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Abstract

A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords Human-environment relationship Human-nature relationship Society-nature relationship Forest conflict Futures studies A B S T R A C T Forests are a crucial and contested part of nature. Their management is at the center of policies and conflicts around global sustainability aspirations and potential futures. Human attitudes and practices play major role in these policies and conflicts. This article focuses on the meanings humans attach to forests. These meanings act as drivers influencing activities and decision-making from forest use to governance, and escalation of forest conflicts. This article sets out 1) to establish and develop the concept of the human-forest relationship (HFR) in order to elaborate on people's forest-related meanings, and 2) to discuss the potentials of the HFR concept for forest policy and research with a focus on forest conflicts and potential futures. The HFR concept depicts a reciprocal relationship between humans and forests that is formed as a result of personal experiences, life histories, as well as cultural and societal backgrounds and environmental settings. HFR possesses the future dimension, as the forest-related meanings may be reflected in the expectations that humans connect to the future state of forests. As forests differ from other natural environments ecologically, culturally, politically, and socially, the HFR concept contributes in identifying, describing and analyzing these forest-specific meanings influencing forest policy and management.

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... In Finland, this relationship has been described as the humanforest relationship (HFR). The HFR incorporates both historical and contemporary values and practices, reflecting the dynamic and evolving attitudes towards forests at global, national, communal, and individual levels (Halla et al. 2023). In Finland, this relationship with nature can be seen through the practice of Everybody's Rights (jokaisenoikeudet), a distinct legal principle in Finland. ...
... In Finland, this relationship with nature can be seen through the practice of Everybody's Rights (jokaisenoikeudet), a distinct legal principle in Finland. Everybody's rights grant individuals specific freedoms and privileges when it comes to accessing and enjoying nature (Halla et al. 2023). ...
... Current environmental crises are the consequences of forestryrelated practices shaped by humans in societal transformation (Halla et al., 2023). Contemporary Myanmar's inherited forestry state may explain why the Global South had higher prescriptions in forestry than developed countries (McDermott et al., 2010). ...
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Contemporary environmental challenges are deeply entwined with land-related issues, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of the historical dynamics between communities and land for practical solutions. Myanmar has encountered significant societal and political disruptions during the colonial era. This study traces the evolving governance of the people-land relationship spanning the final Burmese state, the Konbaung dynasty period, and the British colonial era. Employing Foucauldian governmentality theory and genealogical analysis, this study illuminates traditional governance predating the colonial era while highlighting the distorted shifts in the people-land nexus. The monarchical Burmese state was instrumental in crafting a traditional agrarian society rooted in the tenets of Buddhist statecraft. It upheld liberal governance principles and recognized individual land property rights, fostering agricultural population in both regulatory and practical contexts. However, the British, despite propagating liberal ideologies, established an authoritarian top-down government in the forested areas, using modern statistical methods and scientific mapping. This study highlights the historical dynamics of the people-land relationship in Myanmar, providing essential insights for addressing contemporary environmental challenges and formulating policies that address contemporary land-related issues with sustainable and more equitable solutions. Future land policies should prioritize individual property rights and acknowledge the intrinsic connection between local communities and forested lands for sustainable governance.
... For instance, they have taken up the concept of human-nature relationships to study how "personal experiences, life histories, as well as cultural and societal backgrounds and environmental settings" shape relationships with forests (e.g. Halla et al. 2023). Some have also started to experiment with action research and arts-based approaches to reach and empower societal groups that have so far been marginalised in forest-related governance processes. ...
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... These meanings can be deeply linked to their identity and play a significant role in their forest-related attitudes. Exploring these humanforest relationships can contribute to understanding forest-related conflicts (Halla et al., 2023). ...
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This study investigates the use of a location-based game, geocaching, to gather meaningful data in urban and rural settings. A methodology was developed in which surveys were embedded in geocaches on trails located in urban and rural forests in Finland. These surveys collected quantitative, qualitative, and photographic data relating to human-forest relationships and landscape preferences.
