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)?