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 network and the workshop series will address a shared need among Nordic environmental historians. In the Nordic countries environmental history as a discipline has reached varying degrees of institutional support. Since the early 1990s, a series of researchers have initiated environmental history research projects, but few have been successful in developing long-term research groups. As in most European countries, environmental history is rarely formally represented in universities, research institutions or curricula. Research and teaching in the field of environmental history is done by individual scholars at various institutions and under different denotations.” 

In short, there was a considerable lack of institutionalization. To begin working on these issues, we designed the network around four workshops over a three-year period, each dedicated to a particular theme: institutionalization, research, teaching, and project development. We wanted to strengthen our connections similarly to what we were seeing our Canadian colleagues doing. 

Rather than a workshop series set up to produce publications – the “hard currency” of academia – NEHN was explicitly designed to start conversations, to enable collaboration and exchange, to sow the seeds of what could later grow into something more. At the time, I was uncertain about that strategy – both I and my collaborators needed to build our publication track records, but the workshops of NEHN were loose and “soft”. But over time, I’ve come to the conclusion that this strategy was a good one. Bringing people together, forging connections that can develop into something more over time, pays off. Some of those connections took the shape of joint publications, such as the Northscapes book edited by Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin, with several Canadian contributions. Others became Nordic research and teaching grant proposals, some of which even succeeded. 

Throughout the funded period of NEHN, we worked hard to forge strong connections to NiCHE. For example, I invited Alan MacEachern and Claire Campbell to the final NEHN workshop in Helsinki in 2011. Claire later invited me to a workshop on “Sustainable Energy in Atlantic Canada” at Dalhousie University in 2013, my first visit to Nova Scotia, and one that I enjoyed tremendously. NiCHE also supported our workshop Bringing STS into Environmental History in Trondheim in 2010, which led to the highly successful book New Natures. Michael Egan and Anya Zilberstein participated through the NiCHE support. Later, we applied for a research grant and a teaching exchange grant with Michael, though they were not funded. 

Environmental history is no longer a niche activity in the Nordic countries. There is no doubt that NiCHE has been important for Canadian environmental history – but NiCHE has also influenced other regions, including the Nordic countries. NiCHE has shown how having a strong community in one region also strengthens others.

Originally published at NiCHE Canada on 10 December 2020.

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 kan derfor skille mellom de som forfekter det vi vet og de som fornekter det vi vet. De sistnevnte er i betydelig mindretall.

Et viktig mål med vårt utdanningssystem er å skape selvstendig tenkende mennesker med bred og relevant allmenndannelse. Det trenger vi i et demokrati hvor vi må ta stilling til en mer og mer kompleks virkelighet som møter oss som en evig strøm av informasjon fra uendelig mange avsendere med både gode og mindre gode intensjoner. Dette betyr ikke at vi alle skal kunne alt om naturforvaltning, lønnspolitikk eller klimaforskning. Til det har vi forskningsmiljøer med årelang trening i å finne slike svar.

Men allmenndannelsen kan hjelpe oss i å skille et forskningsbasert argument fra en hjemmesnekret teori. Verken demokratiet eller folk flest hjelpes når Aftenbladet forsøker å skape en illusjon av at alle kan ta fornuftig stilling til slike ekstremt tunge faglige problemstillinger som klimaproblemet representerer. Det er like lite fornuftig som å la passasjerene stemme over hvordan piloten skal styre flyet.

Kontroversdrivende avisdebatter er ganske enkelt ikke en fruktbar arena for forskningsdebatt. Det er mer bekymringsfullt at samfunnet ikke hører hva klimaforskerne sier.

Aftenbladets artikkelserie tar oss rett inn i det vanskelige skjæringsfeltet mellom vitenskap og politikk, der kunnskap bør lede til handling. Norges Forskningsråds jevnlige undersøkelse om nordmenns tillit til forskning viste nylig at nesten halvparten av de spurte mente at forskning ofte er kjøpt av industri eller myndigheter og dermed ikke kan stoles på.

Når man mister troen på at vitenskapen kan være uavhengig og objektiv, likestilles forskningsresultater fort med ideologi og personlige meninger. Når forskningen ikke viser det man vil, leter man gjerne i stedet etter alternative forklaringer som bekrefter det man allerede mener.

