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.