examines the confrontation between global and local understandingsof nature and nature management through a case study of the politics of national

3 It should be noted here that I use this term in Smith’s sense of a physical landscape invested with ethnic

meanings, and not in Arjun Appadurai’s (1996: 33) more metaphorical sense of ‘‘global ethnoscapes’’ as

the shifting and deterritorialized ‘‘landscapes’’ created by the movements of ‘‘tourists, immigrants, refu-

gees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals’’ in the present era of accelerated

globalization.4 For some geographically diverse examples of the rich literature on landscape and national identity, see

also Crang (1999), Gruffud (1995), Kasparian (2001) and Schama (1995).


parks in Latvia. As Kenneth R. Olwig (1996: 380) has observed, ‘‘[n]ational parkswould seem to be as much about the nature of national identity as about physicalnature’’ (see also Nash, 1973; Runte, 1979). Thanks to their weighty symbolismand public prominence, national parks often bring to the fore, more acutely thanother protected nature areas, the tension between notions of nature as wildernessor biodiversity and nature as lived-in landscape of labor or ethnoscape. The world’sfirst national parks, Yellowstone and Yosemite, were imagined as ‘‘empty’’ spacesdevoid of humanity’s footprints, and productive uses were strictly limited or excludedfrom park territories. But in these and other American parks, ‘‘uninhabited wilder-ness had to be created before it could be preserved’’ (Spence, 1999: 4). Preserving‘‘wilderness’’ required erasing these territories’ actual history of centuries of habita-tion and exploitation by Native Americans and, all too often, their violent removalfrom these ostensibly ‘‘virgin’’ lands.5

Like so many American creations, the national park idea took root around theworld, and along with it the American understanding of parks as empty wilderness.Thus, Africa’s first national parks were established by European colonialists whoimagined Africa as an untouched ‘‘Eden’’ and superimposed their own Romanticwilderness ethic over indigenous landscapes of labor and culture (Neumann, 1995;Ranger, 1989, 1999). Today, the era of colonialism may have passed, but indigenouscommunities and their advocates often critique Western-sponsored conservationprojects in the developing world as neo-colonial strategies for territorial control, sim-ilar in effects if not in means of implementation to the earlier efforts of colonial elites.Nowadays, they note, the Romantic narrative of Eden is often replaced by the sci-entific narrative of biodiversity, but both have been used to trump local values byWestern elites seeking to control nature on a global scale (Adams & McShane,1992; Wilshusen, Brechin, Fortwangler, & West, 2002).

In colonial Africa as in 19th-century America, parks were shaped by discourses ofnational identity: by myths of the rugged outdoorsman, memories of heroic militarycampaigns and so on. But they were also born out of the desire of fledgling statesfor status and recognition on the international stage. Indeed, since the Wilsonianera of national self-determination, possessing a national park has become a symbolicmarker of full statehood, as Jane Carruthers (1989: 207) notes: ‘‘whereas no stigmaattached to a country before 1914 if it did not have any national parks, after 1919 it

5 As Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek (1998: 20) report, Yosemite’s founding is particularly

bloodstained: ‘‘Yosemite Valley had a long indigenous history, and probably owed much of its pastoral

beauty to Indian land use [.]. Yet to JohnMuir and others the land seemed vacant, gardenlike, unspoiled,

ripe for the taking e or saving. At Yosemite, [.] a virgin land illusion seemed true because twelve years

earlier miners had driven out or killed the original Miwok/Ahwahneechee inhabitants. Indeed, this first

national park provided the worst possible scenario for Indian/white relations: prior occupation with ex-

tensive horticulture by Indians; brutal military conquest of the land; a park created with no regard for

past or present native claims; an Indian petition for redress of grievances; the ignoring of the petition

by Congress; repeated efforts by park rangers to evict remnant villages; Park Service neglect of ethno-

graphic interpretation; and belated NPS [National Park Service] recognition that Yosemite was, and is,

important to aboriginal people. It would be difficult for any park to build a worse record.’’ See also Burn-

ham (2000) for a discussion of Indian removal in other American parklands.


was shameful not to have established such institutions’’. Thus, while national parkscan be seen as the ultimate institutionalization of the ethnoscape, shaped by potentmyths about the nation’s character, history and relationship to the land, they also re-flect pressures to conform to international norms and values.

Two Western assistance projects in the late 1990s brought Latvians face-to-facewith the question of whether national park management should prioritize globalnorms and international status or local meanings and traditional land uses. At Lat-via’s flagship national park, Gauja, created in the 1970s expressly to protect the Lat-vian agrarian ethnoscape, internationalist-oriented conservation authorities andtheir Western advisers attempted to re-define the park’s territory and mission inline with an exclusive focus on biodiversity protection, but they met with stiff resis-tance from their agrarian-minded peers. And in northern Kurzeme, government ef-forts to create a new national park were stymied by local residents embracinga staunchly productivist agrarian understanding of nature. Neither of these wasa case of Westerners imposing particular park boundaries or management regimesupon locals, but rather of Latvians themselves advancing competing visions forthe parks in response to Western ideas and assistance. What internationalists sawas a savvy embrace of the globalization of nature, agrarians denounced as a sortof self-imposed neo-colonialism.

Constructing the agrarian ethnoscape

In Latvia as throughout the colonized borderlands of Eastern Europe, nationalidentity was first cultivated during the ‘‘national revivals’’ of the 19th-century,when intellectuals and artists seeking to construct national histories and define theirnation’s ‘‘essence’’ often turned their gaze to the countryside. Nation-builders fannedout into the provinces, studying peasant customs and vernacular architecture andgathering folksongs, fables and poems. Folklore institutes were established and col-lections of peasant artifacts amassed in newly founded ethnographic museums. Writ-ers and painters drew inspiration from folk themes and sought to depict the lives ofpeasants, who, thanks to their isolation in remote villages, were seen as having pre-served the ‘‘pure’’ national culture and character, unadulterated by cosmopolitan in-fluences, thereby sparing the nation from annihilation under the foreign yoke (Banac& Verdery, 1995; Hofer, 1980; Stauter-Halsted, 2001).

Inspired by Herder, the German pre-Romantic philosopher of linguistic national-ism, national awakeners in the territory of present-day Latvia e then a Russianprovince dominated by Baltic German elites e dedicated themselves to promotingthe Latvian language and collecting Latvian folksongs, tales and proverbs. Butthey also drew upon German geographical ideas, tremendously influential in Latviaas throughout the Russian Empire, to imagine a primordial connection to nature asa central element of national consciousness. Germany’s pioneering geographers un-derstood nature as fundamentally intertwined with people: nature was shaped by hu-mans and in turn shaped human culture in distinctive ways. The local or regionalcultural landscape, seen as both determining and reflecting the character of its


human population, came to be known as Heimat, and one of the major strands inearly German conservationism was the Heimatschutz (homeland protection) move-ment, dedicated to protecting not only natural objects but also monuments of folkculture and vernacular architecture (Dominick, 1992; Williams, 1996). In Latvia,one of the towering figures of the National Awakening published the first workfor a Latvian audience (though in German) on ‘‘homeland studies’’ (Heimatkunde),arguing that knowledge of the homeland’s natural terrain was a crucial source of‘‘love of the fatherland’’, for nature was a reservoir of national character and a ‘‘liv-ing witness’’ to the nation’s past (Kronwald, 1867).6

After World War I, governments in Latvia and the other newly independentnation-states carved out of the wreckage of Europe’s empires embraced a peasantistideology that transformed the 19th-century Romantic cultural celebration of ruralauthenticity into the basis of the political and economic order (Ionescu, 1969). Lat-vians were literally transformed into a ‘‘nation of farmers’’ through a radical landreform that created hundreds of thousands of small family farms. The agrarian re-form was reinforced discursively by the construction of the laboring, land-owningfamily farmer e in Latvian, the saimnieks, a semantically and symbolically richword that can be translated also as landowner, master, boss or steward (cf. Rus. ekhozyain) e as the quintessential Latvian citizen. In literature and the arts, in publicceremonies, and in a new open-air ethnographic museum, the traditional farminglifestyle was celebrated as the wellspring of the Latvian national character. Particularattention was devoted to the dispersed single-family farmstead, seen as a marker ofLatvians’ difference from their historically village-dwelling Estonian, German orRussian neighbors. In the spirit of Heimatkunde, a special closeness to nature wasidentified as a central element of Latvianness, and specifically a closeness obtainedthrough the labor of agrarian cultivation.7 Canonical literary works of the interwarperiod lovingly constructed nature as agrarian ethnoscape and depicted the true Lat-vian saimnieks as not only a hardworking farmer but an innately sensitive and re-sponsible steward of nature. But agrarian nationalist discourse also containeda more nakedly productivist strand, which celebrated above all the saimnieks’ heroic

