the nature???

[baggins]

i wonder if any of our Scandinavian friends can help me here. i'm very interested in knowing more about what is called 'The Nature' in Scandinavia. What it means to you, where it comes from and how it dictates your view of the outdoors and your lifestyle.
Where did the phrase originate and how do you think it has evolved over the years?

Any help and info would be much appreciated.

Cheers

Baggins

edit; i guess i should say that i am writing an article on it, hence my interest in personal views.

 

[Janne]

I would say it is just a way for us describe the areas outside urban areas, but even they can have "areas of nature" like wild parks.
When posting I sometimes call it Nature, Outdoors or Bush. Prefer Nature.
It harks back to what we use in Swedish when talking about it.
Many words have evolved from the base word "Nature".
Nature is a very prominent part of Sweden and the Swedish way of life. It is a large wild country with specks of urban areas. The hobbies that has to do and are practiced in Nature, i.e. Fishing, hiking, hunting, watching birds, fungi and berry picking, are very popular.
In school we are slready tought the love for Nature, do nature excursions, projects and so on.

The Swedish population was mainly rural untill around WW2, so basically 2-3 generations back. Many Swedes have still the ancestral cabin somewhere rural, or have bought one, or would love to have one.

The rural population used not to live in villages like in the rest of Europe, but spread out on farms surrounded by fields and forests.
This was a practical experiment forced on the population after Rutger McLean ideas in the 1780's. So most Swedes lived surrounded by Nature.

Then we have the people that went into the unpopulated areas, volunterally or not, to break new ground, cut down the trees, remove the stones and create new agricultural ground.

 

[Janne]

The Swede's ancient connection ot the Nature is still unbroken, even if you live in an urban area. You can live in the middle of Stockholm, but can be within one hours car travel in basicalky untouched, deep forest where you can drink the water from the brooks.
Indeed our live and necessity to connect with Nature has been recognised in the Right to Roam customary laws Allemans rätten. These laws are sncient customs.

 

[Janne]

What I have written applies to Norway and Finland too.

 

[baggins]

Fabulous, Thank you Janne, a very poetic explanation and it shows from your writing how much The Nature obviously means to you.

 

[Robson Valley]

"it is a large wild country with specks of urban areas."
What a summative description. Thank you.

I live in a speck in the mountains called McBride (550).
Only Vancouver, the "Lower Mainland", (5,000,000) will isolate you from nature.

"Nature?" I don't see here any emphasis as Janne describes. Maybe we should do more.

 

[baggins]

I've been very surprised, having traveled extensively in both Scandinavia and Canada, the difference in peoples attitudes to their landscape. Even though a lot of the scenery is very similar and equally breathtaking, i found that in Canada, the landscape was something to be conquered and tamed (i do exclude First Nations from this), where as in Scandinavia there seems to be more of an ethos of living in harmony with your environment.
OK, i know it is a bit of a generalisation, and i have no wish to upset anybody here, these are only my observations from extended visits and short periods of back country camping.

 

[Robson Valley]

Too true, baggins.

"We gotta get something out of this. We gotta make something out of this."
The Canadian prairies quickly became an extraordinary showcase for very large scale grassland agriculture. Tamed and replanted with invasive Asian grasses.
Hell. The bison had to go. The original name for Regina, SK was "Pile 'o Bones." My family homesteaded near there in 1884.

The Rockies represented an obstacle to an overland route to the Pacific. This was politically urgent what with the Americans settling their own landscape.
Now, spice this all up from California north to the Yukon in the form of Gold Rushes.
All of this development needs shelter, fuel and soon to appear, the railroad. So the Forest Industry jumps up.

Maybe productivity drove it. Hard to say. Resource extraction of one sort or another is the standard here.

 

[Janne]

Despite our love of Nature, please do not think that the Scandinavian forests are untouched wilderness.
Much of the forest acreage in the southern third ( Stockholm and south) used to be small holdings / fields, but in the Swedish Exodus to the US and Canada 1840-1930's those fields were planted with pine, even i pine is not really the natural species there. Traces of this can still be seen in the form of boundary rock walls/ fences usually with a pile of larger rocks in the middle.
In the north, the forests have been managed for at least 120 years, and harvested and replanted.

