The offshore islands of the North Atlantic were among some of the last settled places on earth, with humans reaching the Faroes and Iceland in the late Iron Age and Viking period. While older accounts emphasizing deforestation and soil erosion have presented this story of island colonization as yet another social–ecological disaster, recent archaeological and paleoenvironmental research combined with environmental history, environmental humanities, and bioscience is providing a more complex understanding of long-term human ecodynamics in these northern islands. An ongoing interdisciplinary investigation of the management of domestic pigs and wild bird populations in Faroes and Iceland is presented as an example of sustained resource management using local and traditional knowledge to create structures for successful wild fowl management on the millennial scale.
In 1951 Swedish writer Stig Dagerman wrote an autobiographical essay titled "Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable." It is a remarkable poetic meditation on the life-and-death stakes of the literary imagination from a writer who was likely suffering from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, fighting for his life through one depressive episode after another. Written when his critical reputation and fame as Sweden’s greatest new literary phenom had been firmly established following a remarkable outpouring of critically acclaimed work in the late 1940s, the essay marked a point in time when the tides had turned for Dagerman, who now struggled with the opposite of this productive streak in the form of a debilitating bout of writer’s block that would eventually contribute to his suicide two years later. "Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable" lays bare the writer’s fragile psyche, not only his faltering ego but his selfless and far from sure-footed ambition to offer something of lasting beauty and meaning to a world indifferent to his very existence. While writing the essay, Dagerman managed to rise temporarily from the depths of his depression and identify the sources of his own consolation and hope in terms that have continued to resonate powerfully with many readers, and fellow writers, over the following 60 years. Originally published in 1952 in the improbable venue of Husmodern (a magazine dedicated to home economics for Swedish housewives, analogous to American magazines like Good Housekeeping or Better Homes and Gardens), the essay was a profound response to a trivial commission from the magazine’s editors, who asked Dagerman to send them “something on the art of living.” The soul- and psyche-searching tour de force that Dagerman composed was not likely what the editors had in mind, but to their credit—and also possibly owing to his celebrity—they published the essay as written. The essay has since been translated into 10 languages and published / reprinted a great many times. This is the first literary translation of the essay into English.
English translation of short story by Swedish author Stig Dagerman (1923-1954) about impoverished children in Depression-Era rural Sweden and the shame of being invisible.
Stig Dagerman (1923–1954) was regarded as the most talented young writer of the Swedish post-war generation. By the 1940s, his fiction, plays, and journalism had catapulted him to the forefront of Swedish letters, with critics comparing him to William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus. His suicide at the age of thirty-one was a national tragedy. This selection, containing a number of new translations of Dagerman's stories never before published in English, is unified by the theme of the death of innocence. Often narrated from a child's perspective, the stories give voice to childhood's tender state of receptiveness and joy tinged with longing and loneliness.
Walrus-tusk ivory and walrus-hide rope were highly desired goods in Viking Age north-west Europe. New finds of walrus bone and ivory in early Viking Age contexts in Iceland are concentrated in the south-west, and suggest extensive exploitation of nearby walrus for meat, hide and ivory during the first century of settlement. In Greenland, archaeofauna suggest a very different specialized long-distance hunting of the much larger walrus populations in the Disko Bay area that brought mainly ivory to the settlement areas and eventually to European markets. New lead isotopic analysis of archaeological walrus ivory and bone from Greenland and Iceland offers a tool for identifying possible source regions of walrus ivory during the early Middle Ages. This opens possibilities for assessing the development and relative importance of hunting grounds from the point of view of exported products.
