River Management. Technological Challenge or Conceptual Illusion? Salmon Weirs and Hydroelectric Dams on the Kemi River in Northern Finland - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 230

the river, hydroelectricity production appears like a brute attempt of controlling
the river in a way that comes close to traditional understandings of 'management'.
Hydropower is therefore often stylised as a means of effectively controlling the
river, both by proponents and adversaries of the technology. This opposition,
however, only holds to an extent. Fishing with salmon weirs was in fact highly in-
stitutionalised and in many respects managerial. Also, the actual practice of hy-
droelectricity production reveals that even this form of river use essentially repre-
sents a way of negotiating with the flow, the seasonal variations and the
unpredictability of the river. River management, if understood as the manipulation
of an environmental phenomenon according to a rigid, ready-made plan, emerges
as illusionary. All engagement with a river seems to require reciprocal relations
with its dynamics. The argument is based principally on ethnographic fieldwork
along the Kemi River that the author conducted from August 2007 to September
2008.
The Kemi River catchment comprises the majority of the Finnish province of
Lapland into the Gulf of Bothnia (see Figure 19.1 ) and the histories of the area and
the river have been closely entwined 1 . When the region was settled after the last
Ice Age, hunters and fisher people exploited the river's banks for habitation and
livelihood. Since the 15th century, settlers from Karelia, Southern and Eastern
Finland arrived on the scene, using the river as a means of transport through the
mostly wooded and swampy area. Towns and villages were established along the
river and its flow, waters and ice served a host of purposes, from sanitation and
transportation to the provision of fishing grounds.
The exceptionally rich salmon fishery on the Kemi River had, in the Middle
Ages, already attracted the attention of the Swedish Crown and the Christian
Churches (Vilkuna 1975). Not only were they eager to baptise the people who
would gather each year to seize, salt and sell the rising fish; at least as much, they
were keen to levy taxes on the catch. Later, when the consolidation of territorial
claims became an issue of national interest, the settlement into this peripheral area
was encouraged by policies such as exemption from tax or military service for
those who would dare to establish a home there. With the onset of industrialisa-
tion, factories were built on the river, taking advantage of its power to drive me-
chanical and later electrical machinery. The predominant industry was - and still
is - the wood-processing business, providing timber for construction and small
wooden products, but mainly producing pulp and paper. Until less than 20 years
ago, the bulk of the logs that had been cut throughout the watershed 2 were floated
along the many tributaries into the main course of the Kemi River and from there
to the factories that were situated mainly at the river's mouth.

1

As will become clear throughout the paper, the river is approached analytically as shaped
by various influences, including - but not limited to - human actions. Therefore, it can be
called a 'hybrid' phenomenon (see Lippert, this volume) or an 'organic machine' to take
White's (1995) term.

2

I use the term 'watershed' in its American connotation, identical to the British 'catch-
ment area' or 'drainage basin'.