"The issues that are to be known”: marine nature in the public information of the 18th century St. Petersburg and the birth of environmental knowledge.

• In Event: Shaping Cities, Shaping Knowledge

Abstract

I will discuss the initial stage of formation of what I label general environmental knowledge, that is, knowledge of nature existing between traditional and scientific. I explore the image of nature that existed and developed in the social imaginary of the people who considered and represented themselves as educated public but had no specific education in natural sciences. This sort of knowledge is significantly understudied so far in environmental history even though its importance for the formation of pro-environmental behavior is commonly acknowledged (Geiger SM, Geiger M, Wilhelm O. Environment-Specific vs. General Knowledge and Their Role in Pro-environmental Behavior. Front Psychol. 2019 Apr 2;10:718). I will base my research on the St. Petersburg Gazette (Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti), the oldest Russian newspaper issued in St. Petersburg since 1728. Considering St. Petersburg as the center of the Romanov’s maritime project directed towards the maritimization of the continental Empire, I see the general knowledge of marine nature formed through the flow of routine news distributed regularly through the Gazette as an important aspect of the construction of a new system of interaction between the reading public and the marine nature. The Gazette shaped the geographic and environmental imagination of the St. Petersburg dwellers and eventually defined their vision of the right ways of dealing with the sea. From this perspective, the story provides an instrumental model for the more general analysis of formation and initial development of general environmental knowledge in the Early Modern urban communities.

Author

• Aleksei Kraikovskii, University of Genova