Paper short abstract:

We will present our ongoing research related to the methodology of environmental biography. As cultural historians and life-writing scholars we will present two case studies of writing the lives of past people from the perspective of environment in a particular context of archipelago and islands.

Paper long abstract:

The focus of our present research project "A grove of stories – Sagalund. Home museum, environment and life narrative" lies in the archipelago of Turku, on Kemiö island and the museum surroundings of Sagalund. Sagalund was built by a local teacher Nils Oskar Jansson. In this research project Jansson and other local teacher Adèle Weman and their home museum Villa Sagalund as well as its nature surroundings will be analysed. Sagalund offers a unique possibility to study archipelago milieu and its cultural heritage. Our aim is to study the rich cultural historical material of Villa Sagalund from the perspective of environmental biography.

The ongoing project grew out of a book by Leskelä-Kärki where she together with her colleague Otto Latva wrote about the artist Tove Jansson (1914-2001) and her relationship to the sea and archipelago. In this book, "Meri ja Tove. Elämää saaristossa" (Sea and Tove. Life in the Archipelago, 2022), the life of Jansson is approached from the perspective of her relationship to nature and sea on the islands where she spent her summers for many decades. Both the actual life narrative i is studied, but also the ways how Jansson depicted archipelago, islands, seashores, animals and nature in her art.

In our paper, we will develop further the connection between life writing studies and environmental humanities as a biographical approach, and ask how this methodology could be used in the case of Jansson and Weman in the context of Sagalund.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores three methodological challenges in writing ecobiography: utilising botanical specimens as an ecobiographical archive; writing ecobiography from a decolonised perspective; and infusing more-than-human approaches through ecobiographical, historical and life writing elements.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores methodological challenges in writing ecobiography through the story of Sarah Brooks (1850-1928), a prolific botanical collector for preeminent Australian botanist Baron von Mueller (1850s-1890s). Located for the final 54 years of her life on the remote eastern edge of the South West Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR) a global biodiversity hotspot, Sarah’s collecting identified plants new to Western science, and helped to establish the biogeographical boundary of the SWAFR.

The writing of Sarah’s life combines ecobiography, environmental history and auto-ethnography, through more-than-human approaches. Three significant methodological challenges have emerged: firstly, how to utilise the botanical specimens collected by Sarah as an innovative primary archive, along with more conventional sources.

The second challenge lies in writing the ecobiography of a settler-coloniser in a sensitive and ethical way. My research explores the dissonance between Sarah’s dawning understanding of the cultural and ecological values of the place she helped colonise, and her complicity in the colonisation process and pastoral industry that would ultimately diminish the values she was discovering and documenting. My research project has been grappling with the possibility of writing a decolonised history of a settler-coloniser while being inextricably part of the settler-colonialist culture that has wrought such a profound impact on this place and its traditional owners.

Finally, this paper will reflect on whether this project has been successful in infusing the three layers of ecobiography, environmental history and auto-ethnography with more-than-human approaches, in the hope of exploring new forms of life writing.

Paper short abstract:

In my contribution I will present my doctoral thesis on Nordenskiöld as an example of the multidisciplinary field of environmental biography. I will discuss how I combined environmental history, economic history, the history of ideas and ethnology, the history of science and some other topics.

Paper long abstract:

Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832–1901), a Finnish born Swedish scientist and explorer, was an environmentally literate person before the concept of environmental literacy was formulated in the 1960s. During his Arctic expeditions, between and 1883, he encountered destructive changes in nature that made him aware of the vulnerability of the environment. His environmental literacy guided him to take appropriate action to maintain, restore and improve the health of systems in nature.

Nordenskiöld expressed his own observations and experiences in his writings. His ideas also included aspects of the modernization process, some patriotic ideas from the Romantic era, and a strong dose of American influence. He influenced his fellow citizens by publishing his opinions. He made people realize and confront the threats he himself had witnessed. His concern for environmental problems was something new in Europe at the time. Many members of his social network shared his concern and continued his conservational legacy. Nordenskiöld was an important link in the chain of the history of conservation.

In my contribution I will present my doctoral thesis on Nordenskiöld as an example of the multidisciplinary field of environmental biography. I will discuss how I combined environmental history, economic history, the history of ideas and ethnology, the history of science and some other topics.

Nordenskiöld’s example helps us to understand the important role of every individual in the history of the environment: the fact that everybody has an impact on history and on the environment.

Paper short abstract:

The modern environmental movement gained momentum globally in the 1970s. This presentation asks how Finnish children’s environmental awakening of this decade can be understood by using a collective biographical approach.

Paper long abstract:

The modern environmental movement was born in the 1970s when people’s critical consciousness was globally awakened. Protest events such as the first Earth Day organised in The U.S. in 1970 allowed millions of people to voice their concerns of the pollution of Earth and the mass media transnationally circulated information about these protests. Simultaneously, important political milestones added to the attention on environmental issues when the European Year for Environmentalism was celebrated in 1970 and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established in 1972, to mention just a few examples.

The environmental awareness of the 1970s did not only affect adults but also children who were provided with information on environmental issues. As an example, environmental education was implemented in school curriculums in Finland and the Finnish Broadcasting Company included educational elements of environmental issues in their children’s programmes. In this presentation, I will ask how the environmental ethos influenced Finnish children’s lived experiences of their relation with the nature during the 1970s. How will our understanding of the history of the modern environmental movement change when we approach it from the perspective of children?