Her har vi mye å gjøre. Det stemmer at vitenskap aldri er 100% avgjort, og tvilen må alltid finnes der – det ligger i forskningsprosessens natur. Vitenskap kan heller ikke erstatte den politiske prosessen – vi trenger begge like mye. Men dette må ikke hindre oss i å handle ut fra det som til enhver tid er den beste og sikreste kunnskapen.

Om det er så at vi helst ikke vil handle, så er faktisk det store flertallet i det internasjonale klimaforskersamfunnet, de som mener klimaendringene i stor grad er menneskeskapte og at det haster med handling, som er de egentlige klimarebellene. Klimautfordringen handler ikke om å skaffe mer kunnskap, det handler om å skape endringsvilje, om nettopp å ikke fortsette akkurat som før.

Vi trenger modige mennesker som tør å ta til seg det vi vet i dag og som utfordrer business as usual. Og viktigst av alt, vi trenger en klimakunnskap som faktisk får politisk og folkelig gjennomslag. For det forskningen forteller oss er at det haster.

I stedet for å forsøke å skape en illusjon av en forskningsdebatt burde Aftenbladet skape en meningsutveksling om hvordan våre politikere best kan bruke den solide kunnskapen vi har til å møte klimautfordringene.

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?

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 nearby Brooks Camp as a base. The camp is not accessible by road, yet has more than 20,000 visitors annually—a number dwarfed, of course, by the online audience.

The Bear Cam makes sense for Katmai National Park for two reasons. First, connecting nature with the social web helps national parks remain relevant in the digital age. Roy Wood, the ranger behind the Bear-Cam initiative, has called the livestream a “virtual campfire” and global meeting place for people to engage with the bears at the falls. Regular viewers have indeed formed a kind of community with each other, park rangers, and even the bears themselves—whom viewers have given names like Lurch, Holly, Grazer, Otis, and BB. The Bear-Cam web page has close to 130,000 comments, which discuss the stream and share recorded video highlights, including dramatic events such as when Grazer’s cubs went over the falls.

Second, the Bear Cam becomes a proxy for human presence in nature. This can be good for both humans and bears. People get to watch bears without traveling to remote Alaska, and the bears get to live without modifying their behaviors in response to human tourists. Keeping humans and bears apart is a constant struggle for Katmai National Park, so redirecting tourists to the digital sphere might reduce conflict.

The park had difficulty with the technical setup due to the remoteness of the location for years. Finally, in 2012, they received a $150,000 grant from Explore.org that allowed them to install high-quality webcams. The philanthropist Charles Annenberg Weingarten founded Explore.org to place webcams across the world to help people slow down and appreciate nature. Watching nature on a screen could, in his opinion, serve as a form of meditation, a digital zen moment.

There is indeed a zen-like quality to the Bear Cam and other nature webcams operated by Explore.org. So often, nothing much happens. There’s a waterfall with jumping salmon, sometimes many, sometimes few, with the light subtly shifting over time. The scene is almost like a screen saver. When bears appear, they are not there for entertainment; they come to feed, and leave when they feel like it.

Of course, the camera is placed in a location where the rangers know bears come. And it’s manipulated throughout the day to zoom in on any bear action. What the livestream doesn’t show is the viewing platform that’s right behind the camera, where tourists come to see the exact same view. In this respect, the stream is not all that different from an edited BBC nature documentary, with David Attenborough guiding the viewer through ever more spectacular scenes of the natural world. It’s real nature on display, but in a way that’s more carefully constructed than it seems. So just how authentic is what the Bear-Cam viewer sees?

In the book Wild Ones, the journalist Jon Mooallem argues that while direct encounters between humans and animals have gotten rarer in contemporary, industrialized society, the ways people relate to and create meaning around nature experiences has shifted over to visual culture. Through zoos, books, pictures, and videos, people work out their relationships to the natural world. This makes nature as much a place of the imagination as something “out there,” away from people and civilization, as the environmental historian William Cronon observed in his influential 1995 essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness.” Close connections between humans and nature, in other words, don’t require long treks to remote and undisturbed locations. People form bonds with nature through all kinds of media. The natural world can be found in Emma Marris’ rambunctious garden and children’s stuffed teddy bears.