The structure and agendas of European research are undergoing a sea change. One example of this shift is the next multi-annual framework for research and innovation in Europe, Horizon 2020, which has proposed structuring research funding into interdisciplinary blocks defined in terms of “societal challenges.” A new role for the Social Sciences and Humanities is being envisaged within this forthcoming (eighth) framework, emphasizing greater prominence and integration of work from these areas in the overall organization of European research. Directly preceding the VIII NIES symposium in Pori, the Lithuanian Presidency of the EU has dedicated an entire conference, “Horizons for Social Sciences and Humanities,” to the goals of eliciting consultations from stakeholders within the European research community and advising the responsible European agencies on the shaping of Social Sciences and Humanities agendas in “Horizon 2020.” The main outcome of the meeting will be the “Vilnius Declaration on Horizons for Social Sciences and Humanities,” to presented by the EU Lithuanian Presidency to the European Commission before the framework undergoes final refinements leading up the program’s launch in 2014. A number of research interests and focuses are likely to be woven into the fabric of this declaration, and among these the emerging interdisciplinary area of the Environmental Humanities can and should be a significant component. To this end an alliance of strong European research centers and networks has been formed to identify and articulate the strategic challenges, goals and wider relevance of an emerging Environmental Humanities research community in Europe. Nordic researchers from a wide range of disciplines and study areas within the Humanities are playing a key role in the realization of this agenda, just as they have helped to lay the groundwork for this emerging research area. This talk traces the trajectory of Nordic research initiatives in the environmental humanities in recent years, highlighting in particular how an intensification of scholarly activity in the Nordic countries has contributed to the wider development of this field internationally. The state of the field is also addressed, both globally and within the European context.
The increasing visibility of an emergent Environmental Humanities research field offers evidence of a sea change in the very structure and agendas of international research, while also holding the promise of reintegrating the humanities in the scientific production of knowledge. Such a development could have some significant implications within the policy sphere, as well as for the struggling humanities domain more generally. Yet in many ways the Environmental Humanities remains far from a settled field. Drawing upon examples from European and wider global contexts, this talk traces a number of initiatives over the past several years that have served in some measure to clarify this developing field of study. The talk also offers a critique of some of the productive, and at times unproductive, tensions among competing visions of this emergent field that need to be resolved before the Environmental Humanities can realize the impacts many scholars now hope the field may achieve.
Research clusters within the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES), the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) and the Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance (GHEA), in cooperation with partner networks in the USA, the UK and the Nordic countries, have undertaken a major interdisciplinary research initiative that aims to examine environmental memory in the medieval Icelandic sagas, with a prominent focus on historical processes of environmental change and adaptation. The medieval Sagas of Icelanders constitute one key corpus, among other literary and documentary corpora, to be investigated in this initiative. Anchored in traditional fields of study (e.g. saga studies and various medieval-studies fields) as well as newer and emerging fields (e.g. integrated history and historical ecology, ecocriticism, digital and environmental humanities, etc.), the initiative brings together literary scholars, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, geographers, digital humanities specialists and environmental and life scientists in a coordinated set of sub-projects. The initiative seeks to foreground evidence of changing environmental conditions in Iceland, Greenland and Scandinavia from the late Iron Age through the pre-Industrial period, with a guiding focus on long-term human ecodynamics and the relations among ecological change and adaptation, on the one hand, and resource management, social organization/conflict and resilience on the other. Numerous IEM workshops organized by NIES, NABO, GHEA and various university networks are taking place in 2013 in Sweden, Scotland and Iceland. This talk briefly sketches how this initiative began and how it has developed over the past year. More importantly, it looks ahead to where we expect IEM to be heading in the next year and beyond.
Keynote presentation on the Role of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Global Environmental Change (GEC) research delivered at the 2013 GHEA Open Workshop, University of Maryland, 4 Novmeber 2013.
The circumstances that have given rise to the Anthropocene concept require that we reassess our assumptions about human agency and human effects on the earth system. Human activities, and thus human choices, clearly lie at the root of the great environmental predicament of our age, which is not primarily an ecological crisis, though its ramifications are far reaching within ecological systems. Rather, it is a crisis of culture. If the humanities "are a unique repository of knowledge and insight into the rich diversity of the human experience" from which we learn to make sense of our "responses, motivations and actions" in the face of challenges, then it is risky to omit humanities knowledge from scientific assessment and consultation processes informing environmental policy.
The complete article is available for free viewing on the Future Earth site: bit.ly/1QoHPeC .
Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas (IEM) is a major interdisciplinary research initiative examining environmental memory in the medieval Icelandic sagas. The initiative brings together teams of historians, literary scholars, archaeologists and geographers, as well as specialists in environmental sciences and medieval studies, to investigate long-term human ecodynamics and environmental change from the period of Iceland’s settlement in the Viking Age (AD 874-930) through the so-called Saga Age of the early and late medieval periods, and well into the long period of steady cooling in the Northern hemisphere popularly known as the Little Ice Age (AD 1350-1850). In her 1994 volume inaugurating the field of historical ecology Carole Crumley argued in favor of a “longitudinal” approach to the study of longue durée human ecodynamics. This approach takes a region as the focus for study and examines changing human-landscape-climate interactions through time in that particular place. IEM involves multiple frames of inquiry that are distinct yet cross-referential. Environmental change in Iceland during the late Iron Age and medieval period is investigated by physical environmental sciences. Just how known processes of environmental change and adaptation may have shaped medieval Icelandic sagas and their socio-environmental preoccupations is of great interest, yet just as interesting are other questions concerning how these sagas may in turn have shaped understandings of the past, cultural foundation narratives, environmental lore, local ecological knowledge etc. Enlisting environmental sciences and humanities scholarship in the common aim of framing and thereby better understanding nature, the IEM initiative excludes nothing as “post- interesting” or “pre-interesting.” Understanding Viking Age first settlement processes informs understanding of 18th century responses to climate change, and 19th century resource use informs understanding of archaeological patterns visible at first settlement a millennium earlier. There is much to gain from looking at pathways (and their divergences) from both ends, and a long millennial scale perspective is one of the key contributions that the study of past “completed experiments in human ecodynamics” can make to attempts to achieve future sustainability. IEM is a case study of the Integrated History and future of People on Earth initiative (IHOPE) led by the international project AIMES (Analysis, Integration and Modeling of the Earth System), a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme; the initiative is co-sponsored by PAGES (Past Global Changes) and IHDP (The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change). This talk brings together two of the main coordinators from IEM’s sponsoring organizations, NIES and NABO, to reflect on the particular challenges, innovations and advances anticipated in this unprecedented undertaking of integrated science and scholarship, a new model for the scientific framing of nature.
This paper contributes to recent studies exploring the longue durée of human impacts on island landscapes, the impacts of climate and other environmental changes on human communities, and the interaction of human societies and their environments at different spatial and temporal scales. In particular, the paper addresses Iceland during the medieval period (with a secondary, comparative focus on Norse Greenland) and discusses episodes where environmental and climatic changes have appeared to cross key thresholds for agricultural productivity. The paper draws upon international, interdisciplinary research in the North Atlantic region led by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) and the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) in the Circumpolar Networks program of the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE). By interlinking analyses of historically grounded literature with archaeological studies and environmental science, valuable new perspectives can emerge on how these past societies may have understood and coped with such impacts. As climate and other environmental changes do not operate in isolation, vulnerabilities created by socioeconomic factors also beg consideration. The paper illustrates the benefits of an integrated environmental-studies approach that draws on data, methodologies and analytical tools of environmental humanities, social sciences, and geosciences to better understand long-term human ecodynamics and changing human-landscape-environment interactions through time. One key goal is to apply previously unused data and concerted expertise to illuminate human responses to past changes; a secondary aim is to consider how lessons derived from these cases may be applicable to environmental threats and socioecological risks in the future, especially as understood in light of the New Human Condition, the concept transposed from Hannah Arendt's influential framing of the human condition that is foregrounded in the present special issue. This conception admits human agency's role in altering the conditions for life on earth, in large measure negatively, while acknowledging the potential of this self-same agency, if effectively harnessed and properly directed, to sustain essential planetary conditions through a salutary transformation of human perception, understanding and remedial action. The paper concludes that more long-term historical analyses of cultures and environments need to be undertaken at various scales. Past cases do not offer perfect analogues for the future, but they can contribute to a better understanding of how resilience and vulnerability occur, as well as how they may be compromised or mitigated.