Moving Closer to Nature

The 26th of February, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory held the roundtable conversation Moving Closer to Nature. The discussions centred around researching and thinking about nature, capitalism and situated ways of knowing.

In this conversation, political ecologist Henrik Ernstson (KTH) invited Michael Adams (Wollongong University), Dan Brockington (University of Manchester) and Bill Adams (Cambridge University) to reflect, using their own empirical research, on how research, theory and thinking about nature have changed over their active careers. Central to the conversation was to move closer to nature to better understand its political content in a world where the pressures to codify nature to serve capital as a service, a product or a consumerist experience, is paralleled with a need to re-understand nature as profoundly intertwined with us. Indeed, we could have called this meeting ‘Nature in tension: between simplification and situatedness’.

The Roundtable Conversation was filmed. The conversation is part of an environmental film project between Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson at Telltales Film and KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory. Similar conversations will be filmed at two other meetings organized by Henrik Ernstson during 2015, the conference Urban Beyond Measure: Registering Urban Environments of the Global South at Stanford University 8-9 May, and Rupturing the Anthro-Obscene: Political Possibilities of Planetary Urbanization, co-organized with Erik Swyngedouw at KTH in Stockholm, 17-18 September. For more information about this project, follow www.situatedecologies.net  and other ongoing projects for situating ecologies:  www.situatedecologies.net/archives/portfolio/ways-of-knowing-the-film