In the northern 2/3 on the country slash and burn agriculture was fairly common.
The Same of course did not do any damage as they did not plant much, and did not need any fields.

 

[Robson Valley]

Same here, Janne.
Much of the legally required replanting here is pine. Even if pine was not the species harvested in that block.
Growth rate and extraordinary fiber length in our Boreal Forest climate contribute to the use of pine as pulp wood stock for papers.
Maybe no more than 5-15% but the fiber length contributed web strength for today's high speed printing presses.

Not a whole lot of Old Growth forest to show you here. Any place you camp has either been burned in the last 70-100 years
and/or deliberately reforested as required by law. So the trees are quite even aged, 40-70' tall, nice dark, closed canopy over your camp.
Being conifers with persistent branches, there's never any worry about limbs falling off and a million places to hang things!

100km west of me is a big patch called "The Ancient Forest." It's climax western red cedar forest, has not been burned for possibly 3,000-4,000 years.
Soil pits and 14C dating of charcoals. Geographic peculiarities prevent the buildup of thunderstorms, so I'm told.

 

[Janne]

RV, so you have the same situation in your woods. Native species ( oak, beech and other soft woods) are replaced by fast growing pine suitable for pulp and paper.
This of course changes the whole ecology in a negative way.

There are still some virgin forests in Sweden, those are the ones close to the mountains. Not enough timber per area and difficult terrain to make truck roads in. There is some harvesting of these woods, and I believe the timber is used for window and door frames and such. It is dense and full of resin, so rot resistant.

 

[Robson Valley]

Not quite. This is the Boreal Forest Biome, dominated by conifer species. It's really patchy, depending on water and soils.
Soil here is glacial clay with a little organic debris but not much. The glaciers melted back just 8,000 yrs ago with areas of sand dunes
still not covered by even shrubs.
Plus, so much of my region has been burned, there's every possible stage of seral succession visible by just turning your head.
So sit back for 120 years and see what's growing then.

Where I am, this is the Interior Cedar Hemlock zone. Willow and Alder are pioneer species, they will be relaced on some sites with big aspen and birch.
Pines will fill in the driest sites, they are the most drought tolerant. Rich sites will see spruce coming in to replace the pine.
With an overall increase in precip on west-facing slopes, here in the mountains, Western Red Cedar is the climax species, as it is on the Pacific coast.
Travelling east across Canada, I'd have to do about 1500km to find maple and ash, another 500+ to find any oak and beech even further east.

Landscaping specimens do thrive in the absence of competition, there's even Tilia along our Main Street!

 

[baggins]

Heehee, you are still very lucky. In the UK there are very few proper ancient woodlands here. Most of the Uk has been managed by man for the last 2000 years. Take the Scottish Highlands, very picturesque moorland, but historically most of this area was heavy woodland, oak, ash, birch etc. but the need for sporting estates and the growth of deer stalking removed the possibility of reforestation. Recently there has been a movement started up called trees for life, buying up large tracts of land and replanting native species and trying to reintroduce native fauna.
I suppose an area i grew up in, was for years the hub of the industrial revolution, where coppice was much needed to fuel the furnaces of industry. Being a small island with a large population, there are now very few areas of true natural wilderness left, an those that are can often be crowded with urban visitors with no direct link to nature, so car parks, nicely graded paths and more and more tightening regulations are becoming the norm, to protect what little we have left. This isn't a complaint, it's just how our island has evolved.

 

[Robson Valley]

Allowing cattle (aka white-faced range maggots, to some) to graze on open Canadian prairie pasture land for a single summer, changes the plant community species mix forever.
Kernan's Prairie in Saskatchewan is the only patch that I know of that is pre-colonial.

The Boreal forest is a little different in that the seral stages of recovery are both documented and predictable.
You can drive along a mountain logging road and pretty well guess the age of the forest (+/-20 years) beside you.
Fire is a normal part of the landscape and has been so for thousands of years.

