ABSTRACT
This chapter takes inspiration from Val Plumwood’s work on ‘shadow places’, bringing her ideas into Sweden’s forests. We elaborate on and experiment with ‘Shadow Forests’ as a concept and analytical framework, with the aim of examining possibilities for a forestry that nurtures rather than erodes the forest ecosystems that support us. Our analysis includes a brief history, tracing the ongoing social and ecological destruction of Sweden’s forest landscapes to the early 20th-century institutionalisation of scientific forestry, a rationalist culture whose ideals, norms, and identities resist adoption of less intensive management models. To go beyond critique, based on interviews and workshops with municipal forest managers, we elicit stories where human and non-human needs and desires are described in non-conflictual terms, which acknowledge and adjust to difference, and resist the imposition of standard management models. We conclude that continued engagement with situated and communicative methodologies, focus on perspectives and practices considered trivial by industrial forestry, and provision of space for ecological processes and non-human lives, are important for fostering a culture underpinned by ideals of care and responsibility for global and local forests.