Methodologically the presentation relies on a collective biographical approach by combining biographical details from several research subjects. Additionally, the presentation discusses how oral history interviews and contemporary sources such as media texts and organisational archives can be used side-by-side when writing a collective biography of children’s experiences of environmental activism in the 1970s.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a collection of life story oral history interviews with ecologists, naturalists, paleoclimatologists, farmers and agricultural scientists who lived and worked in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century – a period of dramatic environmental change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores a collection of life story oral history interviews with ecologists, naturalists, paleoclimatologists, farmers and agricultural scientists who lived and worked in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century – a period of dramatic environmental change. Recorded recently by National Life Stories at the British Library, these interviewees tell stories about themselves and human and non-human others during decades (especially the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s) of substantial habitat loss and biodiversity decline. By examining this collection of life stories, I seek to contribute to recent theoretical and methodological reflection in environmental biography. In particular, I pursue four questions. One, what do the interviews reveal about how particular plants, animals and habitats were bound up with and ‘shaped’ human subjectivities (White, 2020)? Two, how should the lives of plants and animals – including agricultural crops and livestock – be recovered from these accounts narrated by humans? Three, what are the advantages and challenges of exploring not a single life story but a collection of life stories in which the individuals we hear from variously ignored, studied, worried about and contributed to the ‘Great Acceleration’? Four, what is the particular contribution of attention to the lives of scientists, including James Lovelock, whose work partly inspires the ‘post-human’ critical theory that animates new environmental biography (Latour, 2017)?

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how ecobiography can reframe the subject-historian-reader relationship. With reference to my research on the animal-human history of Victorian vegetarians, I seek to explain how this method can engage both emotions and ideas.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will argue that the micro-historical approach of biography makes it particularly suitable as a means through which to recover the co-constitution of our subject’s lives and thoughts through their being-in more-than-human worlds. Throughout, I will illustrate my points by drawing on examples from my PhD research into the animal lives of three largely forgotten Victorian vegetarians.

In the first part of the paper, I will discuss my theoretical grounding of such an approach within a phenomenological ontology as a basis for historical investigation, drawing the parallels between co-constitution and intersubjectivity but also animal-human interagency. Moreover, I’ll gesture towards how this might complicate the subject-historian-reader relationship and how, as a historian, I see my methods as at least partly informed by my subjects themselves. In the second part, I will seek to explain how, as a methodological approach, biography is best placed to analyse the emotional history of subjects and how emotions ought to be put into conversation with intellectual productions. Finally, I will seek to end my paper with some impressions about the place of biography within history (being a method that has long been eschewed by historians): in particular, what is the place of emotions within the act of history writing?

Paper short abstract:

Persian memoirs from early modern South Asia depict encounters of humans with each other and with nonhumans. Ecobiographical readings of such texts can generate social networks of conflict. Breaking the text's structure is challenging but can reveal deeply gendered and environmental implications.

Paper long abstract:

Early modern South Asia witnessed an ever-intensifying connection with Central Asia through mobile humans, animals, and commodities. Gendered codes of conduct were crucial in shaping how mobile and elite male travelers in the early modern period experienced new physical geographies. Illustrations emerge from the Persian texts like the autobiographies penned by mobile Central Asians who traversed South Asia: Emperor Babur (d.1520), the travel writer Mahmud Wali Balkhi (d. C.1660), and the Sufi prosopographer Shah Mahmud (d. C.1750). Dominating historiography stresses that such writings operated within a common sphere of shared political and literary ethics across Asia, molded by a common Persian language. However, an ecobiographic approach moves beyond the glossy trans-imperial cultural ethos associated with such lives. Instead, it spotlights human and animal bodies’ sensorial experiences like seasonal ailments, hunger, exhaustion, and sexual longing in the immediate surroundings. Such readings can generate social networks of humans and non-humans amidst real and imagined topographies, waterscapes, filth, and pestilence. Breaking the intended structure of a text is a strange but illuminating exercise. It shows that physical hardship in the provincial South Asian terrain was crucial in making political, emotional, and spiritual selfhood. But to overcome corporal adversity, world-traveling, natural-history-observing literati gendered their immediate environments. With changing seasons and landscapes, male bodies romanced, violated, gazed at, and shunned novel human and non-human figures that they encountered. This volatility in local geographies texturized what is otherwise deemed a seamless cultural code, shared across Persianate empires.

Paper short abstract:

I detail how past Umwelten can be studied by applying Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory and informed by contemporary science, and outline some basic assumptions in studies of past, current and future Umwelten. I also consider methodological issues related to the study of past Umwelten in particular.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation is based on a published article, "The study of past Umwelten" (Discipline Filosophische XXXIII(1), 2023, special issue “Jakob Von Uexküll. Biological Theory, Subjectivity And Environment”, ed. Vallori Rasini, pp. 227–247). In the article I detail how past Umwelten can be studied by applying Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory and informed by contemporary science. I argue that the methodological challenges raised by the lack of present organisms available for real-time observations and whole-body physiological studies can be partly overcome by making qualified assumptions drawn from relevant knowledge and reconstructing likely Umwelt relations. As groundwork for such studies, I outline some basic assumptions in studies of past, current and future Umwelten, consider methodological issues related to the study of past Umwelten in particular, and present a few empirical assumptions that are informative with regard to the study of past Umwelten in different historical periods. I also discuss the relevance of such studies for current conservation work, specifically contemporary discussions about de-extinction, and for economics conceived of as a branch of ecology in the fashion of ecological economics.