Explore.org has stated that its mission is to be “a portal into the soul of humanity,” and animal webcams may just lead to this soul. When I sit in front of the computer, along with thousands of other viewers, mesmerized by the bears of Brooks Falls catching salmon, the bears and I are close together, despite being physically far apart. It’s not the same as standing on a viewing platform in Alaska, but the experience is still real.

Originally published at The Atlantic, 22 August 2016. A few dead links updated or pointed at The Wayback Machine.

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.

We can see this in Reisehaandbog over Norge, an exceedingly popular book written by Yngvar Nielsen, published in 12 editions between 1879 and 1915. The 1915 edition had grown from the original 234 pages to be 540 pages long, containing several fold-out maps and illustrations. Later editions were split geographically into four parts. The books described travel routes across all of Norway in great detail, including travel distances, transport and lodging options, prices, itineraries, and scenic routes, as well as historical and cultural overviews and a general guide to trekking for inexperienced travelers. Over the years, Nielsen traveled repeatedly across all of Norway, both following and to some extent guiding the development of new transportation infrastructures.

Later he and others were joined by photographers like Anders Beer Wilse, who took photos of more or less everyone and everything, everywhere in Norway. Like Nielsen, Wilse traveled extensively and brought visual impressions of remote and scenic areas into the homes of Norwegians. This particular combination of nature and media is not only key to understanding the intertwined Norwegian ideas of wilderness and nation that developed, but also to understanding the privileged place that wild nature got in discourses of the value of different types of nature.

…it is a pity that it is so difficult to get to the most beautiful places and that you can’t have a roof over your head in the places that are furthest away from people.

Vinje pointed to the need for physical infrastructure development, to “improve certain mountain paths such as at Vøringfossen and Maristigen, and then build some cabins here and there in the mountain plateaus. And then people can look around without fearing for their lives and learn to know their country both scientifically and aesthetically.” In other words, the rediscovery and reinterpretation of the Norwegian landscape as a particular kind of wilderness was tied to the development of an infrastructure for convenient traveling– roads, bridges, food and lodging, as well as travel guides. Without this infrastructure, nature was simply too wild to provide authentic natural experiences for most travelers.

The Norwegian Trekking Association provided both, and was highly successful in its mission. In fact, the organization was so successful that its members soon began lamenting the new accessibility. A rapidly growing number of travelers discovered that while they enjoyed convenient access to nature, they did not enjoy all the other people there quite as much – a classic case of the tourist’s dilemma. In other words, the Trekking Association realized that through their work, nature had become culture. The wild was tamed through sharing. As a result, the 1933 general assembly of the Trekking Association declared that “we need to protect nature from ourselves.”

The organization thus reconsidered its own expansive activity to accommodate nature tourism in Norway and made a conscious effort to scale back, become less visible, and in particular less accommodating for cars. The wild was broken and had to be rebuilt.

The Trekking Association was not alone in driving the infrastructural development past the breaking point. In the last half of the nineteenth century, new railroads, roads, and boat routes were paired with a growing service industry of maps, guides, food vendors, and lodging, all aimed at urban national and international tourist-travelers. These infrastructures opened up formerly remote regions and connected them to the rest of the nation, but were profoundly intertwined with the work of writers, photographers, artists, and travelers, as well as private and governmental institutions that sought to articulate the cultural meaning of landscape on a national scale. The landscapes of the Scandinavian countryside became increasingly covered in a dense web of transportation infrastructures and cultural information layers. Wild nature and not quite so wild nature were closely intertwined here, and not so easy to distinguish.

Taking a cue from Steven J. Jackson, who argues in his essay “Rethinking Repair” that we should take breakdown, dissolution, and change as our starting point rather than innovation, development, and design, we could consider breakage and breakdown the starting point of our particular conceptions of wilderness, rather than an idea of wilderness emerging from a pure state of authentic and undisturbed nature. It is in dealing with breakdown we build a world – a nature, a wilderness – that we can live with and live in.

