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

Examines how Norway has positioned itself as an alternative, environmentally-sound nation in a world filled with tension and instability.

Peder Anker (Author)

9781108477567, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 May 2020

300 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.3 cm, 0.57 kg

'… Anker provides a thorough and engaging history of envi-ronmental thought and action in this formative period …' Jenna M. Coughlin, Scandinavian Studies

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

1. The power of the periphery
2. The ecologists
3. The ecophilosophers
4. The deep ecologists
5. Environmental studies
6. The call for a new ecoreligion
7. The sustainable society
8. The acid rain debate
9. Our common future
The alternative nation.

Subject Areas: The environment [RN], History [HB], Humanities [H]