Tomorrow, I drive 220km west to the city, my D1 & SIL flying up from California for a visit!
Anyway. Highway 16 is a green corridor through the forest, around mountains and over rushing rivers.
There is no cell phone coverage. The road does not follow the path of the railroad at all.
Nobody lives there. Nobody at all. Much of my world is totally empty of habitation.
You carry much more in the vehicle than most would expect. No big deal.


Somebody once said that humans are the only species dumb enough to live where there's no food.
I see that.

 

[Janne]

Northern Sweden is Boreal Coniferous Forest, or Taiga,from the Baltic coast to the mountains, then on the lower slopes Mountain Birch, Alder and then higher up mosses and lichens. Tundra.

I should have aded that it is the southern 1/3 that used to be covered mainly by soft woods.

 

[Robson Valley]

Ah. Should look no very different that what I see here, except for the cedar.
Sweden would feel very much as my home here if I ever came to visit.
Not very hard to live in when you practice for some 50 years!

 

[forestwalker]

The Nature -- naturen in Swedish, we use more suffixes than the English language does -- simply means nature. many different attitudes to it from people, even if I gather that we -- in general, as a population -- have a deeper respect for it than many other nationalities. I gather that the majority likes nature, likes that there are wild, mostly unspoiled places. it helps that we both have a relatively low population density (which is quite unevenly distributed: most people live in the southern third of Sweden) and a right of common access.

This respect is fairly well ingrained, most people who bother to go out beyond roadside rest spots will not litter intentionally. In spots close to towns you will see more litter, a few more birches where people have harvested birch-bark for fire-starting (I can give you pictures of "close to urban" sites, both to show that there is litter, but perhaps less than would be expected in other countries).

 

[Robson Valley]

I can believe that you have a cultural awareness of thousands of years of habitation.
Not so here.
There never has been any serious attempt to integrate the indigenous culture with that of the colonists.
The recent report calls it a "cultural genocide" by contrast. So, my history is the colonial history.
And that in summary has been resource extraction, no more, no less.

Chances are we dodged a bullet as Canada is so big and resource extraction values (eg mining) are few and far between.
Consequently there's a lot of the country which is never likely to be pulverized.

Considering how badly they have been mistreated, indigenous peoples are very reluctant to offer any insights into their culture.
I have been doing wood carving for some years. I know a few native carvers. Maybe we talk tool designs but that's it.
There's no mix, no transition, no fusion of attitudes regarding the environment.
The tree-hugging, dirt-eating greenies don't yet have even a native appreciation fo the natural world.

 

[Janne]

I find most trehuggers/ bunny lovers big city folks without any understanding of nature.
They have a very romantic view of it, and want to treat it like some kind of exotic preserve to be seen on their 60 inch curved LED Tv.

RW, make no misstake. In all of Scandinavia, we treated the indigenous Same people about as well as you treated the Indians.
The states tried to eradicate their culture and customs so throughly they lost most of their religion, religious artefacts and religious knowledge.
Even everyday objects of value were destroyed.
As a result there is no real knowledge left of their religion, the modern day Shamans are inventing it.
Same happened in Siberia.
One - only one- person realised was was happeing to their culture and during his life gathered as many objects as he could.
At that time, starting in the 1920's until he retired from his job as a district GP in the 1960's, most Swedes thought he was greedy ( many cultural and religious objects were Silver) and did it gor his own gain.
He demanded payment for his services in objects if he saw something interesting and worth saving.

His name was Dr Einar Wallquist, called the Lappmarks doktorn. He was a patron of my old regiment, Regiment K4 in Arvidsjaur ( formerly Umeå) where I met him on many occations.
He founded the famous Silver Museum in Arjeplog.

If any bushcrafter travels to northern Sweden I highly recommend a visit, to learn bushcraft the Same way.

 

[mountainm]

Tree huggers, bunny lovers, dirt eaters?

Mass generalisation and stereotypes. 😞 Never helpful.

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