I have in these two posts asked what wilderness means in the information age, and what we see is that wilderness really starts with the information age. Information technology has a history that predates the computers in our offices and the cellphones in our pockets. While digital devices are obvious interfaces to information infrastructures, so were the media – maps, books, drawings, paintings, and photos – created and shared by 19^th century travelers. The history of old and new media is thoroughly entangled with our idea of what wilderness is and should be.

If we consider how tightly entangled the first articulation of wilderness was with sharable media, we should adopt a more nuanced stance on this strange technological nature that wilderness can be said to be. Our definitions of wilderness have of course evolved over time, and the things the 1860s travelers called wild might not be the same as we call wild today. But we still find the same tendency towards defining wilderness and nature as an experience through sharing in media. Information technology and perpetual connectivity is not necessarily a threat to wilderness – yet full of contradictions and by no means unproblematic.

Featured image: “Horungstinderne,” Den Norske Turistforenings årbog for 1873.

This text was originally published on: http://www.antspiderbee.net/2015/09/09/knowing-sharing-and-experiencing-wilderness/ and will also be reproduced in the Ant Spider Bee book.

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 a classic constructivist approach that made Cronon unpopular among nature conservationists and activists. Scholars like Eileen Crist argues that considering nature as socially constructed is an ideological move that is “as dangerous to the goals of conservation, preservation, and restoration of natural systems as bulldozers and chainsaws.”

“Wilderness” as a cultural concept has evolved through this intertwining of landscape and narrative over long time periods, but can also go through rapid changes in short time. At the moment wilderness became a thing, something we as a society would recognize as wilderness – it became so to a large degree through media. What’s more, it was enabled and preserved by particular kinds of infrastructure. As a cultural concept, it is not entirely in our own heads, but shared (if often contested) between us and made material in a variety of ways. If we think about wilderness in these terms, as embedded in media and information infrastructures, seeing wilderness as fundamentally in opposition to digital becomes difficult.

With infrastructure, I here mean particular types of technology; not individual artifacts, but large systems, interconnected and distributed . In the classic study Sorting Things Out by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1999), they pushed against the idea of infrastructures as technology, and instead directed our attention to the way ideas and categories come into being, and how infrastructures make them become ordinary.

Furthermore, infrastructures have spatiality in ways that aren’t as obvious in artifacts. As Paul Edwards writes, “mature technological systems – cars, roads, municipal weather services, sewers, telephones, railroads, weather forecasting, buildings, […]– reside in a naturalized background, as ordinary and unremarkable to us as trees, daylight, and dirt. Our civilizations fundamentally depend on them, yet we notice them mainly when they fail….” (185) Can we say the same thing about wilderness; we tend to notice technology as a threat to nature when the infrastructures that bind nature and technology together break?

Breakages demonstrate how infrastructures are intimately tied up with knowledge. They are both ways of doing and ways of thinking. Yet, infrastructure becomes invisible: when it works, it retreats into the background, and only becomes visible when it breaks. This does of course make breaking points valuable for scholars like us. What can we find the breaking points of the infrastructure of wilderness? I think one place is simply when it becomes visible – as a danger to nature. In order to function as infrastructure that can support and enable the wilderness story, a careful balancing act needs to take place, one that is both practical and rhetorical.

In the next post in this series, I will use a concrete historical case to trace how the increasingly dense web of transportation infrastructures and cultural information layers in the late 19h century Norwegian countryside not only connected the urban and the wild, but also served to define and articulate these as separate categories. I will pay particularly close attention to the tensions between knowing, sharing, and experiencing wilderness that followed new media and new mobility in this period, and how these tensions came into play when wilderness protection became an issue in the beginning of the 20th century. Today, when the wilderness experience seems to be more endangered (or illusory) than ever, it is critical that we pay close attention to how cultural and technological mediation creates connections between landscapes, values, actors, and nations.

Image: Collins overland telegraph line, John Clayton White (1835-1907), public domain, BC Archives #PDP02915 via Wikimedia.

Originally published on http://www.antspiderbee.net/2015/08/13/breaking-the-wild-with-digital-devices/ and also included in the Ant Spider Bee book.