6 A Latvian translation of this seminal work by Atis Kronvalds was published in Riga in 1922 under the

title Dzimtenes M�ac�ıba (Homeland Studies).7 After the era of the National Awakening, Latvians have no longer typically used the German word

Heimat to denote Latvian landscapes. However, I use the term to refer to the dominant Latvian discourse

of nature as cultivated ethnoscape because this discourse has in important ways remained true to its

19th-century roots. It should also be noted that in the 1920s and 1930s, German conservationism was

co-opted by the Nazi regime, and environmental determinism gave way to full-fledged racialism, with ef-

forts to ‘‘eradicate ‘Jewish influence’ in the natural landscape itself’’ (Williams, 1996: 381; see also Biehl &

Staudenmaier, 1995; Bramwell, 1989; Josephson, 1996). Thus, Heimat has become associated with the

Nazi doctrine of ‘‘Blood and Soil’’, although its original usage invoked environmental, not biological de-

terminism. Mainstream Latvian national discourse, on the other hand, has never emphasized ‘‘blood and

soil’’. Notions of rootedness in place are far more central to Latvian self-understandings than are notions

of kinship or genetic ‘‘purity’’. This rootedness is seen as springing from agricultural labor and the culti-

vation of nature, rather than from the soil as repository of ancestors’ bones. Connectedness to the ances-

tors themselves is ensured by preserving and reproducing the landscapes shaped by their labor. See

Schwartz (in press-a, in press-b).


labor in transforming nature e clearing forests, draining swamps e for productive(and patriotic) purposes.

After Soviet annexation in 1939, the agrarian ethnoscape came under sustainedassault by the forces of agricultural modernization. Collectivization of private farmswas completed by 1950, and in 1965 the Brezhnev administration launched an am-bitious campaign to intensify agricultural drainage and mechanization throughoutthe western and northern regions of the Soviet Union, including Latvia. To createthe vast, level fields required for large-scale drainage and mechanized cultivation,the iconic elements of the mosaic agro-landscape had to be destroyed: old fieldboundaries, groves, decorative tree plantings and dispersed homesteads (Fig. 1).By the 1970s, Latvian conservation professionals and enthusiasts were daring tospeak out against the destruction, and a landscape protection movement led by Lat-via’s poet laureate began to draw members of the urban intelligentsia into the coun-tryside on regular weekend outings to ‘‘liberate’’ elements of the ethnoscape fromneglect and Sovietization (Schwartz, in press-b).

In the mid-1980s, Latvia’s drive for independence from the Soviet Union wassparked by an unprecedented grassroots movement protesting a proposed hydro-power dam on Latvia’s ‘‘fate-river’’, the Daugava, a project that would have entailedthe flooding of landscapes of great natural and cultural significance (Muiznieks,1987). ‘‘The Latvian must become the saimnieks of his own land!’’ declared one ofthe most resonant political slogans of the late 1980s (Stukuls, 1997; Stukuls Eglitis,2002). After independent statehood was restored in 1991, agrarian nationalist dis-course re-surfaced full-force, with renewed celebration of farming as the bedrock

Fig. 1. Latvian ethnoscape. Photo: Guntis Eninxs.


of Latvianness and attention to the traditional homestead and other elements of theagrarian ethnoscape.8 Collective farms were disbanded in a new round of land re-form aimed at restoring the pre-Soviet agrarian structure of family farming. The ma-jority of Latvians polled in the summer of 1991 believed that agriculture would serveas the primary springboard for national economic recovery and development(Liepins, 1993: 193).9 But the ‘‘nation of farmers’’ was re-emerging into a very dif-ferent world than that of the 1930s, and the 1990s brought instead a dramatic col-lapse in agricultural production and in farming’s share of the gross domesticproduct.

As Latvia began preparing for the ‘‘return’’ to a Europe already burdened withagricultural over-production and attempting to negotiate a tricky ‘‘post-producti-vist’’ transition (Ilbery & Bowler, 1998), many Latvians feared for the fate of the‘‘nation of farmers’’ and its agrarian ethnoscape. At the same time, with the first vis-its of German bird-watching enthusiasts in the late 1980s, Latvians began to realizethat, in the realm of biodiversity, they had something to offer the West. Undrainedwetlands and wet forests, as well as miles of seacoast protected from development bySoviet-era military restrictions, support healthy populations of many species nowrare or endangered in western Europe, including lynx, otter, Lesser Spotted eagleand an ‘‘internationally significant’’ population of black storks (IUCN, 1993: 22).Among Latvian rural dwellers and conservation professionals, some embraced thenew narrative of biodiversity, and the prospects of Western aid dollars and eco-tou-rists that accompanied it. But others perceived this narrative as a threat to the deeplyrooted understanding of nature as ethnoscape, both in the Heimat sense of nature asreservoir of ethnographic uniqueness and in the more purely productivist sense ofnature as a landscape of labor. The clash between internationalist and agrarianunderstandings of nature informed debates over sustainable forestry policy and eco-system restoration, as I have described elsewhere (Schwartz, 1999, 2001, 2005, inpress-a), and also, as the following two case studies demonstrate, over the meaningsand management of Latvian national parks.

Gauja National Park

Preparations for the 1973 centennial commemoration of the founding of Yellow-stone National Park sparked lively discussion in nature management circles world-wide about the past and future of parks. In Latvia, too, international ferment

8 Throughout the 1990s, celebrations of agrarian nationalism were met with equally passionate critiques

of the ‘‘nation of farmers’’ discourse as hopelessly outdated. Nonetheless, agrarianism has retained a sur-

prising degree of discursive potency, as a Latvian sociologist noted in 2002: ‘‘it would be difficult to find

another self-reference within Latvian culture that is as capacious and enduring’’ as that of the ‘‘peasant

culture’’ or ‘‘nation of farmers’’ (Beitnere, 2002: 153). A more in-depth discussion of the discursive com-

petition between agrarianism and internationalism in the 1990s is provided in Schwartz (2001, in press-a).

For another perspective on the national meanings of Latvian landscapes, see Bunkse (1992, 1999).9 In this cross-Baltic survey, agriculture was ranked first by 68% of respondents in Latvia, 64% in Es-

tonia and 82% in Lithuania.


inspired conservation professionals to begin discussing with their Soviet colleagues,especially in neighboring Estonia and Lithuania, the possibility of establishing na-tional parks in their republics. The Soviet Union boasted a great many protected na-ture areas of various kinds, but none were designated as national parks, thanks tothe politically objectionable implications of the label. According to the eminent Lat-vian geographer Aija Melluma, a key participant in these discussions, Soviet author-ities initially rejected the label ‘‘national’’ (Rus. e natsional’nyi, Lat. e nacion�alais)in favor of the more orthodox ‘‘people’s park’’ (narodnyi, tautas), but finally conced-ed after the idea’s promoters fortuitously located a passage in Lenin’s works callingfor the eventual establishment of ‘‘American-style national parks’’ in the USSR.10

Thus the Soviet Union’s first national parks were born: Estonia’s Lahemaa in1971, Latvia’s Gauja and Georgia’s Tbilisi in 1973 and Lithuania’s Augstaitija in1974 (Fig. 2). The ethno-nationalist significance of these pioneering Soviet nationalparks was never acknowledged overtly under Soviet rule, but the fact that they wereestablished precisely in the republics that later led the separatist drive suggests thatthe word ‘‘national’’ was, indeed, more than a mere label. Certainly in the Latviancase, according to Melluma, its principal designer, the establishment of Gauja Na-tional Park precipitated a ‘‘great sense of national uplift’’ and a tremendous out-pouring of societal interest and support.11

The centerpiece of the park’s 92,000-ha territory, located in the central Vidzemeregion 50 km northeast of Riga, was the valleys of the Gauja river and its tributaries,whose steep sandstone bluffs and forested ravines had sheltered unique geologicalformations and a wealth of plant and animal life from aggressive human encroach-ment (Fig. 3). Along this stretch of the Gauja, as Melluma (1974: 125) noted at thetime, ‘‘nature has still to a large degree remained primordial and has been little trans-formed by human economic activity’’. But the park designers drew the boundaries soas to include wide swaths of agro-landscape and many cultural and historical sites, aswell: castles, archeological remains, caves celebrated in folk legend and so on. Ac-cording to a popular nature writer, the park’s ‘‘real magic and value’’ were associat-ed simultaneously with ‘‘living, untouched nature in the Gauja’s inaccessibleravines’’ and with ‘‘history’s distant and yet nearby breath in the ancient build-ings.’’ (Eninxs, 1973).12 For Melluma, the park territory was interesting not onlyfor its geological and biological features, but also as a place to study ‘‘the ‘footprints’of human economic activity in the present-day landscape’’.

