Imprisoning the River Kemi

The Land Body Ecologies project launches a podcast about damming the River Kemi in Finland.

Source: Ilan Kelman

Can a dammed river run free? This question was explored as part of an art-science collective in which I am involved, called Land Body Ecologies. It is co-led by the U.K.-based art studio Invisible Flock and collaborators across five countries with various expertise.

The project connects local groups around the world to understand and document the emotional and mental health impacts of forced environmental change. One partner is in northern Finland. As detailed in the podcast Free River (produced by Invisible Flock, Chris Watson, and Land Body Ecologies, as part of a two-year residency at London’s Wellcome Hub), northern Finland continues to feel the impacts of post-World War II dam construction across the River Kemi. Known in Finnish as Kemijoki, it is Finland’s longest river and was known as one of Europe’s best salmon rivers.

During World War II, Finland defended its territory against the Soviet Union’s invasion by allying with Nazi Germany and, afterward, was penalised with heavy reparations. Finland paid while dealing with reconstruction and Finnish refugees from territory ceded to the Soviet Union. Much of this money came from timber, metal, and shipbuilding.

Electricity was essential. Hydropower played a major role with the first dam built on the River Kemi from 1945-1949. Another one went up from 1967-1972. New lakes formed, people were forcibly displaced, and the salmon disappeared.

Impact of the dams

Solastalgia describes emotional distress from environmental change. When a nature-based livelihood has been sustained locally for centuries, being renewable and healthy, an external decision to destroy it can bring trauma. Coupled with the flooding of land, the people’s connection to the environment and their mental health are affected.

Today, many dams have bypasses or tunnels to allow aquatic wildlife to move upstream and downstream. This was not the case for northern Finland at the time. Instead, hard barriers across the river sliced the waterway into different sections.

And it became much quieter. A free flowing river is noisy—burbling and gurgling in summer, with ice creaking and croaking in winter. Smoothing out gradients to create an elevation difference across the turbines means that rapids and cascades vanish, producing stillness away from the dam.

As the people from the area explained within our project, the flooded vegetation upstream decayed, releasing carbon dioxide and methane from the reservoir. Downstream, previously fluvial areas dried out, taken over by impenetrable new vegetation. As the dam cut the river, the power lines from it severed the landscape.

Many people departed since employment changed, not just from the dam but also from wider social restructuring. Those left behind had to deal with an altered local landscape, soundscape, and society. Some who recall the swift changes and still live nearby cannot bring themselves to talk about what was foisted on the river and on them. It precipitated and conflates with the end of river fishing and the end of their river-focused society.

The dams did contribute to filling the country’s coffers. The power generated assisted in turning natural and human “resources” into commodities, developing a new economy connected to the world. The drive for cash obscured other values that had exemplified the river’s meaning. Whether or not the dams helped Finland, they did not consider the Finns close by.

Now, memories are fading of what and how the river was. The anguish spawned by the dam’s construction dies with those who remembered. Its grey monoliths have become the norm, no longer a scar on either the river or the minds of residents.

There might be more freedom for people relying on the electricity. The river’s freedom has been supplanted by desires far beyond the land across which it used to run freely.