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 familj, vänner och även veterinären, och om man vil kan man jämföra med andra hundar. Över tid kan man spåra utvecklingen i hundens beteende för så att inkludera detta i träningen. Det finns system som kopplar denna informationen till en foderautomat som ger hunden mat baserat på hundens faktiska kaloribehov (självklart med en webbkamera var en kan titta på, lyssna och prata till hunden medan den äter).

Vi kan läsa denna utvecklingen på två sätt. Å den ena sidan handlar det om nya teknologier som kan tolkas som onödiga och oseriösa – kanske till och med skadliga, eftersom de förändrar vårt förhållandesätt till djuren. Å den andra sidan kan dessa nya teknologierna öppna upp för att se naturen från mer-än-mänskliga perspektiv. Vi kan se världen som djuren ser den – som om vi inte var där. Är våra perspektiv på världen runt oss de enda möjliga? Kan smarta och internetuppkopplade djur öppna upp för en ny empati med naturen?

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 noun for “the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal”

Even though we may never have heard these words before, or even thought about the need for such precise words, it is easy to relate to them, often recognizing the phenomena they refer to. Macfarlane recognized the impossibility of a complete dictionary of such words, preferring to think of them as wunderkammers or chambers of curiosities rather than archives.

The problem with Macfarlane’s position is that there is no room for the digital in his landscape lexicon. He reinforces an imagined oppositional relationship between nature and the digital, with “the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual,” as he writes. He and many others responded with outrage when the Oxford Junior Dictionary decided to replace 50 nature words in the 10,000 word children’s dictionary with words they considered more relevant for today’s children, such as “broadband,” “cut and paste,” and “analogue.” This is the age-old authenticity debate all over again, where new technologies can only make the experience of nature into something less than it was.

If we are to take the digital environmental humanities seriously as a field of study, we should look for the ways that the digital is part of nature; we should look towards what new and valuable words and ideas can be created. Macfarlane concluded his article by deciding “to leave blank the final glossary of the book – there to hold the place-words that have yet to be coined.” Will some of these words refer to nature phenomena we can only experience when augmented by digital media? Can the digital add to the dictionary of nature words rather than just forcing such words out? Do we need new words for phenomena such as:

• The anticipation of physically visiting a place we have only seen on Google Maps?
• Distinguishing a landscape that has been augmented with openly accessible digital data about flora, fauna, and geology from one that has not?
• A landscape where the GPS signal is unreliable due to geological features?

While this is in part a speculative question, it is also an extension of already existing ways of sensing and naming nature. Various technologies have extended these senses for a long times – take for instance the compass telling the direction, the map revealing surrounding terrain, the binoculars bringing the faraway closer. Cronon and his students recognized that digital technologies play a role in our reading of a landscape, as their landscape reading guide encourages us to study a place in Google Earth, zooming in and out to “toggle the scale at which you frame your attention.” Some landscape features are only visible – and may only be appreciated – from what we can call a more-than-human viewpoint, extended by digital senses.

Can you think of more digital words that should be added to the dictionary nature words? Or digital nature phenomena that needs its own word? Let us know on Twitter or in a comment below!

Image: Zwer – the sound of partridges taking flight. Robert Havell after John James Audubon. Virginian Partridge, 1830. The Birds of America: Plate LXXVI. Public domain. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

This text was originally published on the Ant Spider Bee website and will also be included in the Ant Spider Bee book.

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 can also include topics such as the digital transformation of the natural world. More importantly, we should be as concerned with the speculative – the things we haven’t done yet – as with the things that we are already doing.

I have been trying to create an overview of real-time (or close to real-time) environmental data streams over the last year, mostly out of curiosity. While some such sources of data can be found, there are surprisingly few examples of scholars in the humanities actually doing anything with them. The most interesting examples are typically placed at the intersection between play and experimentation. One compelling example is Mark Sample’s twitterbot “Station 51000”, based on one of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s data buoys, now lost at sea but still generating data. Sample combined the environmental data collected by the buoy with Markov-chained content from Hermann Melville’s Moby-Dick, mashing up these two sources into something with its own identity.

Ye, the sensors say the waves are average tonight, at Dominant Wave Period: 11 sec ft. THE OTHER. Exception might be his.