10 Aija Melluma, interview by the author, Riga, March 11, 1999.11 Aija Melluma, address to the Gauja National Park zoning seminar, Sigulda, December 9, 1998. This

phenomenon presents an interesting topic for comparative research, though one beyond the scope of this

study.12 The founders of Estonia’s Lahemaa National Park had a similar approach, as Rob Smurr (2002: 25)

reports. According to the park’s founder, Jaan Eilart, ‘‘‘The park had everything to do with Estonians and

their culture and nothing to do with nature.’ But the Estonian culture Eilart sought to protect was a tra-

ditional peasant culture intimately tied to the land; thus, despite his contention to the contrary, the park

was about nature too. It was a place where the natural and built environments served as congenial comple-

ments to one another [.].’’


Indeed, the establishment of Gauja National Park can be seen as one salvo inMelluma’s larger campaign to return Latvian nature management to its roots inHeimatkunde. During the Soviet period, Latvian nature management practices con-formed to the dominant Soviet approach of establishing strict nature reserves

Fig. 2. Map of Latvia with research sites. Map: Robert D. Lopez.

Fig. 3. Gauja National Park postcard. Photo: Indra Cekstere.


(zapovedniki) in which human uses (other than scientific research) were, in principle,forbidden (Weiner, 1988, 1999). But in the 1970s Melluma (1979: 11) began to arguefor the adoption of a new ‘‘protected landscape area’’ category, in which agriculturaluses were permitted, aimed at protecting such objects as ‘‘old country parks and ar-boretums, protected millponds, [.] old field systems [.], winding roads and variousother features created by human hands, which vividly demonstrate the history of therelationship between humans and nature’’.

At Gauja, protecting the agrarian ethnoscape was central to the mission of thenew national park from the outset. Melluma and her fellow planners defined thenature protection mandate very broadly to include not only natural systems andgenetic diversity e as in a strict reserve or zapovednik e but also ‘‘the materialwitnesses to the centuries-old interaction between man and nature’’ (Melluma,1980: 5). The park’s boundaries were drawn explicitly to protect not only naturalhabitats of great scenic value and biotic diversity, but also the agrarian ethno-scape of fields, meadows and farmsteads, which, according to Melluma (1994:56), represented ‘‘the essential prototype of today’s Latvian landscapes’’. Alongwith biologists and rangers, the park hired a resident ethnographer who spent10 years carrying out a detailed ethnographic inventory, visiting most of thepark’s two thousand historic farmsteads, gathering ‘‘descriptions, diagrams andphotographs’’, recording oral histories and filming traditional craftsmen at work(Cekstere, 1983: 45). Residents of inventoried buildings were informed of theirbuildings’ value and requirements for its maintenance. In 1982, the ethnographicinformants were brought together for an ‘‘unexpectedly well-received’’ evening cel-ebration, featuring a performance by the park’s own folklore ensemble, formedthe previous year with the mission of ‘‘propagandizing the riches of Latvian cul-ture, its ethical and aesthetic values and understanding of nature’’, through thefolksongs of the Gauja region.13

Park staff understood their mission as including efforts to rekindle Latvians’ fad-ing awareness of their local history and folk traditions, and to protect the embodi-ments of that history and ‘‘mentality’’ in the cultural landscape against theonslaught of Soviet rural policies. Throughout the 1980s, park officials invoked eth-nographic inventory data to ‘‘halt the demolition or thoughtless remodeling’’ ofmany historic buildings, and wielded zoning and management regulations to brakethe progress of objectionable land-use practices such as intensive land reclamation,unplanned construction of summer cottages and tourist facilities and the mass ex-pansion of private farm plots during the campaign to boost food supplies in thelate 1980s (Cekstere, 1983). On the occasion of Gauja’s 20th anniversary in 1993,the park’s first director recalled that the beautiful Gauja valley ‘‘like a magnet’’ at-tracted ‘‘all manner of prominent and monied persons [i.e., politically connectedelites-KS] wishing to establish their garden plot, build their cottage, house or saunaprecisely here and nowhere else’’ (Skriba, 1993: 3). Park managers successfully

13 Indra Cekstere, Gauja National Park information officer; interview by the author, Sigulda, January 20,

1998. Excerpts from her field notes are published in Cekstere (1993).


rebuffed many of these attempts, and so Gauja National Park served as at least a par-tial bulwark against Sovietization of the Latvian ethnoscape.

Shedding the ethnoscape?

After independence, the status of Gauja as a large, complex protected area en-compassing both ‘‘primordial’’ nature and agrarian ethnoscape came into question.Because Gauja was established during the Soviet period without regard to priorproperty rights, post-Soviet property restitution created thousands of new privatelandowners within the park’s boundaries, many of them now struggling to eke outa living by farming and logging, or hoping to capitalize on the area’s natural ame-nities by developing tourist facilities. Because of the original planners’ desire to sim-plify external boundaries, the park also encompassed several small towns anddensely inhabited areas. The zoning scheme thus comprised seven distinct zones,each with its own management regime: the strict nature reserve, natural landscape,cultural landscape, recreational landscape, lightly developed, heavily developedand neutral or buffer zones (Fig. 4). Management of such a complex protectedarea had become significantly more complicated in the post-Soviet-era of privateproperty rights and hard budget constraints. In 1998, the Latvian government se-cured funding and technical support from Denmark for a project to draft a newmanagement plan and regulations for Gauja (State Forest Service, 1998). The ‘‘Dan-ish project’’, as it was commonly known, became an important testing ground for theimplementation of modern Western nature management techniques.

During the Soviet period, studies of plant and animal life at Gauja were sporadic,unsystematic and poorly disseminated. Maps were considered military secrets andkept off-limits to civilians.14 In stark contrast, the Danish project employed sophisti-catedGeographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to layer biological, geolog-ical, socioeconomic and ethnographic data onto aerial photographs to producemultidimensional digitized maps for use in management planning. Project managersgave top priority to conducting systematic ecological field surveys, beginning withan inventory of ‘‘woodland key habitats’’, in order to identify areas of greatest biodi-versity value. These rationalizing techniques reinforced a notion of nature as first andforemost a reservoir of biodiversity. The project team leaders, Gauja director J�anisStrautnieks and theDanish consultant Aase Ostergaard, advocated excising the heavi-ly inhabited zones andmost of the protected landscape zones so as to reduce the park’sterritory to its relatively untouched ‘‘core zone’’, comprising the river valleys with theirforested banks andwetmeadows. This reduction, they argued, would not only simplifypark management and prevent many potential conflicts with private landowners, butwould also move Gauja toward compliance with international standards. Accordingto the widely accepted IUCN guidelines for protected area management, ‘‘at leastthree-quarters and preferably more of [a protected area] must be managed for its pri-mary purpose’’, which for national parks (category II) is identified as ecosystem

14 Valdis Pil�ats, Gauja National Park senior ecologist; interview by the author, Sigulda, January 28, 1999.


protection and recreation (IUCN, 1994: 12, 19).With its acres of farmland, villages andzones of ‘‘light’’ and ‘‘heavy’’ development, Gauja fell considerably short of this three-quarters standard. The strict reserve and natural landscape zonesmade up only around5%and 16%, respectively, of the park’s total territory, while the buffer zone accountedfor 51%.

