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- Convenors:
-
Jaana Laine
(LUT University)
Lotten Gustafsson Reinius (Stockholm University Nordiska museet)
Jukka Nyyssönen (NIKU Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research)
Peder Roberts (University of Stavanger)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Deeper Histories, Diverse Sources, Different Narratives
- Location:
- Room 9
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 20 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The time of humans and societies (short/medium-term time) and forests (long-term time) intersect in many ways. This panel explores different interconnections and challenges between time, humans (societies), and forests (nature).
Long Abstract:
Time is complex and elusive. Humans, belonging to short-term time, are within modern societies’ clock-time detached from the rhythm of nature and instantaneous time’s speed exceeds human capacity, e.g., artificial intelligence. Humans interact with longer time cycles of societies and nature. In the context of their time scales, humans and societies aim to control and adapt to long-term times of nature (longue durée, glacial time, or natural time).
In controlling forests, humans have extended short- and medium-term times to forests, such as activities to accelerate tree growth. Climate change seems to distract the idea of nature’s long-term time adding new perceptions of heritage and temporal urgency.
Time, invisible to human senses, relates both to the forest itself and to human footprints. Forests seem to 'preserve' time, creating an image of agelessness. Due to forests’ long-term time, traces of past human generations, cultures, and institutions, such as management practices, are detectable in contemporary forests. Forests today are largely shaped by past societies, whereas contemporary societies define future forests.
Time of humans and forests intersect in many ways. Our panel contributes to exploring different interconnections between time, humans (societies), and forests. We invite diverse forms of engagement in how we manifest peoples’ and societies’ time versus the time of the forest. What decisions, conflicts, and solutions exist when human/societal time connects with forest time? How have different time scales and the friction between these affected societies and forests?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 20 August, 2024, -Jaana Laine (LUT University)
Paper short abstract:
Our forest-related experiences and meanings are embedded in time. The past, present, and future human-forest relationships described in written reminiscences are the source of this research. They are scrutinized with the concept of time and in the context of time.
Paper long abstract:
Forests exist in Finnish people’s everyday life. Their lives, cultures, institutions, and societal structures are affected by forests.
Human-forest relationships (defined in Halla et al. 2023) intrinsically include time and temporality, however, these aspects are seldom scrutinized in popular or scientific publications. This paper studies how time and temporality express themselves in written reminiscences ‘Me and the forest’ collected in 2020.
The source material includes around 300 texts about writers’ relationship with the forest. Texts are analysed in the light of earlier research and theories concerning time and temporalities. Close reading revealed the abundance of time-related expressions hidden in texts.
Forest-related activities and memories help us to recognise otherwise invisible time. (Urry 2000). Texts of these experiences recall Ingold’s (1993) A-series and taskspace where the past and future are involved within the present. Also, connections to Koselleck’s (2004[1979]) ideas about the continuity of time (Space of Experience and Horizon of Expectation) are found in texts.
Various times (natural time, societal time, clock-time, etc.) are reflected in source texts. However, the forest seems to slow time, for a moment releasing writers from the rhythm of present society. (Adam 2006). Besides current experiences, many writers share their childhood forest-related memories. Writers seem to pass on the ‘forest-message’ from previous generations to their descendants. Forests that we see today are created by those who lived before us.
Tiina Suopajärvi (University of Oulu) Jenni Rinne (University of Oulu) Helena Ruotsala (University of Turku)
Paper short abstract:
We will discuss how forests are part of the everyday lives and oral histories of seniors who live independently in remote places, and how forests support their wellbeing. With our more-than-human point of departure, we aim to challenge the idea of human and forest time often understood as separate.
