The author seeks to bring together environmental anthropology and history to frame the place of forests in humans’ lives, from a political ecology point of view. He does this by reflecting on his personal experiences in Northeast India, Kenya, and Sweden.
Considering Caroline Wendling’s living artwork White Wood (2014) in northeast Scotland, the author examines the relationship between deep time, ecology, and enchantment.
Sophie Chao delves into an unexplored dimension of the agribusiness nexus—the affective attachments of corporate actors to oil palm seeds. Drawing from fieldwork in an oil palm concession in Riau, Sumatra, she highlights the conflicting nature of caring for palm oil seeds.
The authors analyze the portrayal in popular conservation discourse of the flowering plant Rhododendron ponticum as an invasive species in the British countryside, especially Scotland. They explore how its invasiveness is materially produced via the cultural and socioeconomic as well as vegetal relations within which it is entangled.
In this chapter of her virtual exhibition “Human-Nature Relations in German Literature,” Sabine Wilke examines forests and deforestation in works by Adalbert Stifter, Marlen Haushofer, and Elfriede Jelinek. For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.
This virtual exhibition features, in English translation, short excerpts from German-language literary texts that address human-nature entanglements. The aim is to show how literature can contribute to understanding and problematizing the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. What aspects of human-nature relations are addressed, at what point in literary history, and how are they shaped poetically? This virtual exhibition is also available in German here.
Sabine Wilke
In this chapter of the German-language version of her virtual exhibition, “Mensch und Natur in der deutschen Literatur (Human-Nature Relations in German Literature),” Sabine Wilke examines forests and deforestation in works by Adalbert Stifter, Marlen Haushofer, and Elfriede Jelinek. For the English-language version of this exhibition, click here.
In dieser virtuellen Ausstellung werden kurze Auszüge deutschsprachiger Literatur vorgestellt, die die Verstrickung von Mensch und Natur adressieren. Ziel der Ausstellung ist es, zu zeigen, inwiefern Literatur einen wichtigen Beitrag zum Verständnis und Problematisieren der Beziehung zwischen Mensch und nicht-menschlicher Natur leisten kann. Welche Aspekte dieser Beziehung werden angesprochen, zu welchem Zeitpunkt in der Literaturgeschichte und wie werden diese lyrisch gestaltet? Diese virtuelle Austellung ist hier in englischer Sprache zu finden.
Sabine Wilke This short film combines remote sensing, qualitative interviews, desk research, and illustrations to show the complexities and controversies surrounding mangrove reforestation in Senegal and The Gambia.
The Forest History Society is a nonprofit library and archive for forest-related literature and photography.
Eriksson and Arnell address the ecological and cultural effects of the Swedish infield system in Scandinavia. Their essay sheds light on how the human construction and management of infields maintained a spatial continuity that greatly altered, and continues to impact, how humans and other organisms have developed.
