One of my main organizational concerns over the last decade has been the institutionalization of environmental history and environmental humanities in the Nordic countries. How can we build both a discipline and a community in ways that provide not just institutional support but also long-term institutional homes to environmental history scholars? When I started the Nordic Environmental History Network (NEHN) in 2009, with generous funding from a Nordforsk network grant, NiCHE was the model for how a networked community of scholars could function – they demonstrated a level of community, professionalism, and entrepreneurship that few others could match and that we only could admire from afar.  This admiration was combined with a certain feeling of affinity between Canada and the Nordic countries, and perhaps in particular my home country Norway. At the risk of stating the obvious or verging on cliches, both are stretched-out countries with low population density and much nature, at the northern edge of a continent. Neither country can be said to be the center of the world, so we have to be concerned with connections. Both have fierce climates that change dramatically over the seasons. Both can be characterized as welfare states. We share an interest in cabins and cottages (which are one of my long-term research interests) as ways of being in nature. In short, both countries seem to be made for environmental history. And yet, the Nordic countries – until recently particularly Norway – were lagging far behind Canada in terms of environmental history. There were no professorships in the field in Norway; in fact, there were no jobs at all with an environmental history focus. Collaboration between environmental history scholars in the different Nordic countries was also rare. NEHN aimed to change that, with NiCHE as a major inspiration.  When writing this post, I went back to my original grant proposal, written when I was a postdoc in Trondheim in 2009. Here I stated:  “The…

Det er en oppsiktsvekkende artikkelserie Stavanger Aftenblad publiserte sist helg. Over hele 14 artikler bygges det opp en fortelling om de heroiske annerledestenkerene, rebellene som våger å utfordre de etablerte sannheter. Hvem skal vi tro på i klimadebatten? Bak dette tilsynelatende velmenende spørsmålet ligger en større utfordring: Hva er forskningsbasert kunnskap og hvor mye må vi vite før vi kan handle? Klimaendringer er en av vår tids store utfordringer og klimadebatten tar stor plass i media. Å forstå hvorfor og hvordan klimaet endrer seg krever uhyre kompleks kunnskap fra mange fagområder. Vi er avhengige av modeller, global datainnsamling og store organisasjoner som samordner kunnskapen i en kollektiv prosess. Vitenskapelig enighet oppnås når et stort flertall av forskerne i fagfeltet er samstemte om hva som er relativt sikker kunnskap. Dette skjer gjennom åpen debatt og den kvalitetssikringen som ligger i fagfellevurderte fagartikler. Gjennom artikkelserien i Magasinet velger Aftenbladet å utfordre dette vitenskapsidealet og selve tanken om forskningsenighet gjennom å løfte fram de alternative røstene som har stilt seg utenfor det etablerte fellesskapet. Disse besitter alternativ fagkunnskap som de mener velter hele grunntanken bak konsensusmodellen. Ingen grunn til bekymring, vi kan fortsette å pumpe opp olje og leve våre liv som om ingenting var i veien. Men er det så enkelt? Det stemmer at såkalte klimaskeptikere ikke får like stor plass i media som det store fellesskapet av forskere er. Studier viser at opp mot 97% av klimaforskere hører til den siste kategorien. Om media forsøker å balansere representasjonen av de to sidene får vi en fremstilling av klimaproblemet som sier at vi fremdeles ikke har forskning nok til å handle. Dette er en grovt feilaktig fremstilling av dagens situasjon innen klimaforskning. Globalt finnes det store, frie og grundige forskningsmiljø som har trygg kunnskap om at vi forandrer klimaet. Og så finnes det personer som velger å se bort fra denne overveldende forskningsbaserte kunnskapen, og som heller konstruerer sine egne virkeligheter. Man…

It is 9:09 p.m. in Alaska, the temperature is 61 degrees, and a slender, brown bear stands below a small waterfall. All around the bear, salmon attempt to jump up the falls. Suddenly, the bear lunges into the water and emerges with one of the fish in his mouth. Seagulls hover over the scene, hoping to scavenge leftovers. I’m watching this nature drama from the other side of the planet, live on my computer in northern Sweden. I’m not the only one. Every summer during spawning season, millions of people watch bears gorge on salmon at Brooks Falls, a waterfall 290 miles southwest of Anchorage, in Katmai National Park and Preserve. It’s seasonality in the digital age: News sites around the world happily announce that the so-called Bear Cam is up and running again, and people flock to their screens. There are obvious reasons that the feed is popular. Bears are attractive and exotic; when they spring into action on camera, it’s thrilling. But those moments are few and far between. For many hours of the day, there aren’t even bears in sight. Yet many people still spend the whole season tuning in. Last year, more than 22 million people visited Brooks Falls remotely through the feed. So what draws so many people to the Bear Cam? How close can a computer really get to nature? Viewers have indeed formed a kind of community with each other, park rangers, and … the bears themselves. There is nothing new with people watching bears for entertainment. Bear-baiting was a popular spectacle in Shakespeare’s London, for instance. Much more recently, in the 1960s, seats were installed around the rubbish dumps in Yellowstone National Park for watching scavenging grizzlies, who had regularly gathered in the area to feed on garbage since the 1880s. For contemporary bear watchers, Brooks Falls is a hotspot. Nature photographers and tourists have visited the site for its bears for decades, using the…

