Rabbit Hole

Rabbit Hole examines how an ordinary citizen involuntarily becomes an environmental activist, defending his/her civil rights and cultural environment. When familiar forests are logged and turned into a gold drilling area, local roads are turned to busy truck routes, and rivers and agricultural fields become dumping grounds for industrial wastewater—what is to be done? Currently a regional administrative transition is taking place in which the responsibility for environmental protection is being shifted onto citizens. At an individual level, this triggers an expanding and never-ending process in which the citizen encounters a Kafkaesque environmental administration and a multinational corporation’s tactics. In an environmental conflict situation, diverse narratives compete against each other, and the facts depend on the specific context in which they emerge. In the activist’s widening perception, local experiences are gradually linked with national and global problems, encompassing a universal environmental concern. The topic of this project derives from Myllylä’s current study focusing on the corporate responsibility of Dragon Mining (a MNC) in Southern Finland.