For Gauja director Strautnieks, the park’s sovereign mission was to protect the di-versity of species andhabitats. ‘‘Iwon’t talk to youabout the fortress ruins’’, he toldme,dismissing the park’s culturalehistorical heritage as a ‘‘secondary matter’’.15 Straut-nieks hoped to achieve compliance with IUCN category II criteria in 10 years time,if not by shedding the park’s developed zones, then at least by banning all economicactivities other than recreation within the core zone. The primary motivation for thisagendawas, as he put it, ‘‘to keep upwith the times, to anticipate where Europe is head-ing’’. The influence of IUCN and its global norms was ‘‘inevitably’’ growing through-out Europe, Strautnieks pointed out, and now in Latvia, too, nature management was‘‘being raised to an entirely new level, essentially based onEurope’s demandse not dueto local pressure’’. Now Latvians needed to demonstrate their commitment to

establishing a protected nature area system, or at least one protected naturearea, in a manner that is understandable in the Western world. Understandableat least to the Scandinavians, say, who are right here nearby and who see whatwe are doing. Nowadays there is much more contact, they travel here and

Fig. 4. Map of Gauja National Park zoning. Map: Robert D. Lopez, adapted from Latvian State Forest

Service and Holsteinborg Consult.

15 J�anis Strautnieks, Gauja National Park director; interview by the author, Sigulda, August 13, 1999.


wonder, and draw their conclusions and fill up whole newspapers. [.] If wedon’t demonstrate this, then I think that we will not be able to hope for sup-port from foreign governments and various foundations.

For Strautnieks, achieving internationally recognized national park status was one‘‘path toward achieving integration’’ into Europe.

Compliance with global norms and values promised to enhance access not only tointernational donor funds, but also to international tourismmarkets. ‘‘National parksmake valuable ‘green visiting cards’’’, as Stuart Franklin (2002: 1480) has noted,16 andaccording to Strautnieks (1993: 2),GaujaNational Parkwas ‘‘the secondmost populardestination, after Riga, for international tourists. Gauja represents Latvia and its na-ture’’. It was crucial, then, to provide the sort of nature thatWestern tourists wanted toconsume. The key question for Valdis Pil�ats, Gauja’s senior staff ecologist, was: ‘‘Howdoes theWestern tourist differ from the (ex-) Soviet tourist?What does eachwish to seeat Gauja National Park, and what deficiencies does each perceive?’’ Latvians, Pil�atsobserved, wanted to see sites of scenic beauty and folkloric significance and were dis-tressed by a disorderly landscape, wondering: ‘‘Why are the parks’ woods so cluttered,why haven’t the dead and fallen trees been removed?’’ In contrast, ‘‘the Swede, theGer-man, theDutchman, the Danee nearly all of them ask: ‘Why is your forest so new andwhy does it look so cultivated? [.] And where is your old-growth forest?’’’ The prob-lem, according to Pil�ats (1993: 27), was that ‘‘in Latvia, it seems, primordial nature hasnever been celebrated. Only that which accords with human aesthetic canons, which iscreated or transformed by human hands, is valued’’. But the future, for Pil�ats as forStrautnieks, lay with the Western understanding of nature:

Some will say that Gauja National Park must serve our own people first andforemost, and that we need not imitate Westerners. That’s fine, but let’s lookahead. What will Latvia be like after ten, twenty years? How much of that in-significant ‘‘untouched’’ nature will we have left? What will the Latvian visitorto Gauja National Park wish to see after ten or twenty years?

For Strautnieks and Pil�ats, biology trumped ethnography. Gauja National Parkshould be internationalized by excising ethnoscape and focusing on biodiversity.

However, the reduction proposal met with such firm resistance from other mem-bers of the project steering committee e notably the park’s ‘‘author’’ Aija Mellumaand her colleagues from the environment ministry e that it was ultimately shelved.According to the Danish consultant Ostergaard, practical questions, such aswhether sustainable land-use planning could be adequately enforced outside thepark’s borders, were only minimally discussed at project meetings. Instead, she la-mented, the debate centered on ‘‘principles, not reality’’, which she considereda ‘‘waste of time’’.17 What was at stake, though, was a fundamental clash between

16 Franklin argues that Poland’s Bialowieza National Park served to ‘‘atone for pollution elsewhere in

Poland at a time when Poland [was] attempting to meet the Copenhagen Criteria for European accession.’’17 Aase Ostergaard, GNP management plan project leader; interview by the author, Sigulda, January 20,

1999.


internationalist and agrarian understandings of the meaning of Latvia’s flagshipnational park.

Not only internationalists but also defenders of agrarian ethnoscape were able toappropriate Western narratives in support of their position. While the former em-phasized biodiversity, the latter drew upon the sustainable development or ‘‘peopleand parks’’ paradigm: the idea that biodiversity and local values can be simulta-neously protected by integrating conservation goals into international developmentassistance, and by devising ways for residents to profit from sound nature steward-ship through eco-tourism and heritage tourism, controlled hunting, sustainable re-source harvesting and the like. ‘‘All this time I’ve been following the literature onnational parks fairly closely’’, Melluma told me, ‘‘and basically even at those[IUCN] congresses, everyone talks about the national park as a developmentarea’’.18 Indeed, Melluma was well within the mainstream conservation traditionof Western Europe itself, where e in stark contrast to America or Africa e anythingresembling pristine wilderness is long gone, and where nature has been celebratedprecisely as a cultivated landscape of human use. West European parks are typicallynot ‘‘pastoral paradises preserved from evidence of human labor, but working agrar-ian landscapes. Unlike their American counterparts, they tend to be conserved pre-cisely because of their evidence of ancient habitation and stewardship, and it iswidely recognized that the landscape must continue to be worked by the local com-munity if it is to exist’’ (Olwig, 1996: 396). ‘‘No national park in England and Walescan ever approach the national park ideal as exemplified by Yosemite’’, notes a Brit-ish commentator (Blunden & Turner, 1985: 44). At France’s Park de Paysan, simi-larly, ‘‘as in other French national parks, the maintenance of a population ofsufficient size to support the traditional landscape is central to its philosophy’’,and park authorities strive to ‘‘preserve the right balance between fauna, flora, man’scultural heritage and the economic prosperity of the region’’ (Blunden & Turner,1985: 150).

Melluma argued that Gauja should serve as a tool not only for biodiversity con-servation in the core zone, but also for promoting sustainable development and land-use planning in the region as a whole. The narrow focus on biodiversity cast humansin the purely negative role of defilers of nature, she maintained. This dynamic per-petuated the legacy of hostility between park authorities and local residents inheritedfrom the Soviet-era exclusionary approach to protected area management. In herview, ‘‘the entire nature protection system should be humanized’’, and private land-owners within park boundaries should be assisted in nature-friendly developmentplanning, rather than hemmed in with countless land-use restrictions. She lamentedthe elevation of biological values as the centerpiece of Gauja’s management vision,noting that ‘‘here in Latvia the human influence is very ancient, and today it isvery hard to determine what is purely natural and what has been shaped byhumans’’.

18 Melluma, interview by the author, Riga, August 16, 1999.


While Melluma used the current buzzwords of the Western paradigm e sustain-ability, stakeholder participation, natural dynamism e in making her case, her visionwas grounded in the familiar Latvian construction of nature as a site of human laborand reservoir of history and identity. A landscape is like an archive, she told me. ‘‘Itcan simultaneously contain very ancient elements e fortress ruins, say, which datefrom something like a thousand years before our era, along with the very newest el-ements.’’ The ‘‘most compelling’’ aspect of nature protection for her, she said, wasexploring this ‘‘archive’’ to uncover the historical evidence of human impacts on na-ture. While she did not argue in explicitly nationalist terms, the natural heritage thatshe wanted Gauja National Park to embody and protect was not primarily the globalnature of species and habitats but the agrarian ethnoscape.

Northern Kurzeme National Park

Latvia’s second-oldest protected nature area was the Sl�ıtere Reserve, establishedin 1921 in the northern Kurzeme region, where the Baltic Sea meets the Gulf ofRiga at the Horn of Kolka.19 Sl�ıtere is an area of great natural diversity, situatedin a remote and economically underdeveloped region. A wide range of forest andbog types support many Red List endangered and threatened species, and thousandsof migrating birds e buzzards, eagles, ducks, geese, gulls and passerines e fly overthe Horn of Kolka each spring. Sl�ıtere’s diverse topography vividly illustrates thegeological history of the post-Ice Age era. Thanks to the area’s remoteness, muchof the greater Sl�ıtere ecosystem has been relatively untouched by human activities.Moreover, the Soviet regime had cordoned off the entire Baltic Sea coastal regionas a militarized border zone. Non-residents were denied entry, and travel betweentowns and villages within the zone was restricted and unpleasant even for residents.Nearly a decade after independence, roads in northern Kurzeme remained few andpoorly paved, and a dearth of public transportation left many coastal residents largelyisolated. Population growth was negative and population density among the lowest inthe country: 18 and 6 persons per km2, respectively, for the two northern Kurzemecounties, Talsi and Ventspils, and as low as 1.9 for Ance, Latvia’s most sparsely pop-ulated municipality (Dundagas pagasta padome, 1999: 15).

