This article examines how environmental trauma develops and is passed across four generations of women living beside a dammed river in Northern Finland. Through their connected life stories, it traces the emotional, cultural and psychological impacts of hydropower-driven environmental change. Once central to identity and livelihood, the free-flowing river has become a regulated, quiet presence and its silence echoes the community’s muted grief and disrupted memory. Drawing on cultural trauma, ecological grief and land-based violence, the study views unwanted environmental change as an ontological rupture that unsettles place attachment, historical continuity and intergenerational storytelling.

Published in Cultural geographies, Sage Journal

Authors: Outi Autti, Ayesha Ahmad, Romit Raj, and Victoria Pratt