Researching Danish livestock production for the future
Research projects
The global environmental disaster we are verging on calls for investigations of how the urgencies of more sustainable futures shape our present. To enable societal transition towards sustainability we need to understand why, how, and when sustainable futures are practiced – or not – within the mundane routines of shopping, eating, cleaning, sorting waste etcetera. Sustainable futures are materialized in the choices of consumption and in the materials of mundane objects such as plastic. In everyday life, near futures and the immediate present as well as cherished family traditions may compete with distant and dystopian futures reaching beyond one’s own lifetime. Yet, everyday activism also enacts micro-utopias of hope and transition. Through ethnographic investigations of Danish households, the project aims at providing a better understanding of how sustainable futures are practised in contemporary everyday life.
Contact: Tine Damsholt
In June 2021, the Danish Parliament decided, in continuation of the so-called “Nature and Biodiversity Package” agreed upon the previous year, that just over 60% of all state forests should be classified as ‘untouched forest’. The increased political and public emphasis on safeguarding the nature content of forests expressed by this decision had been a long time coming. For just as long, various interests had sought to define what ‘the natural’ of a forest actually consists of, or could potentially come to consist of. It is this historical development and use of - as well as confrontations between - different notions of the nature of forests (and the disputed naturalness of forestry) that is the topic of this project. It takes its chronological point of departure in an article by forester Frants Muus from 1921 with the then provocative title “Transgressions against the nature of the forest by our ordinary management” and concludes with the Danish Nature Agency's implementation of the above-mentioned parliamentary decision a hundred years later.
Contact: Bo Fritzbøger
This project aims to provide a historical understanding of the ideas and values that underpin our political responses to the greatest challenges facing mankind today.
The project has two components:
The first component investigates the knowledge sources sustaining Danish climate politics since the 1980s and illuminates how and why climate challenges in recent decades have been linked to the political ambition of ensuring economic growth through market-based and technology-focused solutions. I spoke about this topic in my professorial inaugural lecture
"Klimapolitikkens idéhistorie i Danmark, 1980-2022" on 3 December 2021, and it is my intention to apply for funding for the project in 2022.
The second component illuminates the roots of neoliberal activism in the field of environmental and climate politics and locates these in the strong reactions of a diverse group of American free market thinkers to the rise of environmentalism as a mass social movement in the 1960s and as an area for government policy in the 1970s. I will be speaking on the The Birth of Neoliberal Anti-Environmentalism at Oxford University on 22 February, and I plan to publish a number of articles on the theme in 2022.
Together with Rasmus Skov Andersen, I have written this essay about "Markedsliggørelsen af Miljøet" at baggrund.com.
Contact: Professor Niklas Olsen
The professional and political debate about the future of Danish forestry in the light of demands for biodiversity restoration, carbon sequestration, procurement of biofuels, and room for outdoor activities is intense. It predicts the ultimate breakdown of the mono-functional, wood-producing forest management that was firmly established around 1900. Contributions to the debate, however, frequently presume implicit ideals that prevent a genuinely constructive discourse. In order to unearth the historical foundation of this tacit knowledge, the project aims at describing and interpreting the multiple strains of imaginaries, interests, intentions, and agencies that converged in the genesis of so-called rational forestry, and to show how present-day ideational positions also were all at work a century ago.
Contact: Bo Fritzbøger
This project focuses on conceptions of nature as seen through natural history practices in Denmark-Norway c. 1760-1810, thereby exploring the heterogeneous roots of present day’s views of nature. The project cuts across social, cultural, and geographical spheres, focusing on how nature emerged in diverse practices of natural history, ranging from activities in scientific societies, the determination of specimens in natural history collections, the accounts of local natural history in the provinces, and observations and discussion on natural history in the salons. Further, the project looks closer at the endeavours to disseminate knowledge of natural history, the natural order of things, and the magnificent diversity of nature and to direct feelings and sensations accordingly, asking how this knowledge was transformed, adapted, appropriated and used.
Contact: Signe Mellemgaard