Over the years the Sl�ıtere Reserve had been enlarged several times, growing by thelate 1980s to 15,000 ha and encompassing not only undeveloped forests and bogs,but also several coastal fishing villages. Unlike many other coastal areas, the villagesof northern Kurzeme had not been emptied during the Soviet period. While individ-ual fishing was banned, many residents found work at local fishing and processingcollectives, and some of these enterprises stayed in business after independenceand privatization. These villages are also home to one of the last remaining commu-nities of Livs; these Finno-Ugric seafarers were the first inhabitants of present-dayLatvia but were long ago assimilated into the Latvian mainstream. (Livs, it should

19 The first nature reserve on Latvian territory, and one of the earliest reserves in the Russian empire, was

established in 1912 on Moritzholm Island (Lat. e Moricsala).


be noted, do not constitute a true ethnic minority. Rather, these individuals largelyidentify as Latvians of Liv descent.) In 1991 this coastal territory was designated asthe Livonian Coast (L�ıvod R�anda), a protected area dedicated to preserving thenear-extinct Liv language and cultural heritage.

In the mid-1990s, spurred byWestern aid initiatives including a Finnish-supportedEco-tourismDevelopment Project for the entire Kurzeme coast, local and national en-vironmental authorities began to explore the possibilities for promoting nature tour-ism in the area. In July 1996 Latvia’s minister of environment and regionaldevelopment proposed merging the Livonian Coast, Sl�ıtere and several smaller naturereserves to create a new Northern Kurzeme National Park. The park’s mission wouldbe to protect both natural and cultural heritage and to promote tourism and sustain-able local development; its territory would encompass Kolka township in its entiretyand portions of Ance, Dundaga, Roja and T�argale townships. Whereas the foundingof Gauja National Park in the early 1970s had sparked an outpouring of public sup-port and a ‘‘sense of national uplift’’, however, in the late 1990s theNorthernKurzemeproposal unleashed an avalanche of hostility from local officials and residents.

On one level, this hostility reflected the peculiar dynamics of local politics there.Whereas Gauja had been created as a national park, Sl�ıtere had always been a strictnature reserve, charged exclusively with scientific research and with protecting naturalvalues from human despoilment. During the Soviet period, recalled Elm�ars P�eterhofs,a biologist and the long-serving director of Sl�ıtere, ‘‘the chief objective was creatinga serious enforcement system, so that we would be in control of the entire territory’’(Plaudis, 1994). Sl�ıtere officials had nomandate for promoting recreation or educationand outreach. According to mayor Gun�ars Laic�ans of Dundaga, where the Reserve’sheadquarters are located: ‘‘If you asked twenty people on the street in Dundaga whatthe Sl�ıtere Reserve management does, they would all shrug their shoulders and no onewould be able to tell you anything, not one word.’’20 Park rules restricted local resi-dents in their traditional subsistence activities of gathering berries, mushrooms andfirewood in the forests, making relations with park officials tense.

Some restrictions had been relaxed since the end of Soviet rule, but badly botchedpublic relations efforts by P�eterhofs and national environmental officials exacerbatedthis legacy of hostility and mutual suspicion. Their clumsy and perhaps not entirelygood-faith efforts at Western-style ‘‘participatory planning’’ fostered perceptions ofa project hatched in secrecy ‘‘at the top’’ and imposed upon unwitting local residents.Subsequent efforts to inform and involve residents failed to dispel this simmering resent-ment, which, some park promoters claimed, local township officials actively exploited toconsolidate their own popular support. Local authorities’ fears of a ‘‘top-down’’ em-parkment echoed a broader fear of losing political control over their townships throughan impending nationwide administrative-territorial reform of municipal and countygovernment. Initial suspicions were compounded by locals’ mistrust of the managersof the Livonian Coast, who were widely reviled for alleged financial improprieties,poor community relations and failure to improve the material well-being of Liv

20 Gun�ars Laic�ans, Dundaga township mayor; telephone interview by the author, August 12, 1999.


residents. Finally, local authorities feared that their budgets would not be compensatedfor the expected loss of property-tax revenues resulting from a larger protected area.

The inhabitants of these isolated, hard-scrabble fishing villages have a long-stand-ing reputation in Latvia as distinctively taciturn and uncongenial, and this stereotypewas frequently invoked by both local and outside observers to explain the exceptionaldifficulty of fostering productive dialogue around the park proposal. Indeed, a par-ticular constellation of local legacies, rivalries and resentments transformed thenational park debate into a bitter ‘‘war of all against all’’, as one local observerdescribed it. But at the same time, the battle lines reflected familiar discursivedivisions. This was not only a struggle over authority, but also a struggle betweencompeting notions of the value of nature and Latvians’ proper relationship to theland.

For Sl�ıtere director P�eterhofs, as for Gauja’s Strautnieks, the proposed nationalpark’s chief value was its natural diversity, and the area’s greatest developmental po-tential derived from Westerners’ interest in that natural diversity: from the recrea-tional and ecological value of the region’s undeveloped beaches, its distinctive‘‘landscape of fens and dunes’’ and above all its biodiversity. Observed P�eterhofs:

During the spring migratory period, there are days when 150,000 birds fly overthe Horn of Kolka. Since Latvia’s border has become more open, not only spe-cialists but also so-called nature lovers come to observe them. In the Nordiccountries it’s like a movement e thousands of people travel on Saturdaysand Sundays to bird gathering spots, to observe them and identify species.[.B]oth Latvian and foreign specialists agree that the Horn of Kolka is themost significant bird gathering spot in northern Europe during spring migra-tion (Blumberga, 1996).

Because of this Western interest, he maintained, ‘‘the Horn of Kolka could be a goodsite for tourism and money-making, if only the Kolka residents could understand thetremendous business opportunities available in the service sector’’. The proposed na-tional park was a crucial element of P�eterhofs’ internationalist vision:

I think the chief stimulus [for economic growth] could be the opening of passen-ger terminals at Ventspils and Roja. [.] From [the old lighthouse in the villageof] Sl�ıtere we can see Saaremaa island [in Estonia]. How everything is developedthere! Truly at the highest levele eco-tourism, all this tourism fromScandinavia,domestic Estonian tourism. And here it all ends. That’s ite it goes no further. Ifthe ferry traffic were extended to Roja, for example, or directly from Denmarkand Sweden to Ventspils, then the flow of money would be opened in thisdirection.21

In P�eterhofs’ view, indeed, eco-tourism offered ‘‘the only development possibility’’ forthis economically ‘‘frozen’’ region, with its aging and shrinking population (Juc�evi�cs,1997). The productivist alternative was a hopeless dead-end. In the spring of 1997, at

21 Elm�ars P�eterhofs, Sl�ıtere Reserve director; interview by the author, Dundaga, April 4, 1999.


a time whenKolka had no unemployment and was drawing over five hundred workersfrom other townships to its fish processing enterprises, P�eterhofs declared presciently:

The welfare of Kolka, which is based on fisheries, is as insubstantial as a see-through nightgown and can vanish in an instant, with shifts in the market de-mand for processed fish in Russia, the sole export destination. Furthermore,people are cruelly overworked in fish plants for a meager 40e60 lat salary,and so you can’t even talk about prosperity, but only about eking out a basicexistence. The tourism business, in contrast, is an incomparably more civilizedand promising income source (Andinxs, 1997).

In the fall of 1998 the Russian economic crisis devastated Latvia’s coastal fisheries,sending unemployment levels to 25% in Kolka by January 1999.