... with perspectives that emphasize the intrinsic value of forests and trees, which were brought up by our participants, as well as other diverse ways of relating to forests. Halla et al. (2023) propose the concept of humanforest relationships as a framework for further analysis. Further research could thus continue to explore relational perspectives on human-forest relationships, e.g. by drawing attention to the role of emotional and caring relationships with forests (Buijs and Lawrence, 2013;Halla and Laine, 2022;Himes and Dues, 2024;Straughan et al., 2022), into which our qualitative, exploratory study provides initial insights. ...
... Research on forest-dependent rural communities lags behind [13]. However, these communities do not only depend on forests for their livelihood and health services (e.g., water purification, forest foods, medicinal plants), but also attach personal, societal, historical, cultural, and spiritual meanings to forests [94]. Accordingly, access to forest resources can affect the mental health of forest-dependent rural communities in LMICs, particularly given that changes in people s immediate environment can cause psychological distress [95]. ...
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An account of how the term "anthropocentrism" has been used in Animal Studies thus far - and how it functions as a key term for Animal studies. It appears in Lori Gruen's (Ed) Critical Terms for Animal Studies, University of Chicago Press 2018
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This chapter will introduce the generic foresight process framework, examine a variety of different types of futures thinking, “locate” the use of macrohistorical models within the broader foresight process, examine some key aspects of the Big History perspective, and use this perspective to think systematically about the “contours” of the possible futures of human civilization at the global scale, as it emerges from the complex dynamics of the present. We will make use of the “eight-threshold” formulation of Big History due to David Christian and examine some of the conceptual possibilities that arise when we consciously and systematically consider the question of what the next major threshold in Big History – what we might therefore call “Threshold 9” – may look like in broad outline. We find that, of the four main “generic” archetypal futures identified by James Dator, the most probable global future currently in prospect – barring a major catastrophic shock, technological energy breakthrough, or similar low-probability “wildcard” event – is a slowly unfolding collapse or “descent” over a timescale of decades to centuries toward a “constrained” or “disciplined” human society characterized by ever-declining access to easy sources of fossil fuel-based energy. Such a future trajectory clearly has major implications for the level of complexity possible for human civilization. This suggests undertaking an anticipatory program of continuing research and exploration into both the underlying nature and the emergent characteristics of the coming transition to “Threshold 9,” in order to prepare for, and perhaps mitigate, its more unwelcome aspects.
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Book covers the history of the Finnish Forest Research Institute. E-book available http://hdl.handle.net/10138/329486
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for assessing the science related to climate change. It provides policymakers with regular assessments of the scientific basis of human-induced climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation. This IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate is the most comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the observed and projected changes to the ocean and cryosphere and their associated impacts and risks, with a focus on resilience, risk management response options, and adaptation measures, considering both their potential and limitations. It brings together knowledge on physical and biogeochemical changes, the interplay with ecosystem changes, and the implications for human communities. It serves policymakers, decision makers, stakeholders, and all interested parties with unbiased, up-to-date, policy-relevant information. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
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Some regions like Europe have experienced a net gain in forest areas over the last decades, but intact areas of natural forests are declining worldwide, accompanied by changes in forest ecosystem functions and benefits to humans. We conduct a biophysical assessment of trends, condition, and drivers of change of forest ecosystem services in Norway from 1950 to 2020. Four main results are highlighted. First, industrial forestry, large scale measures of re- and afforestation, and infrastructure development (e.g., roads and recreational homes) have been the main direct drivers of forest transformation. Second, deep transformations in the Norwegian economy shaped trends of forest ecosystem services over the study period. Third, with the shifts towards the tertiary (service) sector and the mechanization of forestry, the economic and material relations between forests and local communities are waning. Overall, people’s primary relationships to forests have shifted from livelihood to recreation. Fourth, forest management in Norway has largely favored provisioning services at the expense of supporting services and some cultural and regulating services. Consequently, while Norwegian forests retain strong capacity to deliver provisioning services, the overall ecological condition is relatively poor. Our assessment provides an approach to identify and explain trends of ecosystem services at a national scale, over a long period of time. We argue that growth in forest area and biomass are insufficient indicators for sustainable forest management, and that future forest polices would benefit from improved knowledge on forests ecological condition, resilience against climate change, and socio-cultural contributions to human well-being.
