Labour Environmentalism, International Mining Companies and the Reemergence of Industrial Pollution in Western Norway, 1920-1990

This article explores the role of international mining companies, labour unions, and environmental scientists in both normalising and contesting pollution. Whereas environmental historians and environmental justice scholars have demonstrated how states and companies have normalised or externalised pollution and toxic waste, often at the expense of marginalised groups, scholars have paid less attention to the extent to which such strategies have been enacted in more egalitarian societies and how they have been effectively countered. As a contribution to this literature, the article demonstrates how a landscape and a fjord in Western Norway was constructed – rhetorically and physically – as sacrificable for the higher good of industrial growth and, more importantly, how they were restored as environmentally valuable. It does so by tracing the interactions between an electrometallurgical industrial plant, the Belgian, Swedish, and British mining companies that owned it, environmental scientists, and labour unions throughout the twentieth century. Based on corporate archives and the records of the Norwegian Ministry of the Environment, reports from environmental research institutes and the digitised newspaper collections of the Norwegian National Library, it explores how the fjord emerged as a matter of environmental concern through the efforts of labour environmentalists.