Paper long abstract:
Ageing and how it is experienced while living in sparsely populated areas is affected by the tight relationship between humans and other natural elements, in addition to social relations. In our presentation, we will discuss how particularly forests are part of the everyday lives and oral histories of those seniors who live independently in remote places in Finland, and how forests support their mundane practices and wellbeing. By following Anna Tsing’s (2015) notions on how we all live with the entangled lifelines of humans and non-humans, we ask what kinds of forest-human entanglements become meaningful in ageing. Tsing invites us to think about life as “motions over time”, and Tim Ingold (2011) further suggests that wayfaring, movements and the meshwork generated by these movements are the essence of our being in the world. In our study, these movements refer to both seniors’ embodied sensory everyday mobility, like walking or snow shovelling, and to humans’ and non-humans’ co-constitutive movements in time. The ecological deep-time of forest, the changes made by humans through forest management, for example, and biographical temporalities of seniors’ oral histories, as well as the rhythms of days and seasons, all become interwoven in the experiences of ageing. We will scrutinize this by analysing the sensory ethnographic fieldwork we are conducting with the seniors in the woodlands of eastern Finland and in the fells and mires of Finnish Lapland. With our more-than-human living-with point of departure, we aim to challenge the idea of human and forest time as separate.
Anna Kolářová (Charles University, Prague)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the role of time in early nature-based tourism, focusing on the transnational region of the Bavarian and Bohemian Forest before World War II, and how it influenced tourist practices and tourist-forest relationships.
Paper long abstract:
“Among all mountains of Europe, the Bohemian Forest is distinguished by the greatness and magnificence of its forests,” begins the preface of a German tourist guide to the transnational region of the Bohemian and Bavarian Forest from 1888. The forest seems to be the distinctive factor of the region. Most of the Czech and German guidebooks, other tourism-related literature as well as Heimatkunde publications from the end of the 19th century emphasize its woods and forests as the main character feature.
Being the key touristic appeal of the region, the forest was imagined, observed, experienced, and altered by the tourists, their clubs and their activities, who were thus confronted with its transformations of different temporalities – those perceived as cyclical such as seasonal changes; those perceived as one-of-a-kind events such as the bark beetle outbreak in the 1870s; and those perceived as not being transitions at all, confirming the desirable “ancient” status of the forest (Hořejší 2017).
The proposed paper will investigate, what role time played in tourism in the Bohemian and Bavarian Forest in the late 19th and early 20th century, how it influenced tourist practices, and most importantly, what impact it had on relating of the tourists to the forest. That allows to review the current nationalism-focused literature on the topic of tourism in the region (Heller 1995, Maur 2006, Judson 2006) and to shift towards the broadly understood environmental history of tourism, inspired by the environmental anthropology of the forest (Blavascunas 2020, Mathews 2022).
Samira Saramo (Migration Institute of Finland)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on legacies of extractive industry and settler colonialism from the perspective of Finnish settlement in Northern Ontario forests. It draws on examples from fieldwork to analyze forest-human temporal entanglements.
Paper long abstract:
The forest plays a crucial role in the early-twentieth-century history of Finnish migrant-settlers in Northern Ontario, Canada, but, likewise, Finns have profoundly shaped the recent history of these forests. Finns cleared forest to make their homes and found work in the lumber and mining industries. Finns’ work and life in the “bush” has provided an important part of their collective identity and history. Such activities were key parts of the Canadian state’s plan to build its economy and power through extractive industry and to dispossess First Nations people.
In the contexts of deindustrialization, economic depression, climate crisis, and calls to dismantle settler colonial structures, how are our understandings of forest-human relationships and histories changed and can they offer us new ways of confronting the challenges we face? As the forest reclaims its space and leaves histories of Finnish settlement and extractive industry buried beneath, what approaches allow us to unpack these entangled legacies?
This presentation engages with the theme of “Forest, Time, and Society” by sharing experiences and analyses from fieldwork conducted in August 2022. I will outline the history of Finnish migration in the forests of Northern Ontario, and draw on scholarly dialogues on settler colonialism and historical research on extractive industries. I will also share photographs and soundscapes that I made as part of my fieldwork, and reflect on how they are a tool for better understanding the overlapping temporalities of forests and humans.