Article
Public lands and the outdoor opportunities they afford are imbued with a long history of cultural and political contestations between the White settler colonial regime, Black and Native Americans. These contestations are grounded in starkly different values and beliefs systems pertaining to the landscape and human-nature relations. Despite the contestations, whiteness continues to dominate the narratives about public lands and its institutions. Furthermore, the ideology of wilderness - as a place of refuge, the antidote to urban living – remains the main frame of reference to explore outdoor experiences. Thus, as researchers continue to espouse this ideology of wilderness, they effectively suppress the experiences and values that African Americans and other people of color hold towards nature and historically shaped by their social and political realities. The history of slavery, post-slavery and Black dispossession, have conjured up innovative Black diasporic cultural practices of resistance, survival and self-determination. Through hidden outdoor spaces they have forged a culture of resistance, built social structures centered on African traditional practices, and engaged in alternative modes of environmental stewardship. The Black outdoors culture today have roots in this robust legacy of resistance and political struggle for self-determination and provide inspiration for outdoor recreation and environmental education programs that culturally and politically relevant to African Americans. In this paper we engage in an investigation on Black peoples’ political outlook of the outdoors and/or their political outlook on engagement with those spaces both historically and presently. In doing so, we first call attention to the need to critically examine diversity practices designed to accommodate a multi-cultural society and how they contribute to a cultural hegemony. We also review the history of research on outdoor experiences putting into sharper relief the Euro-centric values that dominate the analysis and maintain the cultural power of white racial identities. Finally, pulling from African American literary works, we propose Black-centered interpretations of nature centered on their cultural worldviews and political resistance against hegemonic models of dispossession, abstraction and commodification. The aim here is to advocate for the co-existence of multiple cultural imaginaries of nature defined by the social and political realities of different racialized people, thus responding to the call for different paradigms of outdoor recreation highlighted in this special issue.
Article
The need of further research on the interlink between culture and institutions has been strongly advocated by economists and institutionalists alike. However, bringing together culture and institutions within an organic framework, though, is a non-trivial operation. This is due to the complexity of the synergies between cultural aspects and institutional devices. This special issue attempts to start filling this gap and to build an ad-hoc systemic platform for disseminating such a debate. To this purpose, it brings together an organic collection of contributions in well-established conceptualisations of both culture and institutions, supported by robust and consistent methodological applications. The essays presented in this work provide consistent evidence and conceptual perspectives supporting the idea that the synergies between cultural and institutional aspects are of paramount importance to understand human behaviour, individuals' choices and societies' patterns. They also improve the theoretical, empirical and methodological understanding of the role of institutions and culture in different geopolitical and socio-economic realms. By doing so, these contributions place this special issue as prelude to further research on the co-evolution of culture and institutions and on its possible implications on different societal aspects, human development and well-being.
Article
The ambiguity of the word ‘nature’ is so remarkable that I need not remark upon it. Except perhaps to emphasise that this ambiguity — scarcely less apparent, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, in its Greek near-equivalent physis — is by no means a merely accidental product of etymological confusions or conflations: it faithfully reflects the hesitancies, the doubts and the uncertainties, with which men have confronted the world around them. For my special purposes, it is enough to say, I shall be using the word ‘nature’ in one of its narrower senses — so as to include only that which, setting aside the supernatural, is human neither in itself nor in its origins. This is the sense in which neither Sir Christopher Wren nor St Paul's Cathedral forms part of ‘nature’ and it may be hard to decide whether an oddly shaped flint or a landscape where the trees are evenly spaced is or is not ‘natural’. The question I am raising, then, is what our attitudes have been, and ought to be, to nature in this narrow sense of the word, in which it excludes both the human and the artificial. And more narrowly still, I shall be devoting most of my attention to our attitudes towards that part of nature which it lies within man's power to modify and, in particular, towards what Karl Barth calls ‘the strange life of beasts and plants which lies around us’, a life we can by our actions destroy.