— Station 51000 (@_LostBuoy_) April 13, 2015

Ah, wind blows from the west by in, at Wind Gust: 11.7 knots. The hated whale has lungs and warm blood. I would add, that in the stern.

— Station 51000 (@_LostBuoy_) April 12, 2015

“Station 51000” is an example of critical inquiry through playful making. A broken environmental sensor, lost at sea, can still talk to us and still deliver data about the world. But without the accompanying spatial metadata – its exact location – the data has no meaning. It is a commentary on the Internet of Things and the vast amount of data generated by sensors in the modern world. Things see and sense, but what do they know? What can we know about the world of things?

Connecting with environmental sensors through digital media might allow us to open up windows to nature. Another playful example of this is Piip Show, a webcam set up by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) in 2014. Putting a webcam in a birdhouse is not new, but NRK took this concept to a new level in Piip Show. They built a miniature coffee shop that functioned as a bird feeder, complete with a tiny screen on the wall displaying Instagram photos tagged #piipshow.

Over the course of three months, this coffee shop became a hit in Norway and across the world, and the regulars in the coffee shop as familiar characters as on any other TV show (the squirrel was my favorite).

As fascinating as these examples are, it seems to me like we could be doing so much more with digital environmental sensors as scholars. Must the digital spring be so silent, with no birds tweeting?

Tell us if you have other examples of digital environmental sensors that can be used in environmental humanities scholarship, or if you have ideas for projects that one might do!

Featured image: Screenshot from NRK.no live stream of Piip Show #nrkpiip. NRK CC BY-NC-SA.

This text was originally published on the Ant Spider Bee website and will also be included in the Ant Spider Bee book.

There weren’t many such points along the section of the European Route E10 road we were on, in a region with a very low population density and mostly flat stretches of industrial forest plantations. The road connects the industrial city Luleå in Sweden (home of Facebook’s massive new data center, cooled by the northern climate and powered by cheap local hydropower) and the picturesque fishing village Å at the very tip of the Lofoten Islands in Norway. On the way there, the road passes through mountains and arctic tundra, boreal forests and lake-dotted plains.

As we passed through this landscape by car, however, we were mostly struck by the monotony of it all.

Our car was filled to the brim, children and dogs and all. Halfway through the two-day trek to see family in Norway, my wife was at the wheel. I was fiddling around with my brand new iPhone, which truly seemed a magical product after years with Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. The large touchscreen, the integrated GPS, and the 3G data connection made the phone a window to the world where data and the physical finally coexisted and interacted in a way that felt right to me. It was also a window into the behaviors of other people accessing this world.

Someone—I do not know who—had used Gowalla to tag this little island in the middle of the lake as a point of interest, and so the island became interesting to me. The chance meeting with this island, which existed to me only as a data point, has remained in my mind for years. What did the existence of the island, not as a physical place in the middle of a lake in Northern Sweden, but as a digital place discovered on my phone, really mean?

From the road, places like the little island in the middle of the lake were invisible and undiscoverable. The countryside could seem mostly empty for outsiders and people, like us, passing through. Yet, they are storied landscapes, inhabited for centuries by people with shifting and sometimes competing ways of using the land. There are traces everywhere. Signs by the road alert drivers to officially designated points of interest such as national parks, war memorials, the massive World Heritage Site Laponia. Travelers interested in what historian of technology David Nye calls the technological sublime can observe giant mines, hydropower plants, and the occasional wind turbine—all signs of significant human interventions in the landscape. Rickety moose-hunting towers, animal crossing signs, and black plastic sacks tied to sticks along the road—to indicate the presence of herded reindeer—hint at humans and animals co-existing and interacting, no matter how empty the road may seem at times. Look closely enough, and the land is suddenly very crowded with layers upon layers of history.

Visitors and travelers have been able to learn about these and other points of interest through maps and travel guides for a long time. Throughout the 19th century, urban travelers turned the Scandinavian countryside into a tourist destination by exploring, mapping, and writing extensively about what they considered areas worth seeing. Published since 1886, the Swedish Tourist Association’s annual book demonstrates how its authors directed visitors to particular places and vistas. For instance, the first volume provided directions to the most accessible glaciers in Lapland. Descending from the Walli mountain toward the Njåtso valley, the book advised, would give you the most spectacular views of massive glaciers.