In 1866, a circle of largely urban travel enthusiasts embarked on a mission to open up the Norwegian countryside for tourists and travelers alike. They founded the Norwegian Trekking Association, which had as a key premise to not only promote the experience of the authentic nature of Norway, but also to make this experience practically accessible. By paying close attention to the tensions between knowing, sharing, and experiencing wilderness in the activities of the Trekking Association, we can see how wilderness is a concept that has modern transport and information infrastructures at its core. The Trekking Association built a network of footpaths and cabins in remote areas to make nature more convenient in the years following its foundation. This extensive infrastructure allowed travelers to experience nature in a controlled – even standardized – fashion, whether in rural areas, along fjords, in the highlands, in the forests, or in the rugged mountains. At the time, Norway had few urban centers, connected by the sea, by rough roads, and a nascent railroad network. The rest of the country was wild and untamed, or at least so it seemed from the urban perspective. The infrastructures developed by the Trekking Association brought this wild nature in reach of ever-larger groups of Norwegians. The founders of the Norwegian Trekking Association wrote incessantly about the nature they experienced when traveling, the scenic sites they identified, the people they met, and the national identity they extrapolated from the landscapes they traversed. It was in nature and not in the urban they found the sources of a new and authentic Norwegian national identity after 400 years under Danish rule. They wrote the new national identity into being, while simultaneously writing a new nature into being. What’s just as important, they intended their knowledge of nature to be shared, as were the nature experiences they described. Excerpt from Yngvar Nielsen, Reisehaandbog over Norge, 8de omarbeidede og betydelig forøgede udgave (Christiania: Alb. Cammermeyers Forlag, 1896) We can…

What does the experience of nature look like when filtered through digital devices? How wild is ”wilderness” in the information age? Such questions underpin many current attempts to articulate the authenticity of nature, made urgent by the increasing presence of smartphones, GPS trackers, social media, and other forms of connectivity in nature. Many such stories place nature and wilderness under considerable pressure from information technology, while others bring our attention to potential digital augmentation of nature. See for instance Yolonda Youngs’ digital wonderland and Sarah Wilson’s observations on “the natureness of nature” and the digital, and the Environment and Society Portal’s “Wilderness Babel” for some examples of the last category. While it may not be all that fruitful to say that one side is correct and the other is wrong, it is obvious that nature is many things to many people. We can focus on a subset of nature in this post – the idea of wilderness, arguably the most ”authentic” form of nature. Even so, wilderness also makes it clear that nature is an intensely mediated space. While there are physical landscapes out there that we designate as “wilderness” we do so in the form of narratives shared in public in a variety of media, imbuing wild landscapes with meaning and significance. William Cronon’s influential and (for some) controversial 1991 article ”The Trouble with Wilderness” has shaped environmental historians’ understanding of wilderness in fundamental ways. Cronon leans quite heavily on the history of ideas and the history of religion when looking for the historical articulation of a particular idea of the sublime in nature – in other words, the thing we now know as wilderness. And in this process of articulation, wilderness was not only tamed, but also made as a cultural category. While the landscapes we designate as wilderness existed as physical entities before we came up with the modern idea of wilderness, it held an entirely different meaning. This double move is…

Man behöver inte gå långt in i skogen för att observera hur nya idéer och nya teknologier spridas. Om några månader kommer svenska skogar att fyllas med hundar med antenner och älgjägare som stirrar på skärmar. Diskussionerna kommer att gå runt brasan, i tidningen, i jägarnas tidskrifter och på internet – är det så här man ska jaga djur och uppleva naturen? Medan många kommer att svara nej, så här ska vi inte ha det, så är det nog svårt att komma undan att djuren runt oss snart är lika uppkopplade som vi är. En av de stora teknologiska megatrenderna som antas kommer att prägla världen i åren som kommer är sakernas internet (Internet of Things). Detta handlar om det vi kan kalla ”smartificeringen” av världen, var sensorer och kommunikationsteknologier integreras i alla saker – vägar, bilar, armbandsur, rökdetektorer, brödrostare och tandborstar. Att gå från idéen om sakernas internet till en idé om djurens internet är inte otänkbart. Vilda djur är i ökande grad uppkopplade och fulla av sensorer. Djur och insekter märks med GPS-spårare och RFID-brickor, som nu har blivit tillräckligt små och billiga till att de kan används i stor skala. Genom webbkameror kan du sitta vid datorn och studera levande djur över hela världen. Även våra sällskapsdjur har blivit smarta. I boken Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology kan vi läsa om hur två amerikaner i San Francisco undrar vad deras katt gör när den ibland försvinner i flera veckor. De bestämmer sig för att sätta på en enkel GPS-loggare i halsbandet till katten, och lär då att kattens värld är mycket större än de trodde, och att den inte bara hade ett, men faktisk tre hem, tre familjer som den bodde hos. I dag kan man köpa saker som Whistle, som fungerar ungefär på samma sätt som en träningsarmband, men för hundar. Andra aktivitetsmonitorer som Fitbark kan dela denna informationen med…

