Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Intensive forest management has resulted in negative effects on the environment, such as biodiversity loss and diminished climate resilience. The International Panel on Climate change has made a call for mitigation efforts in forestry and advocate for changing management practices. Sweden plays an essential role in mitigation, seeing as they have the largest forestry cover in the EU, and a long tradition of intensive forest management. Swedish forestry education has served as a barrier in changing into more environmentally friendly practices, through reinforcing dominant norms. Universities have the potential of moulding values and ideas about practices into the forester identity and education is therefore a sphere that could foster change. This study aims to make sense of persistent forestry practices in education in Sweden, through examining how they are (re)produced and or challenged. The empirical point of departure is the 2023 revision of the Swedish Forest Agency’s educational book about forestry which is included in multiple introductory forestry courses. The agency is obligated to make sure environmental values are preserved in forestry, which creates incentive to examine how they construct practices. Through using discourse analysis, this study has made sense of how proper forest management and environmental consideration in relation to production has been constructed in the empirical material. The main takeaways from the findings of this study are that whether a practice is constructed as proper or not could be seen as up to the forestry owner, and that taking environmental consideration is constructed as important but not necessarily urgent. The findings altogether suggest that the book offers contrasting views, but mainly reproduces practices in line with intensive forest management. This connects to larger societal norms, such as backgrounding of nature, through putting economical human needs at the centre. This study contributes to making sense of how persistent forestry practices are being reproduced in Swedish forestry education. The conclusions can be used to promote communication that challenges established norms.