The Ecotourism-Extraction Nexus by Büscher Bram

Author:Büscher, Bram
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135945336
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Historical ecotourism in Karelia

Ecotourism is a term of a particular epoch and its ideologies. As an institution, it was launched by a cluster of global governance institutions and initiatives in the 1990s. But if we conceptualize ecotourism as leisure-oriented travel to a place where the primary attraction is nature in general or its certain constitutive elements in particular, a prefigurative form of ecotourism has existed in Karelia for centuries; a form consistent with the Russian integration of ‘tourism’ and ‘health’ sectors (Burns 1998).

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, curing illnesses with mineral waters and sea waters (thalassotherapy) was in vogue within the Russian medical paradigm. It was also a foreign form of medical intervention (Charlier and Chaineux 2009), accessible primarily to the elite, as at the time there were no healing springs in Russia, and those who could afford to do so, undertook health pilgrimages to the famous healing springs of Western Europe. Tsar Peter I, as a part of his reforms in the name of modernization and improved well-being, preoccupied himself with locating ‘healing waters’ within the Russian territories.

In 1714, a worker of a regional metallurgic plant discovered a healing spring source fifty kilometres from Petrozavodsk, Karelia’s capital city. The worker, described as ‘suffering from heart illness’,2 had been assigned to oversee the transport of iron ore. As the lore goes, the worker stumbled across the healing spring, drank from it for three days, and was fully healed. He then told the plant overseer about his magical recovery, who then in turn informed the regional administrator V. Genin, who, knowing of the tsar’s interest in healing sprints, passed the information up the chain of command until it reached Peter I.

In 1717, Peter I deployed his personal medic to Karelia, ordering him to research the discovered springs. The water, rich in iron and other minerals, was called martsialnaya (martial), after Mars, the Roman god of war and iron, and appeared curative for anemia, scurvy, a range of heart and liver diseases, and rheumatism (see Volfson et al.’s 2010 medical geology overview of Russian use of minerals for curative purposes). In 1719 Peter I ordered a health resort constructed around the healing springs, which included three wooden castles for the Tsar and his family. Peter himself vacationed at the resort four times between 1719 and 1724. The village and infrastructure that grew around the resort, and although the high prestige of the place waned a bit after Peter’s death, the interest in the healing waters continued during Soviet times. Soviet researchers launched expeditions to continue the study of the water properties in the area, and the resort was, in a sense, reborn in 1964. To this day, it is considered a place of ‘clean ecology’ and there is a sanatorium there, where people from all over Russia go for health reasons.

Acknowledging the health favour of Russian ecotourism is important to recognizing that in the Soviet and post-Soviet imaginary of nature and human-nature relationships, ecological tourism, unlike its Western counterpart, is not merely about the experience of ‘wildness’ and ‘untouched’ nature.

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