Nature, Temporality and Environmental Management Scandinavian and Australian perspectives on peoples and landscapes

How are different concepts of nature and time embedded into human practices of landscape and environmental management? And how can temporalities that entwine past, present and future help us deal with challenges on the ground? In a time of uncertainty and climate change, how much can we hold onto ideals of nature rooted in a pristine and stable past? The Scandinavian and Australian perspectives in this book throw fresh light on these questions and explore new possibilities and challenges in uncertain and changing landscapes of the future. This book presents examples from farmers, gardens and Indigenous communities, among others, and shows that many people and communities are already actively engaging with environmental change and uncertainty. The book is structured around four themes; environmental futures, mobile natures, indigenous and colonial legacies, heritage and management. Part I includes important contributions towards contemporary environmental management debates, yet the chapters in this section also show how the legacy of older landscapes forms part of the active production of future ones. Part II examines the challenges of living with mobile natures, as it is acknowledged that environments, natures and people do not stand still. An important dimension of the heritage and contemporary politics of Australia, Sweden and Norway is the presence of indigenous peoples. As is clear in part III, the legacies of the colonial past both haunt and energise contemporary land management decisions. Finally, part IV demonstrates how the history and heritage of landscapes, including human activities in those landscapes, are entwined with contemporary environmental management. The rich empirical content of the chapters exposes the diversity of meanings, practices, and ways of being in nature that can be derived from cultural environmental research in different disciplines. The everyday engagements between people, nature and temporalities provide important creative resources with which to meet future challenges.

INTRODUCTION 1. Holding on and letting go: nature, temporality and environmental management Lesley Head, Katarina Saltzman, Gunhild Setten and Marie Stenseke PART I: Imagining new environmental futures and entwined pasts 2. The outside within: the shifting ontological practice of the environment in Australia Aidan Davison and Stewart Williams 3.Landscape, temporality and responsibility: making conceptual connections through alien invasive species Gunhild Setten 4. Presence of absence, absence of presence, and extinction narratives Dolly Jørgensen 5. The view from off-centre: Sweden and Australia in the imaginative discourse of the Anthropocene Libby Robin PART II: Living with nature in motion 6. The co-presence of past and future in the practice of environmental management: implications for rural-amenity landscapes Benjamin Cooke 7. Wild Tradition: hunting and nature in regional Sweden and Australia Michael Adams 8. Managing nature in the home garden Katarina Saltzman and Carina Sjöholm PART III: Indigenous challenges to environmental imaginaries 9. Indigenous land claims and multiple landscapes: Postcolonial openings in Finnmark, Norway Gro B Ween and Marianne E Lien 10. Mining as colonisation: the need for restorative justice and restitution of traditional Sami lands Rebecca Lawrence and Mattias Åhrén PART IV: Temporalities of environmental management 11. Challenges in agricultural land management – a Scandinavian perspective on contextual variations and farmers’ room to manoeuvre Elin Slätmo 12. Performing natures: adaptive management practice in the ‘eternally unfolding present’ Ruth Beilin and Simon West 13. How to bring historical forms into the future? An exploration of Swedish semi-natural grasslands Marie Stenseke, Regina Lindborg, Simon Jakobsson and Mattias Sandberg

Lesley Head is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Head of the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Katarina Saltzman is Associate Professor at the Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Gunhild Setten is Professor of Geography at the Department of Geography, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. Marie Stenseke is Professor in Human Geography at the Department of Economy and Society, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Fellow of The Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry.