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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.