Like Gauja’s Strautnieks, P�eterhofs stressed the importance of conforming to inter-national nature protection standards. ‘‘If we count up all our protected nature areas, welook very bad, very impoverished in the European context’’, he lamented, but a signifi-cant new protected area would enhance Latvia’s international prestige (Juc�evi�cs,1997).22 Moreover, he told me, ‘‘Anyone who comes from Europe has a notion ofwhat a nature reserve is and what it should be like’’, and Sl�ıtere Reserve, with its villagesand zones of intensive recreation, did not meet these expectations. The core of the newnational park should be its areas of ‘‘primordial’’ nature, he believed, particularly itsnatural and semi-natural forests. Of particular interest to Western observers was anarea burned in 1992 in one of Latvia’s largest forest fires, where the Sl�ıtere management,flying against the Latvian tradition of landscape cultivation, was enforcing natural re-generation instead of re-planting.Where local residents saw only an ugly wasteland anda shameful squandering of firewood, visiting Swedish scientists saw a valuable site forscientific study, declaring enthusiastically: ‘‘Webelieve that the Sl�ıtere forest fire actuallyonly increased the protected area’s value’’ (Zakrisons, Granstrems, & Simmels, 1993:19). As P�eterhofs and other park promoters frequently pointed out, a national parkwas an internationally recognized designation and, as such, opened the door to interna-tional assistance and funding. Like Strautnieks and Pil�ats at Gauja, P�eterhofs believedWestern tourists and aid donors alike were far more interested in the globalizedlandscape of species and habitats than in someone else’s ethnoscape.

‘‘Where do the people go?’’

At the same time, though, the new park was to encompass not only Sl�ıtere Re-serve but also the Livonian Coast, with its mission of cataloguing and protecting ver-nacular architecture, folklore and other cultural elements of the Liv ethnoscape. Theoriginal Northern Kurzeme National Park concept was drafted by Aija Melluma,who at the time was serving as a Livonian Coast board member and advisor tothe environment minister. An early version of the park management plan called

22 At the time Latvia had two national parks, the second having been established shortly before then at

Kxemeri, an ecologically significant wetland area along the Gulf coast just west of Riga. Poorly developed

and severely underfunded, however, Kxemeri was only a ‘‘paper park’’, existing more in name than in fact.


for negotiating with local landowners and finding ‘‘ways of subsidizing the tradition-al land-use forms’’, in order to preserve ‘‘the most valuable traditional rural land-scapes together with the cultural heritage architectural structures’’ (Ministry ND:9).23 As at Gauja, Melluma’s management vision was one of sustainable develop-ment rather than exclusionary nature protection, and P�eterhofs and other park boos-ters enthusiastically propagated the argument that national park status would bemore development-friendly than the current nature reserve status.

However, many residents and local officials e particularly the mayors of Kolka,Ance and T�argale townships e were deeply skeptical about the national park’s de-velopmental potential. Kolka mayor Maija R�eriha, by many accounts the ringleaderof the opposition, insisted that, given the current poor quality of drinking water,roads and other infrastructure in the region, ‘‘visions of the flourishing of tourismare fruitless dreams’’. She predicted that ‘‘the anticipated international fundingwould go to the researchers of flowers and Liv folksongs, and the possible incomefrom tourism e to the national park’’ (Andinxs, 1997). R�eriha and her allies envi-sioned their region’s future flourishing only through the strengthening of fisheries,forestry and farming, poor soil conditions notwithstanding. ‘‘Everything possiblemust be done to develop the traditional occupations’’, she insisted. ‘‘If the operationsof the local fish processing firms should be limited, that would be a tragedy forKolka dwellers’’ (Ozolinxa, 1997). According to T�argale mayor Biruta �Ece, agricul-tural price supports ‘‘ought to play the chief role’’ in her township’s development.Like other agrarian protectionists, she opposed rapid EU accession:

We want to imitate Europe in many ways, but I don’t know whether we canalways pull it off. Really, as far as that European Union accession e well, atthe top they make decisions and talk about all sorts of things, but it doesn’ttrickle down to us [.]. We’re not ready to join the European Union, we’renot developed enough to go with their prices [.]. Country people simply thinkwe’re not ready yet.24

In sharp contrast to P�eterhofs, with his vision of the northern Kurzeme coast asa hub of international transit, park opponents were suspicious of outsiders and for-eign influences. At the first, ill-fated public meeting in 1997, a journalist reported thatmany local residents ‘‘alleged that this performance/meeting was orchestrated bya person or persons with an interest in the anticipated foreign investment capital;others maintained that the national park project would allow would-be builders ofmanors and castles into this heretofore off-limits territory’’ (S�ele, 1997a). Many res-idents scornfully dismissed the idea of grounding local development in the Westernappreciation of nature as wilderness. ‘‘What do we have to show others?’’ askeda public meeting participant. ‘‘It’s a pigsty here, a jungle, everything is overgrown’’(Stalte, 1997).

23 S�ur Mer (Great Sea), the Liv name for the Baltic Sea, was considered as an alternative name for the

proposed park.24 Skaidr�ıte Lapinxa, Ance township mayor; interview by the author, Ance, July 21, 1999.


But unlike many rural dwellers elsewhere in Latvia (Schwartz, 2005), the northernKurzeme folk rejected also the prospect of marketing their own ethnographic heri-tage. ‘‘What will happen if my goat leaves droppings on the trail where the gentlemenhave to walk to enjoy the view? And I myself have to wear a folk costume and standat the gate? Perhaps I will earn a few pennies?’’ asked one meeting attendee. ‘‘TheLivs are now likened to Indians who live on reservations and are brought cheap li-quor and prostitutes’’, declared another. ‘‘They don’t have to work or fish, but onlywatch with clouded eyes’’ (Stalte, 1997).25 R�eriha concurred: ‘‘The Liv and the Lat-vian are proud, they don’t have the mentality to sell themselves for money and dis-play something. Anything else, but that e never!’’ On the other hand, ‘‘That weknow how to produce and that we make a very good product, that much is clear’’.26

‘‘Rationally we understand and support [the park idea]’’, explained a retired lumber-jack. ‘‘But if only the rich tourist will feel free here, while we ourselves won’t be ableto set foot in the forest or the sea on account of the many restrictions, then that’s nokind of life. We have to go to the forest for firewood, to the bog for berries, to the seafor fish. And we have to cut hay for our livestock’’ (Trops, 1997).

The primary concern of the Northern Kurzeme park opponents, voiced repeatedlydespite assurances to the contrary by park promoters, was that the land-use restric-tions in effect in Sl�ıtere Reserve would be maintained and even tightened in thenational park, and area residents would be forbidden from engaging in their tradi-tional subsistence activities of gathering firewood, grazing livestock and pickingmushrooms and berries for sale at markets and roadside stands. In defending thesetraditional land-use rights, park opponents invoked the familiar notion of the labor-ing Latvian saimnieks as an innately good steward of nature. ‘‘The ancient chroniclesand documents indicate that the Kurzeme coast has been inhabited for over seven oreight centuries’’, observed Laimdota S�ele (1997a), a local reporter who vigorouslyopposed the park proposal, adding that these inhabitants ‘‘have always been wiseneighbors to the unique landscapes, the diverse plant and animal world, and allhave survived together up to our time’’. First and foremost, however, park opponentsdefined their relationship to nature as that of material producers. As one park pro-moter, Livonian Coast director S�ılis, lamented:

The locals view everything connected to trade as speculation, ever since Soviettimes. Everything connected to services is just looking for Easy Street. Every-thing connected to higher education e that’s a lost person, because he no lon-ger works. But what does it mean to work? To work means to produce [.], tocatch fish, produce agricultural goods. Maybe you can work in factories, too,

25 Consider the following similar take on official celebrations of cultural heritage: ‘‘A Latvian English-

language teacher who visited the United States in 1993 as part of a US government exchange program

recounted to me that her program’s visit to a Native American reservation reminded her of the darkest

days of Soviet rule, when Latvian folk culture was paraded for visiting foreign dignitaries as evidence

of the government’s love of indigenous cultures. She reported that when she attended a staged Native

American ritual performance during her reservation visit she began sobbing because she so identified

with the performers’’ (Ginkel, 2002: 421).26 Maija R�eriha, Kolka township mayor; interview by the author, Kolka, May 5, 1999.


but that’s not the real thing, because the nation’s base is of course in the coun-tryside. Farmers and fishermen e those are the real thing, even if they will onlybe five percent in Latvia, they will still be the nation’s foundation.27

Park opponents feared that local people, prevented from deriving direct materialbenefit from nature, would have no place in nature at all. Thus they perceived the na-tional park idea in very stark terms as promoting nature protection over and againsthuman interests. Kolka mayor R�eriha complained that the draft management plan‘‘gives a great deal of thought to the plant world, to the forests, the bogs [.]. Thereis even a phrase that says [.] that these fishing villages are important for forests,plants, birds, insects and all other kinds of biological diversity, but people are notmentioned at all. [.]. Thus we see that there is no place anticipated here for peo-ple’’.28 She predicted that over time, the stricter regulations of the core zone wouldbe expanded to inhabited zones as well: as these areas ‘‘grow over with forests, birds,insectse people will be pushed out and a stricter zoning will be declared’’. R�eriha wasunmoved by park boosters’ assertions about sustainable development. ‘‘Where do thepeople go?’’ she asked. ‘‘What do they do, how do they live?’’ As the journalist S�ele(1997b) put it: ‘‘We have the Red List of flora and fauna species threatened with ex-tinction; everything possible is done to preserve these natural wonders for the future.But where is the Red List in which the Liv is listed? [.T]he most favorable conditionsare created for the survival of plants and animals, but these conditions are stolen fromhumans, the native inhabitants of this land.’’

