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.