There is a relationship between landscape and language. Being able to read a landscape and to name the things we see is a critical skill for nature lovers and environmental humanists alike. In observing and experiencing a landscape, we draw on both our senses and our accumulated knowledge to identify landscape features and characteristics. In doing so, nature becomes a collection of signs from which we can derive meaning and information. Trees, moss, grass, stones, hills, streams, and lakes are but some examples, but also evidence of human activity such as trails, structures, signs, tracks, and trash all give us clues to the various layers of meaning in landscapes. A website developed by William Cronon and his graduate students is a wonderful resource for learning what it means to read a landscape. As Cronon’s guide states, “Landscape consists not only of the physical and material elements we encounter in a place, but also the representations of these things via texts, including arts, maps, and pictures.” Nature writing is very often centered on the bodily experience of nature, on accessing nature through the five senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste). At the same time, it is evident that we are also drawing on a wealth of cultural knowledge, in language, tradition, history, when sensing through the body. Every language has a highly specialized vocabulary to characterize such landscape features, tied up with the long history of the cultural usage of landscapes. In a recent article discussing his new book Landmarks, the British nature writer Robert Macfarlane explored these relations between landscape and language and his attempts to catalogue local words for nature phenomena. Some examples: Ammil, “a Devon term for the thin film of ice that lacquers all leaves, twigs and grass blades when a freeze follows a partial thaw, and that in sunlight can cause a whole landscape to glitter.”Zwer, an Exeter ”onomatopoeic term for “the sound made by a covey of partridges taking flight.”Smeuse, an English dialect…

Planet Earth is under intense monitoring, with billions of sensors of various types providing data about environmental conditions. What are we as environmental humanities scholars doing to engage with this vast amount of data being generated? Humanistic engagement with the natural world has long traditions, especially within literature and philosophy. Scholars and writers tend to describe environmental change in predominantly negative terms, as a turn for the worse, though we also find stories of hope and redemption. There is a reorientation happening in scholarship right now. Scholars across a wide range of disciplines are debating the new state of nature that characterizes what many call The Anthropocene – the age of man, where not just ecosystems, but also the geology of the planet has been irrevocably changed by human activity. Yet, I feel that environmental humanities scholars have not yet come to terms with the vast new sensory apparatus that we use today to know and sense the world around us. It isn’t just nature that has changed – our senses and our knowledge of nature has been augmented and transformed through digital technologies. Weather, pollution, seismic activity, landscape change, and animal movements are but some of these types of data. Another trend is that these sensors are increasingly providing real-time data, and that they have APIs that allow other applications to interact with the data generated. Ant Spider Bee is dedicated to exploring the digital environmental humanities, or the place where the digital humanities and the environmental humanities meet. These are two very broad umbrella terms, both replete with attempts to define what they actually mean (see for instance Jason Heppler’s fascinating “What is Digital Humanities,” a website that offers 817 different definitions). Our explorative mindset means that we embrace the multitude of interpretations and meeting places between the digital, the environmental, and the humanities. This can take the shape of environmental humanities scholars using digital tools in their research practices, but…

På VK:s sidor har man, särskilt under de senaste veckorna, tydligt kunnat se hur djur ofta korsar våra spår. En björn går genom skogen i utkanten av Umeå; en älgko med sina två kalvar väljer att söka sin tillflykt i trädgårdarna på Carlslid under älgjakten; ett par bävrar bygger en fördämning i en vägtrumma i Åsele. Vid alla dessa tillfällen besväras vi och blir osäkra på hur vi ska hantera situationen. I mötet mellan ”våra” och ”deras” områden uppstår ofta osäkerhet om spelreglerna. Själv fick jag besök av Carlslidsälgarna för någon vecka sedan. De stod i grannens trädgård en morgon, åt litet från några träd varefter de promenerade lugnt vidare sedan de låtit sig fotograferas och blivit bjäffade på av mina hundar. Senare samma dag kom en bil med SVT- reportrar förbi och meddelade att älgarna skulle skjutas och reportrarna frågade vad jag tyckte om det. Det är lätt att bli upprörd över oskyldiga vilda djur som avlivas bara för att de inte respekterar våra föreställningar om vem som hör hemma i ett bostadsområde, men här finns det en djupare liggande historia om vårt förhållande till både natur och det urbana. En stad full av teknologi, folk och kultur kan vara en utmärkt livsmiljö för djur – några gånger till och med bättre än ”ren natur”. Stadens infrastruktur erbjuder ett lättåtkomligt utbud av mat, skydd och lättforcerad terräng. Sådana djur som delar människans livsmiljö kallas synantropa. De värdesätter ofta samma saker som vi gör, även om det är av andra orsaker. Ekorrar, duvor och råttor är några typiska exempel, men mötena med älg och björn runt Umeå visar att det kanske också finns synantropa turister i djurvärlden? Men vad gör vi när människor och djur färdas i samma områden? Den sortens frågor blir viktigare när sådana möten inte längre är dagliga händelser. Idag har de flesta av oss husdjur, men hur ofta möter vi egentligen vilda djur? Vi kan inte…