Fears of local residents being pushed off the land and threatened with extinctionwere rooted in a very real local history of displacement and exile. As locals oftenpointed out, the first exile occurred in 1944 when coastal villagers were ordered bythe occupying German forces to evacuate inland. Some residents fled to Sweden dur-ing the war; others were deported after the Soviet annexation. Like the rest of theKurzeme coast, Soviet rule transformed the region into a vigilantly patrolled militaryoutpost, as described by a journalist:

It is estimated that military personnel outnumbered civilians tenfold in thisclosely guarded corner of the socialist empire’s western border. Radar facilities,tank and coastal artillery divisions of the border patrol were more numerousthan villages. The broad, straight road running parallel to the sea was builtin the sixties expressly to meet the army’s tactical needs, and the locals calledit the Khrushchev road [.] (Andinxs, 1997).

27 Edgars S�ılis, Livonian Coast executive director; interview by the author, Riga, June 4, 1999.28 R�eriha, 1999 interview. In the version in my possession, the section on ‘‘Heritage environments’’ does

call for negotiating with landowners and finding ‘‘ways of subsidising the traditional land-use forms’’, as

cited above. However, the drafters appear to have made a tactical error by preceding these statements with

an appeal to biodiversity, thereby suggesting the primacy of biological over cultural values: ‘‘The tradi-

tional single farmsteads and small villages (both inland and on the coast) in a territory of a continuous

forest massive is a significant element for the maintenance of biological variety in the nature: birds,

bats, insects, plants and other forms of life enrich the landscape of S�ur Mer National Park’’ (Ministry

ND: 9).


Movement in the area was controlled, residents had to carry passports even whentraveling between neighboring villages and access to beaches was prohibited outsidethe few designated public areas. The Sl�ıtere Reserve was widely perceived as yet an-other dimension of the restrictions and prohibitions imposed by an occupying re-gime, as well as a playground for the powerful elite: ‘‘more a place for the bigmen [kungi] to enjoy themselves’’, according to Dundaga mayor Laic�ans. ‘‘It was,as they say, a state within a state.’’29

Soviet rule had also brought nationalization of private property, and the post-So-viet restitution process was slow and problematic in northern Kurzeme. Because theinterwar land survey had been cut short there by the outbreak of World War II,many parcels lacked clearly documented boundaries; but more importantly, restitu-tion in many cases had been encumbered by the presence of Sl�ıtere Reserve. TheSl�ıtere administration was negotiating with landowners to exchange properties inthe core zone for parcels in less ecologically significant areas, but these negotiationshad been complicated by uncertainty over the future extent and borders of the park.Residents thus felt that, after having been exiled from their own land for half a cen-tury, they were now being threatened by a new exile in the form of Northern Kur-zeme National Park. ‘‘What if I’ve been living all this time among eternalprohibitions’’, wondered T�argale mayor �Ece, ‘‘and now finally it’s my property,now my land is finally restituted and then they put the park on top of it?’’30 GundarsBerkholds, head of the Kolka Liv Society, expressed the same fear: ‘‘Let’s say I ownsome land, and some kind of trees are growing on my land, maybe an oak grove orsomething, and that will be a landscape. Will I be able to work there, and how will Ibe able to work there, even though the land is mine? Will the state buy it from me?’’31

After decades of being ‘‘very much hemmed in’’ by the military regime, he said, peo-ple wanted ‘‘to feel freer’’. Former landowners and their heirs ‘‘cannot return to theland of their ancestors’’, declared the journalist S�ele (1997a) indignantly, adding:‘‘What does this remind you of, readers? Perhaps the already partially forgottentimes when Latvia’s citizens were denied access to the sea along nearly the entirelength of the Kurzeme coast?’’ Residents feared that emparkment might not only de-crease their access to the forest but even unleash a new round of expropriations.

From the perspective of the local opposition, the proposed Northern Kurzeme Na-tional Park hung ‘‘like a sword of Damocles’’ over the heads of coastal residents,threatening permanent underdevelopment and yet another foreign-imposed exilefrom their native lands (S�ele, 1997b). Because of land-use restrictions, as mayor

29 Laic�ans, 1999 interview. Stuart Franklin describes a similar dynamic in the Bialowieza case, where lo-

cal residents resisted efforts by Polish scientists in the 1990s to create a national park, seeing the current

emparkment as reminiscent of the Nazi plan to ethnically cleanse the PolisheBelorussian border zone.

‘‘Between June and August 1941 thousands of Belorussian farmers were driven out of their forest villages

as [Reichsforstmeister Hermann] Goering’s plan began to take shape.’’ Local people also feared ‘‘the re-

moval of access to free or cut-price forest goods such as berries, mushrooms, herbs and firewood’’ (Frank-

lin, 2002: 1480, 1474).30 Biruta �Ece, T�argale township mayor; interview by the author, T�argale, July 21, 1999.31 Gundars Berkholds, Kolka Liv Society representative; interview by the author, Kolka, July 23, 1999.


R�eriha put it, ‘‘the local person was no longer saimnieks sav�a dzimtaj�a pus�e’’emasterin his own native place (Plaudis, 1994). Her poignant phrase evoked the separatist slo-gan of the glasnost era, which cast the struggle for independence from Soviet rule interms of Latvia regaining its saimnieks and Latvians becoming, once again, mastersin their own land. Her words also recalled the heroic saimnieks of Latvian literatureand popular myth, who must carve a rugged livelihood from an unforgiving environ-ment through his own hard toil. The anti-park discourse thus combined the notion ofliberation from outside dictates with the agrarian valorization of productive labor.

Sl�ıtere director P�eterhofs firmly rejected the claim that emparkment would ‘‘exile’’local landowners by imposing stricter land-use controls. Park indwellers would con-tinue to be allowed to gather materials and graze livestock; indeed, he insisted, ‘‘themore herbivorous livestock there are, the more meadows will be mowed and the morebeautiful will be the natural landscape, which is one of the chief requirements of a na-tional park’’. And he predicted, ‘‘as tourism develops, fishermen will be able to smoketheir fish and sell them to tourists and vacationers in prescribed places’’ (Kirspils,1997). At the same time, however, P�eterhofs, who had worked at Sl�ıtere Reservethroughout his entire twenty-year professional career, appeared not to have fullymade the transition to viewing local residents as ‘‘stakeholders’’ rather than enemies.Thus he bemoaned the resurgence of individual fishing in the late 1980s:

Fishermen felt that now they could drive across the dunes anywhere that wasconvenient for them [.]. The dunes are being destroyed, and I can guaranteethat fishermen have destroyed more in these few years than the Soviet armyduring the entire postwar period. [.] People have destroyed so much that na-ture protection professionals now are trying to remove the most unique valuesfrom public use, in order to preserve them (Blumberga, 1996).

P�eterhofs thus implicitly rejected the notion of the Latvian saimnieks as an instinc-tively wise steward of nature and of farming, fishing or lumbering as closeness tonature.