More modern travel guides like Lonely Planet and Rough Guides belong in this tradition, but have recently come under strong pressure from digital media. Geosocial networking apps are, in other words, only the latest in a long history of making places shareable and findable through media. They should, however, be considered platforms rather than stand-alone products, dependent on crowdsourced information for all but the most iconic points of interest. The GPS-enabled smartphone gives us a dynamic window into this world. While certainly not the only possible view of space and its meanings, Gowalla and other geosocial networking apps opened up the landscape and covered it in data generated by people who had passed by, lived here, experienced these places, and then chosen to share them.

The accurate GPS navigation that these geosocial networking apps depend on is something relatively new. Patented to the Naval Research Laboratory scientist Roger Easton in 1974, the history of the GPS is a classic story of a military technology that eventually became something we think of as a common good that we all can access, not unlike the Internet. When President Bill Clinton discontinued the so-called Selective Availability practice of intentionally degrading GPS signals for the general public for national security reasons in May 2000, the geospatial consumer market exploded. Today, networked GPS sensors are ubiquitous, supporting a wide range of services and technologies.

Stories of the GPS and its influence generally focus on people being lost or not lost, of finding their way and possibly being blind to the world around them—instead experiencing it only on the screen. But my lost little island tells another story of place and location in the era of the GPS.

When Gowalla launched in 2009, a little over a year before my road trip, it was one of the first location-based social networks. Designed for GPS-enabled smartphones, Gowalla experimented with game-like features, allowing users to check into “Spots” that could again be organized into “Trips” in different categories. More importantly, users could add locations themselves, so Gowalla’s world map was populated as the service gained users around the world. Through Gowalla and competing services such as Foursquare, Yelp, Brightkite, and the more recent Findery, people tagged, ranked, and annotated the world around them, creating and interacting with complex shared representations of the places that mattered to people. These networks function as platforms for sharing and discovery of place and location, processes that generate this meaning.

While beautifully designed and loved by many of its users, Gowalla lost ground against its main competitor (Foursquare) before being purchased for the talent (sans user data) by Facebook in 2011. By then I had lost interest in Gowalla itself, as had many others, thanks to a lack of clear direction from Gowalla’s developers. I hardly noticed at the time.

A promised data-export option never materialized, so all the Spots and Trips registered by Gowalla’s users were lost. All these places that people had found and shared—the places they had made discoverable—were gone. I can never again find the little island in the middle of the lake.

The lost little island tells us something about the ephemeral nature of places in the digital world. We know that space becomes place as people imbue it with meaning over time. But places can be unmade, too, with the disappearance of the services that first made us aware of them. Physical places may continue to exist, but how integral to a place’s identity is its digital representation?

Social networks gain value as people invest their time and attention in them—as they share their lives and locations. The more people use a social network, the more valuable it is, not just to shareholders, but also as an engine for discovery. But the more of yourself and your world you invest in the network, the more vulnerable you are to its obsolescence.

The last few years have seen several new geosocial networks appear, such as Findery. Gowalla founder Josh Williams is launching a new one, too. Even with newcomers, some older networks like Foursquare are still around. Some of these will survive, but many will likely not. How many little islands will be lost with the next network to shut down?

Originally published with The Atlantic 24 June 2014.

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 längre avläsa djurens beteenden och signaler tillräckligt bra och därmed blir både människa och djur osäkra på varandra. På mig verkar det som att många därför tycker att vilda djur ska hålla sig i naturen och helst inte i våra bostadsområden eller infrastrukturer; när vi möter dem ska det helst ske på våra egna premisser.

Men vad är då dessa premisser? Är det så enkelt att vi hör hemma i kulturen och djuren i naturen? Samma sak gäller våra idéer om naturen där ute – den är långt ifrån opåverkad av mänsklig aktivitet. I stället för dessa rena och förhållandevis enkla kategorier får vi i stället en sorts blandning. Platser där vi inte längre vet om de är natur eller kultur, teknologi eller miljö, blir rika studieobjekt för oss kulturforskare. Men här finns det inga enkla svar, kanske bara fler frågor.

Och ingen frågar älgen.