From the 1890s into the 1970s, loggers’ songs was a genre in Sweden where ecological awareness and cultural critique was voiced, also reaching into popular music and protest songs. An 1893 song of deforestation is taken as a starting point of a discussion of productive tropes and the logger persona.
Paper long abstract
In the winter of 1893, Oskar Thelén wrote a 28-stanza narrative song on how companies of the forest industry had cheated peasants into selling off their forest lands for a petty sum, and how the deforestation had ruined the ecological system so farming was no longer possible. The growth of a pauperised working class was one result noted, but the song ends with a utopian image of a restored forest in an equal society. During the first half of the 20th century, logger songs was a productive genre reaching into popular music where ecological perspectives could take romantic as well as culture-critical expressions, in utopian as well as dystopian terms. Nostalgia in the face of modernisation was in the 1960’s joined with public awareness of industrial pollution and a contemporary language of protest, bringing out tropes of anti-capitalism as well as “nature’s revenge”. This presentation will go into these and other productive tropes, but also study the logger persona in popular culture as an eco-conscious subject with a “close to nature”-knowledge.