While he paid lip-service to the idea of national parks as zones for fostering de-velopment and humanenature interaction, P�eterhofs’ comments suggested that heremained wedded to the exclusionary paradigm. Melluma noted this dissonance, ob-serving that as the draft management plan was revised over time, ‘‘it gradually beganto lose all the emphases and aspects connected with development e it was once againtransformed into a stricter protected area, which is inappropriate [for a nationalpark]. If there’s no discussion of the development of the fishing villages, then there’sno point in talking about a national park at all! [.] You can’t turn it into an emptyterritory; that is not our goal.’’ Despite her own intentions in designing the originalmanagement plan, Melluma feared that there might be some grounds for local res-idents’ perceptions of the proposed park as inimical to local development.

Conclusions

Both the Gauja and the Northern Kurzeme cases represented at least a temporaryvictory for defenders of the agrarian ethnoscape and a defeat for the internationalist,


biodiversity-oriented understanding of national parks. By the late summer of 1999,Strautnieks and his allies had indefinitely shelved the plan to reduce Gauja NationalPark to its biologically valuable core zone, and P�eterhofs was negotiating an alter-native proposal to create a much smaller national park within the existing bound-aries of Sl�ıtere Reserve. Sl�ıtere National Park was formally established at the endof 2000, and when I returned for a brief visit in June 2002, several new nature trailshad been completed and a small museum was being set up in the newly remodeledSl�ıtere lighthouse, but no outreach work had yet been undertaken to publicize thenew status or increase tourism.

Internationalists at Gauja and Northern Kurzeme embraced the notion of natureas biodiversity, but at the same time they often expressed a strong attachment to the‘‘nation of farmers’’. While Strautnieks feared that the failure of Latvia’s flagship na-tional park to meet Western standards could hamper Latvia’s ‘‘return to Europe’’, healso believed the government should subsidize farmers to maintain agrarian land-scapes, though not within the borders of a national park. So, too, did his west-ward-looking colleague Pil�ats, who maintained that Latvia needed its farmers,because ‘‘if you look at this nation, and where it gets its human resources from,then I want to say that it’s primarily from the countryside. As a biologist e the valu-able biological material comes primarily from the countryside.’’ Dundaga mayorLaic�ans, while a strong supporter of the proposed Northern Kurzeme NationalPark, similarly affirmed farming as the wellspring of Latvian nationhood and thesovereign rural land use:

I put the countryside in first place as the sustainer of our Latvianness [m�usulatviet�ıbas atra�zot�ajs], in a positive sense, because if we study all of historyand study the great figures that Latvians have had, then it turns out that allof them, at least the majority, have come from the countryside. [.] The coun-tryside is what will also determine our future employment, because you can’tsimply live in the countryside and enthuse about something. [.] And that ba-sically means agriculture, and that is how it has to be, and if we will not under-stand that, then we will very quickly head toward destruction.

Strautnieks, Pil�ats and Laic�ans essentially hoped to compartmentalize the ethno-scape, marketing some parts westward as biodiversity, while keeping a healthy por-tion in agricultural production as ‘‘the sustainer of our Latvianness’’.

The agrarian-oriented Melluma, too, embraced the sustainable development para-digm as a mechanism for simultaneously preserving and globalizing the agrarian eth-noscape. She wanted to prioritize managing natural spaces as ‘‘archives’’ of Latvianethno-history, but at the same time, she welcomed international eco-tourism asa means toward ensuring the viability of living cultural landscapes. The NorthernKurzeme park opponents gave voice to themore purely productivist strand of Latvianagrarian discourse. For Kolka mayor R�eriha and her followers, resource-extractinglabor was the only dignified livelihood for local people, despite the region’s poorsoil quality and remote location and e even after the collapse of the Russianmarket e despite the risky nature of the fisheries business. Neither wilderness tourismnor ethnographic heritage tourism was acceptable alternatives. For them, creating


a new park was not a matter of generating new value in a devalued space, but rather ofimposing a foreign and undesirable value ‘‘from the top’’. The national park was sim-ply a mechanism for depopulation, for emptying the landscape even more effectivelythan the Soviet army had. In short, biodiversity conservation represented nothingmore than a new territorial control strategy, and internationalists like P�eterhofswere merely the tools of Westerners seeking to exploit Latvia as another biodiversity‘‘Eden’’, albeit on a less grand scale than, say, Serengeti. Even more than Gauja, then,the Northern Kurzeme case starkly exposed the difficulties of attempting to wed thenotion of nature as ethnoscape to that of nature as biodiversity.

I began this article by referencing the deeply problematic relationship between in-digenous communities and protected nature areas in colonial and post-colonial set-tings: a relationship all too often characterized by forced removal, exclusion andrestriction of traditional use rights. Like these post-colonial examples, the twopost-Soviet cases presented here revolve around the central tension between compet-ing notions of parks as pristine havens for wildlife or as lived-in landscapes of labor.But these cases also reveal distinctive post-Soviet dynamics. The following compar-ative comments are speculative and offered in the hopes of prompting further discus-sion by political ecologists across the Third WorldeSecond World divide.

In many post-colonial situations, local resistance is sparked by conservation strat-egies directly imposed by foreign-based organizations, sometimes with little inputfrom local residents (see MacDonald, 2005 for a recent example from northern Paki-stan). But in each of the Latvian cases, the foreign role was less direct. At Gauja Na-tional Park, the management project was conceived by Latvian authorities, whosought funding and technical assistance from Denmark. During the months-longprocess of drafting and debating the management plan, the Danish consultantseemed to remain largely on the sidelines of a discursive struggle among Latvian par-ticipants over the fundamental significance and value of Latvia’s flagship nationalpark. In Northern Kurzeme, the national park idea was inspired by earlier Westerninitiatives, but the proposal itself originated in, and was promoted by, the environ-ment ministry and the management of Slitere Reserve, and no foreign staff were in-volved with the project by the time I began my field research in 1998. This seemed tobe the general pattern of Western involvement in Latvia through the 1990s: Westernorganizations (NGOs, government agencies or multilateral donors) were actively in-volved in initial studies and planning and demonstration projects, and subsequentlyprovided funding for Latvians to proceed further on their own, with or without on-going technical assistance.

This relatively minimal role for Western organizations and individuals may be at-tributed, in part, to the fact that the stakes are not nearly as highe ecologically or eco-nomically e in Eastern Europe as they are in the countries of the global South. Whilethe former Communist lands represent a biodiversity bonanza in comparison withoverdevelopedWestern Europe, they pale in comparison to the hotspots of the tropics.Lacking also the scenic magnificence of towering mountain ranges or teeming savan-nahs, and with megafauna decidedly less charismatic and exotic than elephants ormountain gorillas, the potential rewards in both species preservation and eco-tourismpromotion are much more modest in this region. Moreover, the threats to Eastern


Europe’s biodiversity are less dramatic: as in Latvia, most rural areas are strugglingwith the decline of already sparse populations, rather than (real or imagined) explosivepopulation growth encroaching upon the borders of protected nature areas. These dif-ferences may also help to explain why, in contrast to the tragic pattern in many post-colonial contexts, conflicts between park managers and local resource users in Latviahave not been characterized by violence (cf. Neumann, 1998 (p. 6), 2004).

Of the two cases presented here, the Northern Kurzeme conflict more closely fol-lowed the post-colonial pattern of a struggle between local people and park manag-ers over access to scarce land and resources. The conservation authorities claimednot to be seeking to restrict local use rights, but the locals did not believe theseclaims. Their mistrust was hardly unreasonable, given their experience of Sovietrule as well as the park promoters’ inadequate commitment to communicationand community outreach. Sl�ıtere director P�eterhofs, a veteran of Soviet-era exclu-sionary conservation, seemed to hold the classic colonial and post-colonial view ofthe locals as ecologically ignorant ‘‘rapacious natives’’ from whom nature had tobe protected (MacDonald, 2005), rather than as people with deep-rooted localknowledge, sense of place and stewardship traditions. At Gauja Latvian conserva-tion authorities were seeking not to remove local residents from contested land-scapes, but rather to divest the park of these human-inhabited landscapes. Theconflict was not a resource struggle, in other words, but rather a discursive strugglebetween inward- and outward-looking understandings of the meaning of the nation-al park. But both cases raised the question, on the one hand, of whether a nationalpark created in the image of global biodiversity is an oxymoron, even a form of self-imposed cultural imperialism, and on the other, of whether agrarian nationalism canunderpin a viable nature protection strategy in the new borderless and post-produc-tivist Europe.

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