Article
Across the globe, deforestation and conflicts over forests are taking place on a frontier of competing claims, narratives and worldviews, expressed through territoriality, normative orders, and forms of violence against people and nature. Policymakers have yet to find solutions that effectively address this crisis over human-forest relations in ways that are also equitable for forest peoples. This special issue responds to this challenge with an interdisciplinary collection of theoretical and empirically grounded studies that explore human-forest relations at the legal frontier. The authors explore how law affects the ecological, cultural and moral foundations of human-forest relationships, and the need to go beyond dominant economic and rights-based legal framings, towards developing further legal dimensions of socio-ecological relations for forest governance. The contributions as a whole highlight the importance of co-constructing laws that are culturally situated in local meanings of forest and interact with global, state and other local normative orders in decolonial, transformative ways. This opens the possibility of a new legal frontier for people and forests of multidimensional more-than-human forms of interlegality. Available free to view at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07329113.2021.1904579
Article
This paper uses a governmentality approach to examine the political history of human–canine relationships in the People’s Republic of China, focusing on the evolution of household dog regulations in Beijing. In doing so, it ties the micropolitics of human–canine relations to transformations in political, economic, and social governance and ways of thinking about and acting on the interactions between human and nonhuman animal species. An examination of successive waves of government regulations reveals a shift from top-down authoritarian approaches to governance toward a greater recognition of (circumscribed) individual responsibility and self-governance, which is emerging under the organizing framework of “social credit.” This government-managed rearrangement is contributing to the rise of new understandings of human–canine interactions as co-constitutive relationships based in citizenship rights and obligations.
Article
A high and sustainable quality of life is a central goal for humanity. Our current socio-ecological regime and its set of interconnected worldviews, institutions, and technologies all support the goal of unlimited growth of material production and consumption as a proxy for quality of life. However, abundant evidence shows that, beyond a certain threshold, further material growth no longer significantly contributes to improvement in quality of life. Not only does further material growth not meet humanity's central goal, there is mounting evidence that it creates significant roadblocks to sustainability through increasing resource constraints (i.e., peak oil, water limitations) and sink constraints (i.e., climate disruption). Overcoming these roadblocks and creating a sustainable and desirable future will require an integrated, systems level redesign of our socio-ecological regime focused explicitly and directly on the goal of sustainable quality of life rather than the proxy of unlimited material growth. This transition, like all cultural transitions, will occur through an evolutionary process, but one that we, to a certain extent, can control and direct. We suggest an integrated set of worldviews, institutions, and technologies to stimulate and seed this evolutionary redesign of the current socio-ecological regime to achieve global sustainability.
Book
This book concerns the implications and interrelations of key concepts of culture, defending an updated communicative notion of culture as meaning-making against a series of current challenges. The first part of the book distinguishes four main concepts of culture, presenting their histories, uses, limitations and mutual contradictions, which else often tend to be neglected. The second part scrutinizes neomaterialist and posthumanist critics’ antihermeneutic efforts to escape the spirals of interpretation and meaning. Learning from such contestations, the third part summarizes the arguments and in five theses reconstructs a contemporary and comprehensive agenda for cultural studies, based on creative imagination and communicative mediation in the dynamic interface between meaning and materiality. This thus provides a survey of fundamental concepts and theories of culture for students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, while simultaneously also serving as an introductory guide to the contemporary debate in this field.
Article
Our understanding of the world is essentially based on shared meanings that are intersubjectively produced and reproduced in different social practices. In this study we analyse private forest owners’ discourses of the forest as a social practice that produces alternative competing truths about the forest and forest ownership. We examine the order of five predefined discourses (1–5) in relation to discoursal power by analysing the signs of hegemony and marginalisation within these discourses. Importantly, we also analyse the position of different kinds of forest owners within the prevailing order of discourses. Our critical discourse analysis combines qualitative content analysis with quantitative multivariate analysis (NMS) and is based on in-depth interviews with 24 Finnish forest owners. The harmonious discourses of the forester (1) and the economist (2) demonstrated many hegemonic features. This essentially illustrates the hegemony of the economic truth about the forest and its proper use among forest owners, as economically effective wood production was emphasised in both of these discourses. The signs of marginalization were common in the discourses of the distant economist (3), the critical anti-economist (4), and the dutiful forest owner (5). Discourse 4 was characterised by an open critique of the hegemonic economic truth. Forest owners with primarily non-monetary objectives were placed in an unfavourable position in the order of the discourses. The results reflect a wider discursive environment where economic meanings and practices prevail as the most natural and proper ways of thinking and acting. Being a forest owner is easy in Finnish society if the hegemonic economic truth about the forest functions as a natural and unproblematic part of one's forest ownership. However, discourses 4 and 5 indicate that the prevailing discursive conditions make forest ownership unfulfilling for some owners. Openness to alternative ways to understand the forest and forest ownership should thus be enhanced in research, policy, practical forestry, and the media.
