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Abstract Practical projects around the world are exploring and prefiguring ecologically feasible futures. The ideas informing these initiatives are familiar from degrowth discourses. But particularly where activists hail from the professional middle-classes of wealthy cities - architects, designers and other 'creatives' in Helsinki for example - they risk being dismissed by the media as well as by academics as vacuous life-style experimenters. Looking at Finland, the sense that this activity is not truly political or transformative can be further enhanced by activists' own reluctance to enter into explicitly political debate and their preference for discussing futures in the neutral language of science. Connecting today's situation to precursors in the 1960s, however, we can see how these local projects are embedded in local political culture, including a Finnish tendency to play up scientific rationality as a tool for managing collective affairs. This contrast with many other degrowth discourses shows the significance of local histories in influencing the space available for people to work out alternatives to the status quo. Keywords: social movements; Finland; urban/DIY activism; design

Abstract Practical projects around the world are exploring and prefiguring ecologically feasible futures. The ideas informing these initiatives are familiar from degrowth discourses. But particularly where activists hail from the professional middle-classes of wealthy cities - architects, designers and other 'creatives' in Helsinki for example - they risk being dismissed by the media as well as by academics as vacuous life-style experimenters. Looking at Finland, the sense that this activity is not truly political or transformative can be further enhanced by activists' own reluctance to enter into explicitly political debate and their preference for discussing futures in the neutral language of science. Connecting today's situation to precursors in the 1960s, however, we can see how these local projects are embedded in local political culture, including a Finnish tendency to play up scientific rationality as a tool for managing collective affairs. This contrast with many other degrowth discourses shows the significance of local histories in influencing the space available for people to work out alternatives to the status quo. ; Peer reviewed

Abstract Practical projects around the world are exploring and prefiguring ecologically feasible futures. The ideas informing these initiatives are familiar from degrowth discourses. But particularly where activists hail from the professional middle-classes of wealthy cities - architects, designers and other 'creatives' in Helsinki for example - they risk being dismissed by the media as well as by academics as vacuous life-style experimenters. Looking at Finland, the sense that this activity is not truly political or transformative can be further enhanced by activists' own reluctance to enter into explicitly political debate and their preference for discussing futures in the neutral language of science. Connecting today's situation to precursors in the 1960s, however, we can see how these local projects are embedded in local political culture, including a Finnish tendency to play up scientific rationality as a tool for managing collective affairs. This contrast with many other degrowth discourses shows the significance of local histories in influencing the space available for people to work out alternatives to the status quo. Keywords: social movements; Finland; urban/DIY activism; design

AbstractEnvironmentalists, especially old-growth activists, often rely on expert discourses which effectively disempower those whose livelihoods depend on forest products. They are often said to do this by fetishising nature as the other. In Finland, which is perhaps the world's most forestry-dependent country, old-growth activism opposing the forest products industry and sustained-yield forestry clearly expresses both desires to seek connection with sublime nature, but also to control and manage nature in an expert idiom much like that of the forestry profession itself. To help explain the prominence of expert discourses the paper charts the historical emergence of Finland as a nation-state, made economically dependent on timber products, but also characterised by a national culture emphasising forest-nature as something quintessentially Finnish. These two national narratives helped seal a national "forest consensus" which is now, however, being challenged with the very language that created it in the first place.

Despite persistent concerns over sustainability, cities continue to be developed that serve capital more than citizens. Where urban politics prioritizes growth, "green" credentials easily turn out to be illusory. Helsinki, with its pro-environmental administration, is an example of combining "green" agendas with a culture of growth and depoliticizing debate. This essay presents two cases of this broadly ecomodernist approach. In one case this approach led to proposing the destruction of irreplaceable green space and in the other, to drawing residents into international circuits of finance and data. This problem does not just emerge from corporations and elites, however. Drawing on Harvey Molotch's idea of "the city as growth machine", we suggest that growth ideology reflects a culture that, following psychologists, we might call WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic. Its claims are founded on a historically particular but widespread conception of global progress that is increasingly questioned. ; Peer reviewed