Easter is a good opportunity to contemplate the death and resurrection of nature. One of the most prevalent narratives about nature in the Anthropocene is one of decline – of species extinction, biodiversity loss, degraded ecosystem services, encroachment on wilderness areas, natural disasters, global climate change, and so on. People have left their fingerprints on everything and the world is a poorer place for it, or so the story goes. Such narratives of decline and catastrophe have been important catalysts in the formation of the environmental movement and continue to be major challenges that we’ll need to deal with one way or another in the future. As argued earlier, all of these can also be defined as a wicked problem or part of a whole wicked tangle of problems that can’t be solved through simple fixes. Note that I chose to call this a narrative about nature. This is not the same as saying that these problems are fictional and thus don’t exist (they do). Narratives are storytelling mechanisms that organize and connect events in time and space. They are one of the ways in which we attempt to make sense of the world around us, as individuals and as societies. If we want to make any headway with the environmental problems that we face in the Anthropocene, we need to think critically about the narratives we tell to ourselves and to others about nature and culture. At the core, narratives about environmental decline begin with the idea of nature as once whole, pristine, and untouched. Once upon a time there was an environmental baseline that we not only measure, but also judge environmental change against. If there are people in the story, they tend to live in harmony with nature, knowing their place in the ecosystem. Environmental degradation often follows with the introduction of new technologies or when people start showing up in places where they don’t belong. For example, one…

Walking around a large grocery store like Ica Maxi at Strömpilen can be most instructive for thinking about the Anthropocene and our relationship with nature at large. First, while pondering what to have for dinner, we can contemplate the transportation and logistics infrastructures that brought all this exotic food from all corners of the world to our shopping carts up here in the north, fresh and ripe and ready to eat. In this sense, there is nothing “natural” about much of the food that ends up on our plates; it can only exist as part of a technological life-support system. Second, we can observe how many products make claims about nature, naturalness, and connections to place. “100% Natural,” “Ecological,” “Sustainable,” “Green,” “Biodynamic,” ”Organic,” “Pure,” “Authentic,” “Local,” “Short-traveled” – the list goes on and on. We can’t help but care about such claims since they speak to the very direct relationship between the products we buy, the place they come from, and our bodies. By claiming to be natural, the food promises to be good for us, or at least not to be directly harmful. The American writer Nathanael Johnson explored the tensions between “naturalness” and technology in his brand new book All Natural*: *A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing, and the Environment Really Keeps Us Healthier and Happier. In his interpretation, we suffer from “ecological anxiety,” a vague but insistent feeling that despite all the obviously good things about modern society, something has gone wrong on the way. We are missing something that we used to have, know, or feel, back when things used to be “natural.” As a result, we are drawn to products, solutions, and lifestyles that claim to be “natural.” Others eschew “natural”, aiming instead for the clinical reliability of modern technology. This fundamental divide becomes particularly obvious in healthcare, but we can also find it in food. Michael Pollan has,…

Did you observe Earth Hour this previous Saturday? Did you turn off all the lights in your house between 20:30 and 21:30? I did. At 20:28, I lay down on the couch in the dark. I could count two green and five red little standby indicator lights within my field of vision, plus the slow, white battery pulse of my laptop sleeping on the table. It was a peaceful moment, of sorts, the silence only penetrated by the humming of the aquarium pump and house ventilation system. My dogs started wondering what was up, so I took them out for a walk. Around Carlslid, the area where I live, less than half of the houses were dark. In one of these, a giant flatscreen TV lit up the room more than the scattered candles, an absurd sight that made me laugh out loud. How can we understand an event such as Earth Hour? What is the point of such events? What are the motivations of the people who observe Earth Hour, and of those who don’t?  Which problems are they trying to deal with and which values do they attempt to live up to? Earth Hour started by WWF in Australia in 2007, and spread worldwide from 2008. Today it is a more or less global event, visible from space. Earth Hour co-founder Andy Ridley stated that “Any movement of change begins with symbolism – it’s a needed step to prove enough people care about an issue.”  The goal of Earth Hour is to make a difference, but not through any actual reduction in electricity usage during this one out of  the 8760 hours in a year. By turning off the lights, we may shine a light on ourselves and the ways in which we have chosen to live our lives. Earth at night, illuminated. Photo by Chris Hadfield at the International Space Station. Many say that Earth Hour is pointless since it doesn’t actually…