Article
In sustainability science calls are increasing for humanity to (re-)connect with nature, yet no systematic synthesis of the empirical literature on human–nature connection (HNC) exists. We reviewed 475 publications on HNC and found that most research has concentrated on individuals at local scales, often leaving ‘nature’ undefined. Cluster analysis identified three subgroups of publications: first, HNC as mind, dominated by the use of psychometric scales, second, HNC as experience, characterised by observation and qualitative analysis; and third, HNC as place, emphasising place attachment and reserve visitation. To address the challenge of connecting humanity with nature, future HNC scholarship must pursue cross-fertilization of methods and approaches, extend research beyond individuals, local scales, and Western societies, and increase guidance for sustainability transformations.
Article
We still understand inadequately how ideological shared meanings affect private forest owners' ideas about forests and forest ownership. In this study, we examine how private forest owners adhere to different discourses of forests when producing meanings for forests and forest ownership. We especially concentrate on forest owners’ objectives as a part of these discourses. Our discourse analysis combines qualitative (content analysis) and quantitative (NMS ordination) methods and is based on in-depth interviews with 24 Finnish forest owners. We identified the discourse types of 1) the forester, 2) the economist, 3) the distant economist, 4) the critical anti-economist and 5) the dutiful forest owner in the analysis. The first main gradient separating the discourse types illustrated variation from uncertainty (distant economist, dutiful forest owner) to self-confidence in forest management (forester). The second main gradient ran from pure economic emphasis and non-criticalness (economist, distant economist) to an emphasis on non-monetary meanings and a critique of overriding economic orientation (critical anti-economist). Our findings support the view that the position in relation to the economic utilization of the forest is an essential dividing factor among forest owners. More importantly, our discourse analysis revealed some important aspects of forest owners' objectives: 1) forest owners’ general appreciations are often interpreted as actual objectives, resulting in an overly multi-objective impression of forest owners; and 2) careful consideration is always needed before emphasizing the complementarity of economic and non-monetary objectives. For some forest owners, a conflict between these two exists as long as economic objectives equal wood production. In conclusion, meanings for forests and forest ownership are produced and reproduced whenever we speak or write about forests. Policy-makers, scientists, planners and counsellors especially should be more aware of the ideological discourses as a part of their argumentation if we aim to guarantee pleasant and fulfilling forest ownership for every forest owner.
Article
In the Colombian Andes, peasants have co-evolved with their environment for centuries, but it is uncertain whether traditional informal institutions and natural models are adapting to current and possibly unprecedented economic and climatic disturbances. This study investigated institutional adaptation and the social mechanisms of institutional change or continuity among peasants in the Eastern Andean Cordillera. The research was informed by evolutionary theories of institutional change and based on a qualitative approach that included data collected through a focus group, oral histories, key informant interviews and observations. This study suggests that reciprocal work exchanges, festivities and gender-based divisions of roles have been disused or changed due to economic pressures, but that most informal institutions have persisted due to selective outmigration, conformist intergenerational transmission, and practices of everyday resistance. The natural model of vital energy and the traditional peasant ethos represents a ‘social attractor’ that has influenced institutional continuity. This study highlights tensions between resilience, cultural diversity, and transformation that are important in many other marginal rural locations in the Andes. Future research should further explore first, under what conditions institutional adaptation is observed and when it is related to increased resilience, and, second, how transformability, social-ecological resilience and cultural diversity are related.