Does the smulstronst?llet have defenders?

About 20 years ago I was in a small town in England, interviewing an environmental activist who was on the run from the Spanish police. His group had sabotaged the building of a hydro dam that was being built in the Basque Country. I asked him: What did it mean that his struggle was framed in specifically Basque terms? He rejected any idea that this was nationalism. “Basque is a sensibility,” he repeated. “A sensibility.”

I’m now trying to investigate how this kind of ecological sensibility can be produced, and be part of struggle, in the context of Sweden. The implication in the activist’s answer was that Basque as a sensibility was open to all who participated in it. So what kind of life, what kind of contact with culture leads to gaining this kind of participation?

Inspired by conversations with Emil Sandstr?m I’m trying to understand how cultural and environmental factors overlap here using the concept of the smultronst?llet: a Swedish word meaning a place (or even a time) that is dear to your heart.

The kind of ‘sensibility’ the Basque activist spoke about is rooted in a sense of place, and leads one to want to defend that place if it is threatened by industrial development. I’m therefore looking into a conflict over a Stockholm forest close to my own home (see picture). Some local people want to defend this area against what they see as destruction by the city council’s decision to allow homes to be built in this natural environment.

To flip things on their head, we could even see the city council as operating within its own ‘sensibility’, or what Foucault would call a certain kind of governmentality, produced by the daily activity and the culture of its participants. My most recent written exam hence suggested a framing for this conflict as a clash of subjectivities and as an ‘open moment’ where the future is up for grabs, after the work of Seema Arora-Jonsson and Arvid Stiernstr?m . I do not mean to take sides in this specific dispute, my view rather that whether you prioritise home building or protection of existing forest in Stockholm it’s important to understand what subjectivities and sensibilities the conflicting parties are operating within. This can help explain why they may misunderstand each other and fail to find common ground.

I’ll end with that word, ‘common’. I’ve always worked within a framework that supports the commons, the allm?nning and sees it as a potential path forward for a sustainable future. My own political heritage comes from the debates during the English Civil War, especially 1649, when Levellers and Diggers debated with the followers of Cromwell over whether property could be held in common. The path that was taken into modernity led us eventually to the current situation where a small group of people own and pollute what used to be common resources. This means not just monopolies over goods and services but includes the power to overflow the carbon sink, which I see as arguably the world’s most important common resource, following discussions with Kevin Anderson. This also links into how the theory of the 'open moment' derives from using lessons from colonialism (in the global south) to also understand the similarities with processes of enclosure and colonialism in the global north, since the English enclosures and destruction of common land at home was arguably part of a turn towards colonialism abroad.

So I’ve struggled for a long time over the idea of what could be a basis for a re-commoning of the world’s resources. My current investigation therefore looks into to what extent this kind of subjectivity and sensibility can be a basis for collective management of nature. Can people’s love for their smulstronst?llet lead them to become custodians of the forest in which it lies?

In concrete terms this will involve me doing a lot of interviews, and understanding better my local cultural association (hembygdsf?rening) as part of my current course on conflict, democracy and facilitation. This forest conflict is the basis for one of the six group projects my class is carrying out. And today I found out my previous written exam, where I laid out this proposal received full marks, which makes me feel even more confident in going forward with this line of inquiry.

If you’ve read all the way to the end thank you!