As The Forest Answers: Reimagining our relationships with forests though language
Our project Niin Metsä Vastaa (As the Forest Answers) explores our collective imagination of Finnish forest-relationships. During spring we developed a new workshop format for co-creating intentional language to inspect and shape our relationships with nature. Niin Metsä Vastaa seeks to co-develop a creative dictionary of new language defining the need of future forest relationships, and introduce the work to Finnish society.
Here we present our thinking, process, and production of the first working period of the project, seed funded by the Collective Imagination Practice Community.
Iines
Growing up with Finnish forests, I never recognised how our societal relationship with them had shaped the ecosystem around me. What we called a forest could have been a biodiverse haven or a monocrop industrial wood field waiting to be clear-cut every few decades. There is no difference in Finnish or English to separate those two things from the human perspective, but for many other species, the difference is crucial.
The language we use to describe things is a window to our experiences. Words can bring a previously unrecognised collective stream to societal consciousness. They can also be used to hide, to build walls around something that is true. The dominant language always pushes something into the margins — why is this accepted in the discourse while that is not?
It is descriptive that when writing down the first sentence, “Growing up with Finnish forests…”, the autocorrect adds a red underline to the word ‘with’. It is asking me to fix my language. One should not grow with the forest, rather in it, or surrounded by it. This is a way language can supersede our personal, reciprocal relationships with nature.
The project name Niin metsä vastaa refers to a Finnish proverb “Niin metsä vastaa kun sinne huudetaan” that translates to “The forest answers in the same way one shouts into it”. The idea behind it is about reciprocity, that you can only receive back what you give out. Conceptually thinking, we can see the effects of our use of language reflected in the forests.
Finland is a country with much of its land area covered by forests, and 20% of its commodity exports consist of forestry products. Many Finnish livelihoods are entangled with these ecosystems and have been throughout history in various ways. In culture too, Finnish heritage and folklore present forests as places of gods and spirits, sources of fortune and misfortune, and places for healing and nourishment.
Over time, large-scale economic use and changes in religion have shifted Finnish relationships with forests. We colonised the land but also our imagination. The current mainstream perception of forests focuses on their instrumental value. Even sustainability discourse prioritises calculations — ecosystem services, carbon sinks, and biodiversity loss — over forests’ existential and relational value.
Marginalised or not, many of us can recognize the pain of a familiar forest being logged. We try to rationalise it: if I want to keep using toilet paper, I shouldn’t feel like this. It’s not sensible, and most of all, it’s bad for the economy.
Most Finnish people, regardless of their occupation, age, or location, still report that forests have personal significance to them, encompassing everyday, spiritual, and emotional aspects. Traces of the past’s strong cultural relationships remain today, passed down through generations. Rowan trees, for example, still stand in many Finnish gardens to protect the house. And the tag game ‘hippa’, which once meant running away from a forest spirit, is still played today.
We are now experiencing a significant drop in the capacity of forest ecosystems to support life. In the midst of multiple social and ecological crises, how can we awaken the collective imagination of alternative ways to reciprocally engage with our ecological environment?
Savannah
Unlike Iines, I didn’t grow up with the forests of Finland — nor in or around them. My childhood was spent among the woodlands and carefully organised fields of Wiltshire in South-West England. That being said, after four years of living in Helsinki I am no stranger to Finland’s forests and Finland’s deep connection to these spaces that teeter the line between ecological haven and resource bank.
My introduction to Finnish forests saw these spaces as abundant and accessible environments that offered respite from the urban environment — whether an hour from Helsinki, or far north up in Finnish Lapland. In winter they are covered in a thick layer of fluffy snow, a playground for snowshoeing, winter hikes and cross-country skiing. In Spring the snow melts and the ground becomes lush with Lily of the Valley, inviting the majority of hikers back to the forest. In summer the forests’ lakes return for a season of paddle boarding, kayaking and fishing. In late summer and autumn the blueberry bushes ripen and secret spots for chanterelle-picking appear.
