Communal Clean-up Practices: The Case of Baltic Talka Traditions

This article focuses on Baltic talka – voluntary, collaborative clean-up traditions and explores the various genealogies from whence these traditions arise in Latvia. Via the discussion of these genealogies, the article places talka traditions within the larger context of human-waste relationships. Following Gay Hawkins’s plea to rethink and redo our relationships with waste, the practices of talka are here considered in terms of the underlying human-nature relationships that they represent. The article concludes that several aspects of talka practices could be useful examples of situated practices that can be employed for the development of affirmative ethicalities in environmental contexts. Simultaneously, the article also approaches the topic critically and acknowledges the complicated political and environmental backdrop of the tradition to be taken into account. On a meta-level, the article strives taking situated Baltic and Eastern European knowledges seriously, to both demonstrate the existing heterogeneity of human relationships with nature in the Global North, as well as to facilitate transforming the experienced present by (re)visiting the past.