This research is part of my ongoing Kone Foundation-funded project “Placing Finnish Migrant-Settler Histories”.
Jukka Nyyssönen (NIKU Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research)
Paper short abstract:
In what ways are prognoses about forest/pasture use affected by the emerging uncertainties brought along by the climate change? The scientific prognoses are read in the light of numerous temporalities and compared to find out the competing politics and the ways forest time affects research.
Paper long abstract:
In the Finnish north, forest is one of the ecosystems upon which numerous groups of people and numerous means of living rely on. As a consequence, the hemi-Arctic forests and/or pasturelands in the Sami Homeland, in Inari, Finland, have been sites of re-occurring conflicts over land use. Research on forestry and reindeer herding has also been politicized and has become a site where different interests are voiced, and competing futures of the forests/pastures are imagined. I will analyze the prognoses made in forest and pasture studies on the future uses of the forests. The paper builds on the theorizing on multiple temporalities (Koselleck [1979] 2004; Jordheim 2012) and on human/forest time (Sörlin 2022). In research, forest time is both a temporality being targeted for change but also a temporality that structures, limits, and unsettles the human efforts, perhaps increasingly so in the time of the climate change, due to increasing number of uncertainties in the ecosystem. The prognoses are read as normative, performative, ideological and political, not only as scientific activity. How do the new uncertainties affect the prognoses? Has the ongoing climate change, through the tangible changes in the shared environment for all subsistence forms, managed to gather the competing segments of research to deal with the shared threat? Are there any changes in the temporal metanarratives articulated in research (progress vs. crisis as a main tool of temporal synchronization in the Western world, Jordheim and Wigen 2018; Tamm and Olivier 2019)?
Lotten Gustafsson Reinius (Stockholm University Nordiska museet)
Paper short abstract:
Recent scholarship on climate change has proposed the concept of solastalgia (Albrecht 2019) to capture affective aspects of drastic landscape alteration. This paper highlights the temporal and cultural aspects of forest loss, focusing local reactions to to wild fire and boars in Mid Sweden.
Paper long abstract:
Recent scholarship of environmental change include discussions on the social and emotion aspects of extreme weather or invasive species.
Glenn Albrecht (2019) has proposed the concept of solastalgia to stress the emotional particularities of landscape loss, including experiences of disorientation and distress when familiar landscapes change in seemingly irreparable and drastic ways. Deforestation in anthropocene through uncontrollable wild fires are local as well as global catastrophies, and sometimes referred to as the age of pyrocene (Pyne 2021).
Comparing local reactions to two interrelated cases of forest loss in Mid Sweden - in the aftermath of a big wild fire (2014) and through suddenly restricted forest access in the context of wild boar infection in the same region - this paper expands the understanding of solastalgia with a focus on its temporal aspects.
Taking inspiration also in ongoing discussion on async and family time in relation to climate change consciousness (Kverndokk 2020) and in classical ritual theory on the social construction of communitas and cultural time (such as Turner 1969, 1974, Leach 1979) this paper highlights and explores new aspect of human forest relations such as the experience of loss of cyclicity through deforestation.
As a contribution to the panel´s discussion on the interconnections of time, humans (societies) and forests the paper stresses the crucial role of forests (paths, activities and places within these) in social and cultural construction of time through case studies of the related loss of seasonality, communitas and cyclic time when access to such things becomes impossible.
Joana Sousa (Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra) Marta Silva (IHC, NOVA-FCSH IN2PAST)
Paper short abstract:
In the past, in Serra de Monchique and Serras da Lapa and Nave (Portugal) fires were controlled within modes of life marked by seasons. Accelerations were imposed on plant development and fire-related performances. Time dissonances are found today in the response given to fire damage and management.