Having forests on your doorstep — even when in the capital city — is a wonderful privilege to experience, a balancing energy for the hustle and bustle of everyday life. And yet, when I review all the ways in which we engage with these spaces, a theme of extraction emerges. Whether it’s berries, mushrooms, entertainment or relaxation, we tend to view forests in terms of what they provide for us (and that’s without even getting into the complexities of Finland’s forestry industry). Our collective imagination of these ecologically diverse and magical spaces as purely “ecosystem services” reinforces our damaging, extractive relationship with the environment that has fuelled climate change and biodiversity loss.
How, then, can we shift our imagination of forests and our relationships to and with them? The concept of Linguistic Relativity explains how language shapes our perceived realities, belief systems, assumptions and ways of relating to each other and the world. It delineates how the words we use to describe relationships, environments and co-habitants have a tangible effect on our behaviours towards them. In this project, we draw on this intrinsic connection between language and collective imagination, with the aim of decoupling the words, stories and terms of extraction towards a more reciprocal, caring and plural description of Finnish forests.
Our process
Together as a team from Falay Transition Design collective: Iines Reinikainen, Savannah Vize and Zeynep Falay von Flittner, we have been exploring the potential of intentionally creating new language reflecting the multiplicity of nature relationships and interactions. We are investigating:
- How can we diversify, reimagine and reconstruct the language we use to speak about Finnish forests, their plural meanings and importance?
- How could we use design approaches to curate new sustainable heritage for the future?
- In turn, how can this language affect our relationships and collective imagination of forests? How can this approach contribute to sustainability transitions?
So far in the project we have deepened our understanding of the current collective imagination of forests through researching different forest relationships, history, beliefs and stories. In parallel we have deep dived into the power of language and its potential for shifting collective imagination across different stakeholders in Finnish society.
Through this desktop research and interviews with forest-involved stakeholders, we have begun to uncover the power of language, and how new co-designed vocabulary might help us better describe:
- The hidden qualities and characteristics of forests
- The diversity of life supported by forests
- The political nature of forests (old and new) in Finland
- The lifespans and multi-generational lives of forests
- The unspoken but mutual understanding of how to be in a forest
- The nuances between ownership, guardianship, stewardship and more
- The emotional importance of forests
- The invisible spatio-social borders of forests
“We would need new kinds of words and language to connect history and future within forest owners and the Finnish society, and to support ecosystems as whole, beyond the property limits.”
- Project interviewee, Head of Forest Planning and Management at The Finnish Forest Administration, Forestry Ltd
A workshop approach
From these findings, we have begun developing a workshopping method to co-create new words with intention to name and give language to these invisible elements of human-forest relationships.
After initial introductions, we start the workshop by introducing our new term: Unidentified Collective Entity (or UCE for short). We use this as an overarching term to describe those invisible, undefined and language-less elements of experiences, interactions, emotions and relationships. In other words, a UCE is a shared and mutually understood concept, but one that we lack the language to describe.
We then go on a guided imagination voyage to a forest memory. Through visualisation and sensory prompts, we accompany the group on a walk through a forest in their minds, connecting to the feelings, sounds, smells and experiences that it conjures.
From here we share our forest stories and begin the co-creative part of the session — welcome to the word café. Together we’ll move through different word creation stations that draw on the multitude of ways in which new language emerges, to build new language to describe unnamed elements of our imaginative journey.
We are incredibly excited to test this new workshop approach, and eagerly invite you to an online trial in August. The workshop will focus on forest relationships more generally (not just to Finnish forests), and so is open for all to join. You can see the details below, and can register your attendance here.
We are also keen to explore this workshop format in other ecological contexts — perhaps The Ocean Answers, or The Meadow Answers, or The Desert Answers. If you would be keen to explore this process with us, we would love to hear from you.
Get in touch here.