Paper long abstract:
Fast running fires in mountain slopes, super-hot and unpredictable flames, branches of trees blown by strong winds transporting fire from a hill to the next, all illustrate the acceleration of fires as these were evoked in Serra de Monchique and Serras da Lapa e Nave (Portugal). As part of a research project seeking to historicize fires, we listened to farmers, foresters, firefighters, shepherds, among others, who told us about other accelerations, like the rapid-growing plantation trees and booms of after-fire sprouting plants; the movement, lights and noises of trucks, helicopters, cameras and drones used to document and fight the flames; the piles of lines and numbers in reports, calls, contracts put together to prevent fires and deal with material damage, among other site-specific accelerations related to strategies of evacuation, grief and trauma. This landscape on the rush has overthrown the slow burnings of the past. People used to grow multiple slow-growing trees with diversified uses which, together with fire, reproduced livelihoods based on agriculture, cork and resin extraction, distilling and pastoralism. Fire jumped out of a time frame marked by seasons, which allowed for the reproduction of modes of fire control with soil, tools, and time; and has been immersing into a performative immediatism dependent on water, high-tech machinery, and digital technology. In dissonance with this acceleration, however, experiences of slowness and distancing are reported by several people in, for instance, compensation programs and political uses of fire, which ultimately aggravate the effects of the new time of forest fires.
Otso Kortekangas (Åbo Akademi University)
Paper short abstract:
I will look at how “forest time” is portrayed in school textbooks in Finland and Sweden (1972–2023). Are forests portrayed as ecological entities with their own temporality related to ecological processes, or is the scale of human time and human action predominant? Is such a dichotomy fruitful?
Paper long abstract:
In our project funded by the Finnish Kone Foundation (2024–2027), we (Otso Kortekangas, Christoffer Åhlman) investigate what different interpretations and meanings (e.g., economic, ecological, cultural, recreational) school textbooks have presented about forests in Sweden and Finland (1972–today). In this WCEH paper, I will especially look at temporalities, and how “forest time” is portrayed in the textbooks. Are forests portrayed as ecological entities with their own temporality related to ecological processes, or is the scale of human time and human action predominant? A related and abstracted question that I will explore is whether we, living in the Anthropocene, could even claim that there is a “forest time”, individual from humans.
For this paper, I will use a sample of Swedish and Finnish textbooks from the subjects of biology, geography, social studies (samhällskunskap/yhteiskuntaoppi) from the latest 20-year period. Apart from this empirical material, I will relate the discussion of “forest time / human time” to environmental philosophy and history (e.g., Steven Vogel, Pauliina Kainulainen, Sverker Sörlin, Matthias Fritsch). I will specifically explore how to frame forests and humans within education and in society in a world where the presence of humankind already affects everything from the micro to the planetary scales.
Charrlotte Adelina (Freie Universität Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
Afforestation techniques that are adopted by non-governmental actors for urban greening projects in Coimbatore rely upon accelerated vegetal growth. The author unpacks the convergences and divergences between the time of the forest, of human aspirations, and the political ambition of urban greening.
Paper long abstract:
I study the politics of naturing Coimbatore city in India, to delineate an animated urban political ecology of urban forests in India. My work traces current afforestation projects envisioned to ‘save cities’ in the long durée of planetary crisis, and the ways in which it reorders relationships between humans and trees, in a space activated by modalities of entrepreneurial urbanisation, sustainability fixes and more-than-human agencies. I aim to bring together stories of human and more-than-human aspirations in uneven landscapes and their contested politics of place, bringing disparate bodies of work from urban studies and political ecologies into conversation.
In the proposed presentation, I would focus on excavating the techniques of close-range afforestation that are presently adopted by non-governmental actors (NGOs) for urban greening projects in Coimbatore. The method relies on accelerating vegetal growth through ecological engineering processes tapping on the ecological concept of inter-species competition. These projects of experimental urbanism not only ally with the project management timeframes of NGOs, but also with the rhythms and policy sprints of ‘fast urbanism’. While they bode well for human actors, speeding up the life cycle of tree growth negatively affect the resultant experiment ecologies. Thus, the presentation will unpack the convergences and divergences between the time of the forest, of the human actors, and of political ambition of greening in an urbanized society.